News from the IPL
INTRODUCTION
This newsletter is published by The Innovation Policy Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, and sponsored by the Ministry of Research and Innovation. The views and ideas expressed in this newsletter do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Ontario Government.
ANNOUNCEMENTS
Canada Announces New Start-Up Visas, First of its Kind in the World
Canada will launch a brand new program on April 1 to recruit innovative immigrant entrepreneurs who will create new jobs and spur economic growth. The Start-Up Visa Program will link immigrant entrepreneurs with private sector organizations in Canada that have experience working with start-ups and who can provide essential resources. The Program is part of a series of transformational changes to Canada’s immigration system that will make it faster, more flexible and focused on Canada’s economic needs. Linking forward-thinking immigrant entrepreneurs with established private sector organizations is essential to the success of both investors and entrepreneurs in building companies that will compete globally and create Canadian jobs.
DARPA Announces US$194M University Semiconductor Initiative
The Department of Energy (DOE) is will commit up to $12 million for a new round of funding for the SunShot Incubator Program — a pay-for-performance program focused on helping solar energy start-ups transition from a proof-of-concept or business plan to domestic commercialization and/or deployment. DOE anticipates to make up to nine awards to support research and development of both hardware and non-hardware solutions that reduce the cost of systems that convert solar energy into electric potential. Interested start-ups must submit their concept paper by March 5, 2013.
The Gigabit Community: Broadband and the Future of the U.S. Innovation Economy
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski called for all 50 states to be outfitted with at least one gigabit-speed community by 2015 in an op ed piece run by Forbes earlier this month. Approximately 42 communities in 14 different states already fit the bill and more are joining the effort in what Genachowski termed the “Gigabit City Challenge”.
University of Manitoba Employs Groundbreaking Tech Transfer Model
The University of Manitoba is embarking on a new approach to technology commercialization — they’re giving it away. Well, not exactly. Instead of hard-boiled negotiations between the university and industry partners on royalties and licensing agreements for intellectual property developed in-house, the university will make the research available to partners with no financial commitment until the company itself starts making money from the technology. It’s a bold realignment and an attempt to allow innovative work that is going on at the university to get outside the ivory tower.
New “Clusterplattform” for Germany
The new internet portal “Clusterplattform Deutschland”, launched in the beginning of 2013, offers information regarding policy support measures for clusters and cluster initiatives at federal, regional and EU level for any actor involved in clusters. The platform is an initiative of the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research as well as the VDI/VDE Institute for Innovation and Technology.
Editor's Pick
The Brookings Institution
This report is the first analysis of its kind to present patenting trends on a regional level from 1980 to 2012. The report ranks all of the nation’s roughly 360 metropolitan areas on patenting levels and growth, while noting the firms and organizations responsible. It also analyzes how patenting has affected productivity levels in each region, comparing patents—which embody novel inventions—to other sources of economic dynamism, such as educational attainment. This report examines the importance of patents as a measure of invention to economic growth and explores why some areas are more inventive than others.
Innovation Policy
Regulating Online Postsecondary Education: State Issues and Options
National Governors Association
In recent years, online courses and programs have become a more prominent part of postsecondary education in the United States. The number of students taking an online course has nearly quadrupled over the past decade, with nearly one-third of all postsecondary students in the nation—including many working adults—currently taking at least one course online. As providers and regulators of online education, states have a unique and challenging opportunity. They must promote access and quality assurance while working in coordination with the federal government and accreditation agencies. The expectation that state regulators can ensure both access and quality will only grow with the continued expansion of online programs by public, private and for-profit institutions. Governors should consider calling for a review of current state laws and regulations surrounding authorization of online program.
Bringing It All Back Home: Will Insourcing Give the U.S. the Jobs It Needs?
Anna Clark, Next City
Whether you call it onshoring or insourcing, the idea of bringing manufacturing jobs back to U.S. soil from overseas has become a political force to reckon with. But if the country will never return to its 20th-century heyday as a manufacturing powerhouse, what can happen at the local level to restore employment in places like Muskegon, Mich. or Lorain County, Ohio, where factories have emptied out and jobs have disappeared? Examining the policies, partnerships and strategies that are successfully creating new manufacturing jobs in Muskegon, Lorain County and other mid-sized hubs, Clark offers new insight for those seeking to bring manufacturing back to their own city.
