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
Air Rail Link to Pearson Airport Will Create Jobs and Strengthen the Economy
Premier Dalton McGuinty recently announced that construction will begin this spring for the new Air Rail Link ‘spur line’ connecting downtown Toronto to Pearson International Airport. When complete, the service between Union Station and Pearson will branch off the Georgetown south corridor and connect to a new passenger station at Terminal 1. Construction of this portion of the Air Rail Link is expected to be completed by summer 2014 and the Air Rail Link will be in service in time for the Toronto 2015 Pan/Parapan Am Games.The Air Rail Link will help meet the tremendous demand for a direct service by connecting the busiest airport in Canada with the busiest transit and passenger rail hub in the country. It will remove 1.2 million car trips from our roads in its first year of operation alone.
CFI 15th Anniversary Initiative: Helping Canadian Researchers “Think Big”
Supporting Canadian discovery, innovation and competitiveness has been a hallmark of the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) over the last 15 years. Throughout 2012, the CFI will be celebrating the world-class research it has enabled through investments in state-of-the-art facilities and equipment at Canada’s universities, colleges, research hospitals and non-profit research institutions. In addition to showcasing great Canadian discoveries in every discipline, the CFI will focus its communications activities on how research is helping to build strong communities and is delivering real, tangible benefits to Canadians.
NIST Creates Office for the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership
The Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP) National Program Office (NPO) will be housed at the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The NPO is established to strengthen advanced manufacturing through improved technology transfer and industry partnerships focused on innovative manufacturing technologies. The AMP National Program Office will include participation from all federal agencies involved in U.S. manufacturing to support interagency coordination of advanced manufacturing programs and to provide a link to the growing number of private-sector partnerships between manufacturers, universities, state and local governments, and other manufacturing-related organizations.
Congress Approves Six-Year SBIR Reauthorization
After 14 short-term continuing resolutions and years of negotiations, the federal Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Tranfer (STTR) programs have been reauthorized through 2017. The legislation changes a number of features of SBIR/STTR, including making it possible for companies that are majority-owned by venture capital firms to receive awards. President Obama is expected to sign the bill in the near future. Last week, the House of Representatives passed the National Defense Authorization (HR 1540) conference report, which had incorporated the SBIR reauthorization. The six-year term of the conference agreement was a compromise between the three-year reauthorization approved by the House in April and the eight-year term passed by the Senate earlier this month. Funding for awards will increase gradually over the six-year period. Federal science agency set-asides for SBIR will increase from 2.5 percent of their budget in the first year to 3.2 percent by 2017. STTR set-asides will grow from 0.3 percent to 0.45 percent.
Editor's Pick
Paul Benneworth and Adrie Dassen, OECD
With innovation increasingly important to economic development, innovation policy is attracting attention from politicians and policy-makers at all levels. Regional policy-makers face a distinctive challenge in that innovation takes place in international networks reaching far beyond their region‘s boundaries. What regional policy-makers can achieve is therefore constrained by the kind of firms and innovation networks already in their regions. This paper creates a framework for analyzing regional innovation policy sensitive to this global dimension. Drawing on a global-local network analysis, the paper develops a regional classification for global-local innovation connectivity. The paper then analyses a set of common innovation policy measures, identifying how these policies can be optimized across these regional classes. The paper then highlights typical policy strengths and weaknesses for each of these various classes of regional global orientation. It argues that regional innovation strategies should pay more attention to their regions‘ global orientation if they are to become an effective tool across OECD members for improving innovation performance and economic growth rates.
Innovation Policy
Building a Science, Technology, Engineering and Math Education Agenda
National Governors Association (NGA)
This guide focuses on strengthening science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education. Economic growth in the 21st century will be driven by the nation’s ability to both generate ideas and translate them into innovative products and services. Governors have been working to increase the proficiency of all students in these areas and grow the number of students who pursue STEM careers and advanced studies. As governors look for the best strategies to strengthen state economic performance, it is important to focus on STEM occupations because they are among the highest paying, fastest growing and most influential in driving economic growth and innovation. Individuals employed in STEM fields enjoy low unemployment, prosperity and career flexibility. Unfortunately, America has fallen behind in fully realizing the benefits of STEM education. The United States currently ranks behind 25 countries in math and 12 countries in science, which is evidenced by slow growth in postsecondary degrees awarded in STEM fields over approximately the past decade. That lack of degree growth is occurring as other countries are experiencing rapid growth in their STEM talent pools.
Tech-Based Economic Development and the States: Legislative Action in 2011
SSTI
2011 was an active year for legislative activity focused on technology-based economic development (TBED). SSTI’s latest report identifies several trends that emerged during the year and includes examples from states in the following categories: Focus on regions; Reorganizing economic development activities; Providing access to capital; Tax incentives; New commitments to TBED; Investing in research; and Higher education and STEM initiatives.
Investing in America: Building an Economy that Lasts
The White House
Over the past decade, real business investment in production capacity stagnated. Economic growth in the U.S. relied far too heavily on an unsustainable boom in residential and commercial real estate fueled by an unchecked financial sector. The bubble created by this boom distorted the economy and undercut the international competitiveness of products and services. Companies increasingly chased low‐cost labor outside of the U.S., moving their manufacturing production, and some of their services, like call centers and software development, abroad. While these reports have identified the emerging trend of companies bringing production back to the U.S., analysis, official data, and examination of the behavior of particular firms support the view that investment has been growing and a new, promising trend of insourcing is beginning to take shape. While insourcing is often used to describe a company bringing activities back in‐house, the term is used to refer to bringing activities and jobs back to the U.S. or choosing to invest in the U.S. instead of overseas. This report finds that these jobs are coming back to the U.S. from a wide range of locations, including advanced industrial countries and some emerging economies. The analysis identifies economic shifts that could help propel investment in the U.S. and economic expansion for many years to come.
