Abstract The term “innovation ecosystems” refers to the economic dynamics of the complex relation-ships that are formed between the material resources and human capital, whose functional goal is to enable technology development and innovation. Because of their importance in eco-nomic growth, the promotion of European innovation ecosystems was among the priorities of the Ninth Framework Program for Research and Innovation for 2020. Studying the driving forces behind innovation as a part of an entire network and not as indi-vidual entities is essential to guarantee the creation, survival, and evolution of such ecosystems. As data visualization can significantly improve information exploration, visualizing innovation ecosystems can lead to the discovery of meaningful insights into the complex relationships within them, that otherwise would go unnoticed. However, high complexity socio-economic da-tasets that describe innovation ecosystems present a significant challenge for data analysis and synthesis. This thesis comes to address this challenge by developing a data model and web prototype that integrates heterogeneous datasets, i.e., multi-source, multi-format, and pre-senting diverse levels of quality and resolution. The EuroTech Universities Alliance is a vivid example of European cooperation in science and technology. The Alliance integrates leading technical universities and Europe and beyond, so it was set as the study case to propose a methodology and a prototypical implementation. This thesis proposes a prototype enabled to analyze and retrieve information about relations among European universities, companies, start-ups, and research institutions. The prototype provides an interactive interface that makes use of a thematic web map and statistical charts that allow the navigation of layered data representations. By integrating a solid data model and suitable visualization techniques within an interactive web framework, this thesis offers a state-of-the-art approach to visualizing the spatial connectivity of science and technology across Eu-ropean boundaries. Keywords: innovation ecosystems, data visualization, network visualization, interactive web cartography, interactive web mapping     «

Abstract The term “innovation ecosystems” refers to the economic dynamics of the complex relation-ships that are formed between the material resources and human capital, whose functional goal is to enable technology development and innovation. Because of their importance in eco-nomic growth, the promotion of European innovation ecosystems was among the priorities of the Ninth Framework Program for Research and Innovation for 2020. Studying the driving forces behind innovation as a part of an e...     »