Pushes and Pulls: The Hi(story) of the Demand Pull Model of Innovation
B. Godin and J.P. Lane,
Much has been written about the linear model of innovation. While it may have been the dominant model used to explain technological innovation for decades, alternatives did exist. One such alternative – generally discussed as being the exact opposite of the linear model – is the demand-pull model. Beginning in the 1960s, people from different horizons started looking at technological innovation from a demand rather than a supply perspective. The theory was that technological innovation is stimulated by market demand rather than by scientific discoveries. However, few traces of the demand-pull model remain in the literature today. This paper looks at what happened to the demand-pull model from a historical perspective, at three points in time: birth, crystallization and death. It suggests that the idea of ‘demand’ as a factor explaining technological innovation emerged in the 1960s, was formalized into models in the 1970-80s, then got integrated into multidimensional models. From then on, the demand-pull model disappeared from the literature, existing only as an object of the past, like the linear model of innovation.
President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST)
The impact of networking and information technology (NIT) is stunning. Virtually every human endeavor is affected as advances in NIT enable or improve domains such as scientific discovery, human health, education, the environment, national security, transportation, manufacturing, energy, governance, and entertainment. NIT is also a powerful engine for economic growth. The United States leads the world in both the science of NIT and the myriad uses that transform lives. U.S. leadership stems from a sustained Federal investment in fundamental NIT research and development (R&D) spanning more than sixty years, and a vibrant industrial base that converts the fruits of that research to products. The research addresses both core NIT capabilities and the increasingly diverse domains in which NIT plays a crucial role. The interplay of Federally-funded university and government agency research, privately funded industrial research, and entrepreneurial companies, together with the education and training that fuels innovation and productivity, clearly strengthens the Nation’s prosperity, health, and security. This report analyses progress to date in implementing the PCAST recommendations from a working group convened in 2010 and provides some further recommendations in support of this process.
National Governors Association (NGA)
Following a year-long policy academy intended to help states prepare new strategies for economic growth by fostering collaboration and shared experiences, eight states have agreed to bring a renewed focus to advanced manufacturing. State leaders concur that the manufacturing sector is too important to lose and is rapidly evolving. With change, however, comes a unique opportunity to capture new leadership roles and address global issues that threaten public health and safety. This report from the National Governors Association (NGA) summarizes the work and findings from the group and provides guidance for other states.
Cities, Clusters & Regions
Paul Belanger and Sylvie-Ann Hart, OECD
This paper looks at a study carried out among 80 small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in two Canadian cities, Montréal and Winnipeg, based on a survey and case studies, which show the importance of innovation among Canadian SMEs. These innovations in turn create new demands for skill development, both through formal training and in informal activities. The outcomes of the study show two significant trends. First, an uneven development of learning activities among SMEs is related not only to the size of firms, but also to their orientation towards innovation and shared productivity measures. Second, because they do not have enough internal resources and flexibility to drive productivity growth through learning and training by themselves, SMEs need some form of group based mechanisms to solve this structural problem. However, it is noted that participation of unskilled employees in both formal and informal learning remains an important challenge for the great majority of SMEs.
Innovation Communities: Trust, Mutual Learning and Action
Nordic Innovation
This report describes and places in context the emergent phenomenon of Innovation Communities (InnoComms). It describes the basis and motivation for InnoComms and distinguishes them from networking organizations that focus on achieving specific business, macroeconomic or social results or on academic research. It characterizes and provides twenty-seven case studies from ten countries, placing them in five categories that span business, government, academia and nonprofit sectors.
Statistics & Indicators
Best Performing Cities 2012: Where Jobs Are Created and Sustained
The Miliken Institute
Tech is back! For the first time since 2001, San Jose tops the Milken Institute’s Best-Performing Cities index, which looks at jobs, pay and the technology sector to determine which cities are best at creating and sustaining economic growth. For the second year in a row, Logan, Utah, leads the small cities.
MetroTrends Data Dashboard, Maps and Download Tool
MetroTrends
Created to help researchers, reporters, and residents understand how their local areas are changing, the new MetroTrends Data Dashboard transforms complex datasets into easily accessible, interactive charts and maps. Data are available on the local level, with comparisons to the United States as a whole. The highlights include: Local unemployment trends; Trends in employment by sector (private vs. government) and subsector; Maps of jobs by location; Trends in subsector employment and salary; Housing price trends; Trends in loan activity by loan type, loan amount, and borrower’s race and income; The latest demographic and migration data. Maps of income, age, race, and education level; Trends in property and violent crime.
