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
Government of Canada Invests in Innovative Small and Medium-Sized Firms
The Government f Canada recently announced contributions of $273,000 to Boreal Genomics Inc. and $496,000 to Day4 Energy Inc. from the National Research Council of Canada’s Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC-IRAP). The funding supports innovative research and development projects that will assist both firms in developing high-tech solutions for global markets.
Government of Canada Invests in Clean Energy in Atlantic Canada
The Government of Canada continued working to position Canada as a clean energy superpower, with support for an innovative smart grid project that will include three Maritime provinces and a number of communities. It announced that New Brunswick Power’s electricity load control demonstration project, PowerShift Atlantic, will receive up to $15.9 million through the Government of Canada’s Clean Energy Fund.
This program will link next generation sequencing technologies within Genome Canada-funded Science & Technology (S&T) Innovation Centres with gene discovery projects to help speed the translation to clinical medicine and to advance the adoption of new technologies. The focus of the program is on childhood diseases for which genes can be identified in a short time frame and with a small number of subjects to ensure the greatest impact.
Call for Papers: DIME Final Conference
Maastricht, 6-8 April, 2010
DIME (Dynamics of Institutions and Markets in Europe) is a network of Excellence sponsored by the EU 6th Framework Programme. Over its lifetime of 6 years, DIME has organized many activities that provide a broad perspective on the role of Europe in the global knowledge economy, from a perspective that covers geography, evolutionary economics, institutional economics, organization and management science, and other relevant disciplines. DIME will come to an end on 30 April 2011, and will organize a final conference in Maastricht, the Netherlands. The aim of the conference is to summarize and conclude on DIME’s activities. Contributed papers from DIME members or other interested participants are invited on the following topics: heterogeneity in innovation and economics, growth and development, the paradox of globalization and localization, organization and innovativeness, economic development and the environment, dynamics of technology and knowledge.
Editor's Pick
Export Nation: How U.S. Metros Lead National Export Growth and Boost Competitiveness
The Brookings Institution
If the U.S. is to achieve a significant surge in exports—whether a doubling or not—metropolitan areas will play a huge role. Reflecting their high concentration of the nation’s human and physical capital, metropolitan areas produce 84 percent of the nation’s exports, making them the points of leverage for scaling up trade with the wider world. The 100 largest metropolitan areas alone account for over 64 percent of the nation’s exports, including 75 percent of its service exports. To reset its economic trajectory, the United States needs to connect the macroeconomic goal of increasing exports with the metropolitan reality of export production. Public and private sector leaders at the metro level need to collaborate and engage actively to leverage already extant export concentrations to create good paying jobs at home.
Innovation Policy
Best Pactices for Industry-University Collaboration
Julio A Pertuze et al. , MIT Sloan Management Review
Most previous studies of industry-university collaboration have framed the analysis of such partnerships in terms of research projectoutcomes, defined here as a result that creates an opportunity for a company, such as guidance for the direction of technology development. From a business standpoint, however, research outcome is only of incidental importance. What matters is not outcome but impact — how the new knowledge derived from a collaboration with a university can contribute to a company’s performance. While constructing industry-university agreements is an important, and often lengthy, precursor to the collaboration, this article is concerned with specifically how those collaborations can best be carried out once the agreements are in place. In particular, it seeks to determine, in a measurable way, “best practices” for the selection process — the management and the development of relationships that enable a company to capitalize on a research partnership with a university.
A Sharper Focus on Technical Workers: How to Educate and Train for the Global Economy
National Governor’s Association Center for Best Practices
This report provides a model for how states can work collaboratively with industry, community colleges and each other to provide opportunities for workers and build their skills. It outlines the actions that governors can take to shape a new future for job training in a way that will nurture the largest and fastest growing industries..
Innovation and the Internet Demand New Collaboration
Richard Bennett, ITIF
The history of the internet holds important lessons on innovation enabled by public-private collaboration. Now
the architecture is nearing the end of its useful life and needs to be replaced by a different way of building networks
that will enable further innovation. But the rate at which the new internet arrives will be dictated by investment in
research, the business climate, and the actions of regulators. The question is – how far will openness take us?
Drivers and Policies for Increasing and Internationalizing R&D Activities of EU MNEs
Michele Cincera, Claudio Cozza and Alexander Tubke, IPTS
Based on an original and recent sample representative of the largest R&D corporations in the EU, this paper aims at investigating in a quantitative way the main factors explaining: (i) the decision of firms to increase their R&D investment effort in the near future; (ii) the main drivers explaining the favourite international location choice for R&D; and (iii) the impact of direct and indirect policies to support R&D activities in the EU. The main findings suggest that competitive pressures from the US are the main determinants for increasing R&D investments. Public support to R&D and proximity to other activities of the company influence the decision to locate R&D in the home country. Considerations on the cost of employing researchers become one factor among others only for firms preferring a location outside their home country, in particular in the rest of the world (countries other than the EU or the US).
