9 - Simona Iammarino: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Economy

Summary

Introduction

Simona Iammarino is a highly productive and well-cited scholar within the economic geography field, who has had a strong influence on the discipline as a whole, contributing to many topics and themes therein. These include, but are not limited to: the geography of innovation, multinational companies, the dark side of innovation, industrial clusters and regional development. She is also a well-known and key figure within the economic geography community, occupying central roles such as editor of flagship journals. Simona Iammarino is a multidisciplinary academic, with a background in economics but having transitioned during her career more towards the economic geography field, as evidenced by her current employment as Professor of Economic Geography at the London School of Economics.

Her research spans various disciplines including management, economics, innovation studies and political economy, whilst making a core contribution to economic geography. She combines both qualitative and quantitative approaches in her work, and most commonly works in collaboration with other researchers. This chapter is structured as follows. The first section provides some brief overview of her career and published works to date, attempting to summarize her significant canon into a short review that highlights (at least in the author's own reading) the key contributions. The second section picks out some specific theoretical advancements that Simona Iammarino has made to economic geography, broadly defined, attempting to elucidate what some of her most important and influential contributions to the field have been and why. This section will also touch on how further work in the discipline has been influenced by that of Simona Iammarino. The third section will discuss her role within the economic geography community on more of an individual level, focusing on her role as a mentor and collaborator.

Overview

While Simona Iammarino currently holds the title of Professor in Economic Geography, her PhD was in international economics. Over time, she has moved more in the direction of economic geography, to the point where she is now considered one of the leading scholars of the discipline, also confirmed by the economic geography colleagues interviewed for this piece. An albeit simplistic but illustrative Google Scholar tally confirms that Simona Iammarino's work is well read and cited: she has a total of more than 150 papers, reports, chapters and so forth which have been collectively cited more than 10,000 times.