Colleague gets RSA Early Career Award

Our colleague Lisa Nieth was just awarded the RSA Routledge Early Career Award for her paper ‘It takes two sides to build a bridge – Universities as institutional entrepreneurs in knowledge-based regional development‘. The Regional Studies Association Student and Early Career Awards 2021 honour researchers that have made an original and outstanding contribution to the field of regional studies.

“Having been active within the Regional Studies Association from the first day of my PhD journey, it is a great honor to receive the RSA Early Career Award for my thesis,” Lisa says. The RSA consists of a very international and active community of researchers and practitioners, and she has participated in many activities, courses, and international conference and met so many interesting people. Funny enough, it was at one of their conferences where Lisa first met people from Technopolis Group and decided that this could be an interesting company to work for after terminating her PhD.

Lisa is looking forward to continuing her engagement with RSA now that she works at Technopolis and intents to connect her academic research with her current work. Hopefully this opens new doors in the area of regional development and policy at TG.

“My thesis was conducted as part of a Marie Curie scholarship within the innovative training network on ‘the role of universities in innovation and regional development, RUNIN‘,” Lisa explains. “I conducted my research in the Netherlands, Denmark and Portugal and can say that those three years were very insightful, fun but also challenging. Thus, seeing the fruit of my work in receiving this award is wonderful.” 

If Lisa had to summarise her thesis in one sentence? “I look at the role of universities in regional development (strategies) and how academics can become institutional entrepreneurs, thereby initiating innovative change”. You can find it on University of Twente’s website.