Cities, Clusters & Regions
Corinne Autant-Bernard, Muriel Fadairo and Nadine Massard, GATE
This article builds upon empirical results concerning localised knowledge spillovers to highlight some policy implications within European regions. The analysis emphasises the role of regional innovation policies in supporting the institutions that generate knowledge and learning
Statistics & Indicators
The Importance of Startups in Job Creation and Job Destruction
The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation
This study bases its findings on the Business Dynamics Statistics, a U.S. government dataset compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau. The BDS series tracks the annual number of new businesses (startups and new locations) from 1977 to 2005, and defines startups as firms younger than one year old. The study reveals that, both on average and for all but seven years between 1977 and 2005, existing firms are net job destroyers, losing 1 million jobs net combined per year. By contrast, in their first year, new firms add an average of 3 million jobs. Further, the study shows, job growth patterns at both startups and existing firms are pro-cyclical, although existing firms have much more cyclical variance. Most notably, during recessionary years, job creation at startups remains stable, while net job losses at existing firms are highly sensitive to the business cycle.
2010 Global Manufacturing Index
Deloitte Global Manufacturing Industry Group & U.S. Council on Competitiveness
According to this report U.S. manufacturing competitiveness will continue to decline. Index projections suggest, by 2015, Brazil will have overtaken the U.S. for fourth in the global rankings behind China, India and the Republic of Korea. The report concludes the increasing talent pools worldwide, coupled with higher U.S. wages, have placed U.S. manufacturing at a disadvantage in the global markets. However, the U.S. should remain at the forefront of manufacturing innovation due to a focus on strengthening science and technology research, the strong intellectual property rights (IPR), technology transfer policy, and STEM initiatives.
Policy Digest
Council on Competitiveness
The traditional paradigm of regional development focuses the endowment of innovation assets (i.e. people institutions, capital and infrastructure). Regions abundant in these assets were built to succeed in the global knowledge economy. In contrast, less successful regions fail due to a lack of innovation assets. This study, however, argues that the ability to think, plan and act regionally is the real driving force behind developing a successful region.
To act regionally, there are many obstacles that must be overcome. The council study specifically focuses on one particular barrier: the fact that economic regions and political jurisdictions are not coterminous. There are no governance structures, boundaries or lines of authority that create order within the region. Cities, counties, towns and even states have competing interests, different identities and cultural traditions that make collaborating extremely difficult. Many regions, the researchers argue, still fall under the traditional paradigm that our next door neighbors are the competition and recruiting firms from outside is the mission. In essence, these actors have no reason to connect unless brought together by cause (e.g. overarching environmental issues or similar economic hardship) or regional leadership.
The study found that the first step to rectify this issue is relying on existing regional organizations that can set agendas, call meetings, recruit new leaders, etc. These organizations provide the basis of developing a regional collaboration structure that will allow the new regional leadership to fuel conversation, create connections and utilize regional capacity. Leaders, however, must effectively harness those three Cs to develop regional collaboration.
Conversation: In the new knowledge-based, networked economy, the ability to talk and think together well is a vital source of competitive advantage and organizational effectiveness. The form of converation can and does vary through time and circumstances, but the point is the same – to focus on the future of the region and build regional awareness into the culture.
Connections: Regions need to be linked together in order to collaborate and innovate. These linkages can and do take many forms. Regionalism is a contact sport that is best pursued through personal interactions at every stage of the game. Particularly in the knowledge economy where innovations are born out of multi-disciplinary projects face to face interaction becomes more important than ever for ensuring the free flow of ideas.
Capacity: In many ways, building a region’s capacity is the point of acting like a region. It is what is meant by leveraging assets such as networks that tie early stage companies to professional service providers and to universities that are in turn linked to sources of capital in the region.
Development Depends on Effective Regional Leadership:
The paper argues that collaborations and the three Cs can be achieved only through effective regional leadership. They cite several examples that technology and regional innovation assets alone cannot create a regional brand or regional prosperity. Even Silicon Valley had to strengthen its regional leadership in the 1990s to achieve success. A region without successful leaders still will act fragmented and fall back in the traditional paradigms of economic development.
In developing the seven habits of highly effective regional leadership, the council took into account the personal qualities of individual leadership and nature of regional leadership. They analyzed leadership traits and situations that occurred in the five case studies and previous research to develop this list:
- Be proactive: anticipate needs and create strategies to address them;
- Begin with the end in mind: regions need a vision for where they are heading, and it must be supported by consensus;
- Seek first to understand, then to be understood: Leaders must understand the region before creating their vision and strategy;
- Put first things first: Leaders, when leading action, need to be guardians of the big picture;
- Think win-win, be inclusive: always seek opportunities to make a case for regionalism and promote inclusion;
- Synergize: regions are a fertile field in which to grow synergies because they are at the cross where institutions intersect; and,
- Sharpen the saw: develop metrics and future leadership.
