Ying Li is  an assistant professor at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. She holds a PhD in Business Administration from the Gies College of Business, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include industry emergence and evolution as well as related topics such as innovation and entrepreneurship, space and place, and organizational values. She is particularly passionate about settings of cultural and creative industries . In her dissertation grounded in the context  of the American movie theater industry (1896-2020) , she developed a "cultural geography" perspective to explain how the regional interpretation of an emerging technology's meaning shapes localized dynamics of industry emergence and evolution.