The Fifteenth Globelics Conference, celebrated in Athens from 11 to 13 October 2017, took place while Greece was still confronting the prolonged consequences of the Eurozone crisis. This national context gave particular meaning to the conference theme, “Innovation and Capacity Building in the Context of Financial Crisis.” Rather than discussing innovation only as a source of productivity or technological progress, the meeting asked how knowledge, institutional capabilities, and public policy could help economies respond to recession, austerity, unemployment, and industrial decline.
Athens offered an especially relevant setting for this debate. Years of fiscal adjustment had weakened investment and placed considerable pressure on public institutions, firms, universities, and research organizations. At the same time, the crisis had stimulated new discussions on entrepreneurship, social innovation, industrial restructuring, and alternative forms of economic recovery. The conference drew upon this tension between institutional fragility and creative adaptation, using the Greek experience as a point of departure for broader comparisons with other countries.
Four institutions assumed responsibility for the event: the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), the Laboratory of Industrial and Energy Economics (LIEE), the Institute of Communications and Computer Systems (ICCS), and the Globelics Network. Their collaboration connected engineering, economics, innovation policy, and development research within a single programme. Yannis Caloghirou, together with Nectarios Koziris, Danae Diakoulaki, Aggelos Tsakanikas, Aimilia Protogerou, Ioanna Kastelli, and Evangelos Siokas, coordinated the intellectual and institutional dimensions of the conference. All were affiliated with NTUA, giving the programme a strong foundation in Greek research on technological change, industrial organization, entrepreneurship, and energy policy.
A second group ensured the practical continuity of the meeting. Nikolaos Kanellos, Panagiotis Panagiotopoulos, Georgios Siokas, Petros Dimas, Zoi-Eleni Stathaki, and Priskilla Mousafiraki managed the organizational work required to bring together an international community of researchers and policy specialists. Their contribution was not secondary: the diversity of panels, paper sessions, and institutional participants depended on close coordination between the university, its research laboratories, and the Globelics network.
The programme approached crisis from several analytical angles. Some sessions considered how austerity affects research investment, business innovation, and industrial capacity. Others examined regional innovation systems, university–industry relationships, entrepreneurship, technological upgrading, and the emergence of social innovations when traditional welfare and production structures come under pressure. Greek case studies gave these discussions a concrete basis, showing how firms and institutions responded to restricted financing, declining domestic demand, and the loss of skilled workers.
International comparison widened the scope of the debate. The 2017 Freeman Lecture, delivered by Keun Lee of Seoul National University, drew on the experience of technological catch-up to explain how countries can build productive capabilities despite structural disadvantages. His intervention suggested that crisis management should not be separated from long-term industrial transformation. Luc Soete of Maastricht University, responsible for the 2017 Globelics Lecture, turned attention toward European innovation policy and the institutional difficulties created when fiscal discipline takes priority over investment, learning, and experimentation.
Different regional perspectives entered the conversation through contributions by Marina Szapiro and Michiko Iizuka. Their reflections on Latin American and Asian innovation systems showed that economic instability does not produce identical policy responses. Institutional history, productive specialization, state capacity, and access to knowledge all influence whether a crisis leads to technological decline or opens possibilities for renewal. In this sense, the Greek case became part of a broader discussion concerning how economies preserve and rebuild capabilities under unfavorable conditions.
The conference also retained the intellectual continuity of Globelics through the participation of senior scholars such as Bengt-Åke Lundvall, Richard Nelson, Gabriela Dutrénit, José Eduardo Cassiolato, and Judith Sutz. Their presence connected the immediate problem of financial crisis with longer debates on interactive learning, national innovation systems, competence building, and development. Instead of treating recovery as a purely macroeconomic question, the meeting emphasized the institutional relationships that allow firms, universities, governments, and social actors to generate and use knowledge.
What distinguished the Athens edition was its insistence that innovation policy cannot be postponed until economic stability has already been restored. Capacity building, industrial renewal, education, and research are themselves part of the recovery process. The conference therefore reframed crisis as both a constraint and a test of institutional resilience. By situating innovation within Greece’s recent experience, the Fifteenth Globelics Conference produced a discussion that was simultaneously local, comparative, and directly connected to the practical challenges of economic reconstruction.