The report provides three pieces of advice for practitioners. First, regional leadership is not a one size fits all proposition.Due to the diversity of each region, leadership must develop a strategy that creates collaboration among stakeholders. Second, it admonishes leaders to do something, anything! Regional leadership must work at creating regionalism. Finally, regional leadership requires organizations that keep regionalism alive. Temporary organizations can help advance causes, but it is necessary to have an ongoing intermediary organization to perpetuate collaboration.
Events
Partnerships in S&T Policy Research
Waterville Valley, NH, 8-13 August, 2010
The 2010 Gordon Conference on Science and Technology Policy will focus on a wide range of research at the intersection of science, technology, policy and society. The 2010 Conference will focus in particular on further developing partnerships between North American and European researchers. Invited speakers represent a variety of scientific disciplines in the policy sciences, social and natural sciences as well as the humanities. The Conference will bring together a collection of investigators who are at the forefront of their field, and will provide opportunities for junior scientists and graduate students to present their work in poster format and exchange ideas with leaders in the field. The collegial atmosphere of this Conference, with programmed discussion sessions as well as opportunities for informal gatherings in the afternoons and evenings, provides an avenue for scholars from different disciplines to brainstorm and promotes cross-disciplinary collaborations in the various research areas represented.
Accelerating Innovation: The Road Ahead for Tech-based Economic Development 
SSTI Annual Conference
Pittsburgh, 14-16 September, 2010
The conference offers sessions, speakers, workshops and networking activities tailored to the needs of the innovation community. This year’s presenters include federal officials, governors, heads of economic development agencies and regional TBED organizations, and SSTI staff. It will focus on getting TBED professionals the answers they need to create effective strategies and to handle the speed bumps they encounter along the way.
Toronto, 30 September, 2010
Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area ICT cluster, comes together for a celebration of technology as an engine of economic growth at the Allstream Centre at Exhibition Place in downtown Toronto. We live in a new world without borders. Two out of every three people in the world own a mobile communications device….and Toronto is leading the way to this borderless future. Technicity brings together technology leaders, entrepreneurs, investors and representatives of the region’s economic development agencies for a day of panel discussions, displays and an evening to remember, to celebrate, to brainstorm, network and create economic opportunity. It also serves as an opportunity to leverage our talent pool, infrastructure, and geographic location to broaden the base of our already powerful ICT cluster.Technicity will highlight breaking technologies such as wireless data connectivity that will make up in next-generation cars to predictive analytics that is the next-generation for business intelligence.
Triple Helix in the Development of Cities of Knowledge, Expanding Communities and Connecting Regions
Madrid, Spain, 20-22 Oct, 2010
Innovation is understood as a resultant of a complex and dynamic process related to interactions between University, Industry and Government, in a spiral of endless transitions. The Triple Helix approach, developed by Henry Etzkowitz and Loet Leydesdorff, is based on the perspective of University as a leader of the relationship with Industry and Government, to generate new knowledge, innovation and economic development. The main theme of our conference is “Triple Helix in the Development of Cities of Knowledge, Expanding Communities and Connecting Regions”.
Entrepreneurship and Community: 26th Annual CCSBE Conference
Calgary, 28-30 October, 2010
The theme this year is Entrepreneurship and Community. We are seeking to explore the multifaceted impact entrepreneurs and small businesses have on their communities through their new ventures, business and community outreach. There is growing recognition by policy makers, members of society, business leaders and youth, that creative approaches are needed to address environmental, economic, and societal issues. The conference program highlights the research, educational methods, and community practices pertaining to venture sustainability and social entrepreneurship. In support of the theme we have attracted an array of plenary and guest speakers, and developed workshops which will contribute to the dialogue.
Reshaping Europe: Addressing Societal Challenges Through Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Liege, Belgium, 27-29 October, 2010
Over the past couple of years, Europe, and the rest of the world, has faced an unprecedented crisis affecting all sectors of the economy. The crisis and the recovery that is now taking place in most Member States provide experiences that can be used to reshape Europe and to ensure that it is stronger and better prepared for the challenges of the 21st century. The Europe 2020 Strategy is designed to improve the business environment. It is vital that this environment offers the framework conditions to turn ideas into products and services more quickly and easily, whilst addressing environmental concerns and making efficient use of resources. At this important turning point, the Europe INNOVA conference will provide a timely opportunity to determine how innovation policy and innovation support can help Europe and its enterprises, both large and small, to best face these challenges.The conference will unite the Europe INNOVA Community with key innovation stakeholders from the worlds of politics, academia and business. Together they will discuss three approaches that are crucial if Europe is to respond to the societal challenges with which it is currently confronted.