U.S R&D Spending Growth Lags Behind Growth of the National Economy
National Science Foundation (NSF)
According to a new brief from the National Science Foundation (NSF), preliminary 2011 data indicates that U.S. total research and development (R&D) in 2011 was $414.0 billion (in current dollars), an increase of $7.3 billion from 2010 totals ($406.7 billion). These results mark the second straight year of growth in U.S. R&D expenditures following a $1.8 billion decline in 2009 — only the second decline in current dollars since the early 1950s. However, these growth rates, 0.7 percent in 2010 and 1.8 percent in 2011, were well behind the pace of gross domestic product (GDP) expansion in both of these years (4.2 percent and 3.9 percent, respectively). The report also looks at preliminary R&D data by performers, funders, character of work and intensity. The brief also looked at worldwide R&D expenditures, which totaled an estimated $1.341 trillion in 2010 with an average 7.1 percent annual growth over the past 5 years.
Policy Digest
Needed: Efforts to Manufacture a Recovery
Mark Muro and Jessica Lee, The Brookings Institution
The Brookings Institute, in partnership with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), released three bold policy proposals intended to bolster the competitiveness of the U.S. manufacturing and advanced industries sector by improving innovation, workforce, and higher education connections. Each proposal paper provides a compelling argument for the federal government to make a strategic investment that will help to renew the national, state and local manufacturing bases to address poor U.S. economic performance since the Great Recession including sagging gross domestic product (less than 2 percent annually growth), skyrocketing numbers of individuals living in/near poverty and wage stagnation. Proposals include 20 U.S. manufacturing universities, a network of advanced industries innovation HUBs and a competition for states and a Race to the Shop competition.
The three ideas from Devashree Saha and one of the co-authors of this blog (Mark Muro), Bruce Katz and Peter Hamp, and Rob Atkinson and Stephen Ezell add up to cohesive trio of proposals for improving innovation, workforce, and higher-education connections in the sector.
Create a national network of advanced industry innovation hubs
On the innovation front, th reports argue that Congress should authorize the build-out of a national network of advanced industries (AI) innovation hubs, expanding on the modest beginnings now being made through the Department of Energy’s Energy Innovation Hubs program and the Department of Commerce’s National Network for Manufacturing Innovation (NNMI) initiative. Functioning as regional centers of excellence, the new hubs would focus on cross-cutting innovation, process, and technology deployment challenges of critical interest to advanced industries by drawing universities, community colleges, state and local governments, and other actors into strong, industry-led partnerships. The creation and appropriate funding of at least 25 such hubs—funded at $25 million a year each, with a significant local, state, and private sector matching support required—would, we believe, greatly accelerate the pace of innovation and new-product development in the nation’s advanced industries and so strengthen their long-term competitiveness.
Encourage states to address the workforce and training needs of their leading sectors
Turning to labor force development, Katz and Hamp urge the federal government to initiate a “Race to the Shop” competition (loosely modeled on the successful Race to the Top education challenge) to push states and metropolitan areas to develop long-term strategies for better addressing the workforce and training needs of their leading sectors. Under this new program, the five states and five metropolitan areas that present the strongest plans would receive a federal implementation grant as well as increased flexibility to realign or better invest existing federal resources, say from the Workforce Investment Act or Perkins Career and Technical Education funding. Ultimately winning states and regions might receive significant resources and flexibility to create a network of manufacturing high schools, for instance, or to align community college curricula to fit the varying skill demands of major local industries.
Designate “U.S. Manufacturing Universities” with special engineering programs
Finally, to bolster both the innovative capacity and human capital of the manufacturing commons, Atkinson and Ezell call on Congress to establish an initiative to designate 20 institutions of higher education in America as “U.S. Manufacturing Universities,” with a special charge to strengthen the position of U.S. manufacturing in the competitive global economy. Along these lines, Atkinson and Ezell would have government provide the new cadre of federally-designated institutions $25 million a year each to revamp their engineering programs to better serve the needs of U.S. manufacturers. Through such changes U.S. regions and industries would gain more joint industry-university exchanges; more undergraduate and graduate training that incorporates work-based experience in manufacturing; and more universities focused on turning out engineering PhDs who go on to work in industry.
