The student of innovation studies is faced with a vast, multi-national and interdisciplinary field on which she must gain an overview and make a novel contribution. There exist a plethora of academic journals, networks, conferences and fora wherein researchers of innovation discuss and advance the topic. How to manage and understand this is a major challenge. This paper helps to make sense of this often confusing and ever-shifting field by reviewing the major developments over the past 20 years, highlighting the present ‘state of the art’ and identifying some important trends going forwards. It does this through a review of the published themes of two major international conferences in the field–Danish Research Unit for Industrial Dynamics (DRUID) and Global Network for the Economics of Learning, Innovation, and Competence Building Systems (GLOBELICS) – to gain a global view on the field. At the heart of the exploration is whether the sphere of innovation studies has evolved coherently worldwide, or there are geographic differences.