Making Innovation Work for Society: Linking, Leveraging and Learning GLOBELICS 8th Annual Conference
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 1-3 November, 2010
Global Network for Economics of Learning, Innovation, and Competence Building Systems (GLOBELICS) is an international network of scholars who apply the concept of “learning, innovation, and competence building system” (LICS) as their framework and are dedicated to the strengthening of LICS in developing countries, emerging economies and societies in transition. The research aims at locating unique systemic features as well as generic good practices to enlighten policy making relating to innovation, competence building, international competitiveness, regional development, labour market and human capital development. In an increasingly global and knowledge‐based competition, management strategies need to be based upon an understanding of these framework conditions and the public policies which seek to regulate the environment.
CALL FOR PAPERS: The Entrepreneurial University and thte Academic Enterprise
Washington, DC, 12-13 November, 2010
The theme of the 2010 conference is The Entrepreneurial University and the Academic Enterprise. Conference presentations should focus on the potential commonalities and/or conflicts of interests among government, university, and industry participants in technology transfer. The sessions will emphasize also the assessment of technology transfer activities, especially how to examine the objectives and processes of technology transfer activities (beyond the immediate needs of the participants), including both formal and informal transfer mechanisms (Link, Siegel & Bozeman, 2007; Abreu et al, 2008). Special focus will be placed on papers which evaluate the aspects of academicuniversity research relationships beyond their immediate outputs (Georghiou & Roessner, 2000; Vonortas & Spivack, 2005, Carayannis and Provance, 2007), including intellectual property issues (Feller & Feldman, 2009), modes of commercialization (Kenney & Patton, 2009), and economic impact (Roberts & Easley, 2009).
Knowledge Cities World Summit 2010
Melbourn, Australia, 16-19 November, 2010
‘Knowledge’ is a resource, which relies on the past for a better future. In the 21st century, more than ever before, cities around the world rely on the knowledge of their citizens, their institutions, their firms and enterprises. Knowledge assists in attracting investment, qualified labour, students and researchers. Knowledge also creates local life spaces and professional milieus, which offer quality of life to the citizens who are seeking to cope with the challenges of modern life in a competitive world. This conference will offer a range of innovative presentation formats aimed at facilitating interaction and accessibility for all members of the Knowledge Summit community. The Summit will attract a range of multidisciplinary participants including: practitioners, managers, decision and policy makers of non-government organisations, technology solution developers, innovators, urban planners, urban designers and developers, academics, researchers and postgraduate students.
Liverpool, UK, 18-19 November, 2010
First established in 2002 this annual conference has developed into a renowned international event in which incubators, science parks, investors, universities, governmental organizations and industry discuss and evaluate their strategy on how best to support young start-ups on the road to succes. Be a part of this inspiring event!
Calgary, 25-26 November, 2010
The companies worst hit in western Canada during the recession tended to be those with undifferentiated products with many competitors, where price competition became severe. By contrast, the companies who did reasonably well tended to have unique products and fewer competitors. InnoWest 2010 tells the story of some of these companies, and how innovation helped them to live through the recession relatively unscathed, and position themselves for growth in the recovery. InnoWest 2010 will not focus on the very large companies [such as Suncor] or on very small companies [for example, a 10 employee company] but will focus on the large middle ground where the bulk of Canada’s GDP is generated. Keynote speakers include Sir Terry Matthews.
Ottawa, 5-7 December, 2010
Globally, innovation is recognized as the driving force towards lasting sustainable prosperity in the coming decades. The federal government’s S&T strategy promotes action to grow the translation of knowledge into commercial applications that generate wealth for Canadians and support a high quality of life. We have the opportunity to build a world-class innovation ecosystem in Canada. The challenge is to foster increased partnerships and collaboration among public, academic and private sectors to ensure we improve knowledge mobilization and commercialization for world-class next generation products and services. In keeping with these challenges and opportunities, ACCT Canada, Federal Partners in Technology Transfer (FPTT) and the Networks of Centres of Excellence (NCE) are pleased to present their first national joint conference on innovation and competitiveness in Canada: INNOVATION 2010.
Managing the Art of Innovation: Turning Concepts into Reality
Quebec City, 12-15 December, 2010
Organized by ISPIM in collaboration with local partner INO, a leading non-profit R&D center in Optics/Photonics in Canada, this symposium will bring together academics, business leaders, consultants and other professionals involved in innovation management. The symposium format will include facilitated themed sessions for academic and practitioner presentations together with interactive workshops and discussion panels. Additionally, the symposium will provide excellent networking opportunities together with a taste of local French Canadian culture.
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This newsletter is prepared by Jen Nelles.
Project manager is David A. Wolfe.