Events
Berlin, 17-18 January, 2013
After the experiences of uncontrollable natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy, socio-technical misjudgements as unveiled in the nuclear disaster in Fukushima or the controversial negotiations about the sources and consequences of climate change, societal debates increasingly have turned from valuing indeterminacy as an opportunity to perceiving uncertainty as a threat. The world, it seems, lives in a permanent state of emergency. Somewhere between resignation and the belief to control risks, a “new language of preparedness” (Ash Amin) is emerging, and vulnerability and resilience have become keywords in this new language. The aim of this conference is to stimulate cross-disciplinary dialogue among leading experts representing sociology, political science, geography, planning studies and regional economics about the notions, conceptual scope and limitations of resilience. A particular emphasis will be put on the socio-technical, political and discursive construction work that underlies calculations of vulnerability and strategies of enhancing resilience. The conference is co-organized by the HafenCity University Hamburg (HCU) and the Leibniz-Institute for Regional Development and Structural Planning (IRS), and supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Madrid, Spain, 10-12 April, 2013
The Conference aims to encourage dialogue between academics and practitioners to improve innovation policy design, implementation and evaluation. The conference will offer keynote speeches, parallel thematic sessions, roundtable discussions, special activities for young researchers and ample space for all participants to interact. Visits to research and innovation centres both in public and private institutions will be offered after the conference.
Shape and Be Shaped: The Future Dynamics of Regional Development
Tampere, Finland, 5-8 May, 2013
In the many regions and localities of the world, there is an ever-growing need to find new solutions for the future, as they are increasingly confronted with intertwined sets of ecological, social and economic difficulties as well as new opportunities brought to them by the globalising economy. Indeed, there is a need to work for more balanced and sustainable development and cross the many institutional boundaries that prevent new solutions from being created. What makes all of this a demanding set of policy challenges, is that regions and localities need to find ways to manage their own destiny while being manipulated by many forces. The central idea underpinning the RSA 2013 conference in Tampere is that there is now an urgent need to better to understand how regions and localities can adapt to current challenges and deal with the wicked issues of sustainability by developing new multi-actor governance, policy-making and leadership capacities. The conference offers researchers and workers in local and regional development an opportunity to collectively explore and discuss these key issues from a multitude of perspectives and with different theoretical stand points and with empirical observations from different parts of the world.
Cluster Academy: Learning from the Clusterland Upper Austria”cluster region” 
Linz, Austria, 14-17 May, 2013
The Cluster Academy shows how successful clusters work, using Clusterland Upper Austria Ltd. as an example and gives an input, how these processes could be implemented in your region. An additional benefit is the networking and exchange of experience effect with international participants, sharing the same interests in cluster activities. The cluster management workshop covers the areas of knowledge management, initiation and support of cooperation projects, qualification and event management, marketing & PR, internationalization, financing and evaluation & measuring. This year, more interactive formats of participation such as an ample case-study to complement lectures, field reports and presentations are being designed. Numerous direct visits to cluster companies should spot the motivation of being active in a cluster. Attractive side events give a chance to get to know the participants and the city of Linz.
9th International PhD School on Innovation and Economic Development
Tampere, Finland, 20-31 May, 2013
The aim of the Globelics Academy PhD-School is to support the training of Ph.D. students from different parts of the world and who are writing theses on issues related with innovation and economic development. The Academy brings together frontier researchers in innovation with Ph.D. students from developing countries in order to inspire and qualify their work as well as in order to help them to join high-quality research networks in their field of research.
16th Uddevalla Symposium 2013: Innovation, High-Growth Entrepreneurship and Regional Development
Kansas City, 13-15 June, 2013
The critical role of innovation and entrepreneurship in regional economic development in terms of productivity and employment growth has been well documented theoretically as well as empirically by researchers in recent decades. The specific mechanisms through which innovation stimulates regional economic development are less well established. It is often assumed that entrepreneurship in the form of new firm formation and the growth of newly established firms plays a critical role, but how, why, when and under what conditions is less clear. Empirical studies show that a limited share of new business ventures have the capacity to rapidly up-scale and to generate substantial new jobs in the regions where they are launched. From the perspective of regional policy makers, this implies that it is critical to understand what regional economic milieus are capable of generating innovations that can be the basis of high-growth entrepreneurship as well as provide the right environment for entrepreneurs to launch entrepreneurial initiatives.Against this background, we seek papers that, in particular, topics related to exploring these themes.
Brighton, UK, 10-12 July, 2013
Europe’s relations with the wider world are continuously undergoing change. The urban and regional significance of these changing relations remains surprisingly poorly understood. The global financial and economic crisis, the dramatic events of late 2010 and 2011 in the Middle East and North Africa, the continuing crisis in Europe, and the global rise of ‘new powers’ are each impacting on how Europe, its citizens, and its cities and regions are connected to the wider world. The 9th European Urban and Regional Studies conference aims to consider a wide range of consequences of these changes as well as other themes relating to European urban and regional change.
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This newsletter is prepared by Jen Nelles.
Project manager is David A. Wolfe.