Center for American Progress
Investment in research and development is a significant driver of technological progress and economic growth, particularly in high-wage developed countries. The United States spends more than any other nation in the world on research and development, or R&D, but its relative position (measured by the share of such investment in national income) has been falling even as other countries increase their investments in research. In the United States, as in most other countries, business finances and carries out the majority of R&D activities. The U.S. government supports business R&D both through direct R&D funding, mostly dedicated to national-priority areas such as defense and health, and through tax incentives such as the research tax credit, which is the subject of this report. There have been many careful empirical studies of the efficacy of the corporate R&D tax credit. Most studies find that the credit is effective in the sense that each dollar of foregone tax revenue causes businesses to invest at least an additional dollar in R&D. In other words, the credit stimulates at least as much R&D activity as a direct subsidy. And unlike a subsidy, which is usually linked to a particular kind of R&D related to a specific national goal, the credit allows businesses to select projects on the basis of the anticipated returns from incremental research dollars. This report examines the role of the credit in federal government support for R&D, evaluate the credit’s performance in realizing its objectives, and make recommendations to simplify, modify, and strengthen its effectiveness.
Maastricht Reflections on Innovation
Luc Soete, UNU-MERIT
“Innovation is good for you” is a common refrain in most science, technology and innovation studies over the last decades. This is surprising given the fact that innovation failure rather than innovation success appears a much more common outcome. Hence a simple question is central in this paper: could it be that innovation is not always good for you? A frequent argument is that at a societal level, innovation is renewing society’s dynamics and hence leading to higher levels of economic development and welfare. A process of creative destruction destoys maybe a few incumbents to the benefit of many newcomers. However, sometimes the exact opposite pattern occurs: a process of destructive innovation, benefiting a few at the expense of many In this period of “crises” examples abound of such destructive creation processes. In this Tans lecture some typical examples are addressed: our unsustainable fossil-fuel based economic growth at the global level; European monetary integration; and financial innovation at the sectoral level.
Cities, Clusters & Regions
San Diego Innovation Assets Report
CONNECT
This reportt, published by CONNECT, San Diego’s technology and life sciences accelerator, is a compilation of the richness of the innovation assets of San Diego’s innovation economy. The report showcases the depth and breadth of the region’s assets including: new products launched in the last year; listings of the 80+ research institutes; an index of the flow of key research talent that comes to San Diego’s top research institutes and universities; listings of incubators and accelerators; VCs and angel
investor groups; trade organizations; the growing number of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education programs; and descriptions of the region’s technology and nearsourcing clusters. This report highlights San Diego as a leader in innovation with world class research, leadership, product development and management talent. It serves as a resource for entrepreneurs, policymakers, trade organizations, research institutions and investors interested in learning more about the wide array of assets that support and drive San Diego’s thriving innovation economy.
Cities are engines of growth and they will be critical to our economic recovery. The Coalition Government in the U.K. is taking tough and decisive action to equip Britain for long-term success by restoring health to the public inances and conidence in the economy through a balanced approach led by private sector growth. But this growth will not occur in the abstract. It will be created in individual places where people and businesses work, trade and innovate. The most economically important of these places are cities and their wider economic areas, which account for 74% of the UK’s population and 78% of its jobs. The Government has already taken some important steps to hep cities drive forward growth. But it will need to go much further in empowering cities. The Government will work with diferent cities over the coming months and years to agree a series of tailored ‘city deals’. This is not about rolling out blanket policy prescriptions, but hammering out agreements that will enable cities to do things their way.
Statistics & Indicators
Business Innovation and Strategy: A Canadian Perspective
Industry Canada
The Survey of Innovation and Business Strategy (SIBS) is a comprehensive new survey that covers the factors that influence enterprise strategies – not only explicitly related to innovation, but also to other strategies. It is a joint project, initiated in 2007–08 by Industry Canada, Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada and Statistics Canada, to better understand the market and policy
factors that encourage or discourage the adoption of growth and innovation-oriented business strategies. SIBS provides detailed information about various business strategies and practices that determine business innovation, such as an enterprise’s strategic orientation, its management practices, its use of advanced technology and its marketplace and competitive environment. The survey also provides detailed information about global value chain management practices and activities in Canada, such as which activities an enterprise will relocate to other countries and which it will outsource to external suppliers. This report explores the results of the SIBS in detail.
The Milken Institute
Leaders in this year’s index, which ranks U.S. metros based on their ability to create and sustain jobs, are cities that most benefited from renewed investment in business equipment; have diversified technology bases, which also drive growth in business and professional services; are exposed to America’s booming energy sector; and are home to a large military presence. The Best Performing Cities index includes both long-term (five years) and short-term (one year) measurements of employment and salary growth. There are also four measurements of technology output growth, which are included because of technology’s crucial role in creating good jobs and driving regional economies. The index ranks 379 metropolitan areas, grouped into large (population of more than 200,000) and small (population of less than 200,000) metros.
Sami Mahroum and Yasser Alsaleh, INSEAD
In an increasingly globalized economy, the ability to draw in innovations and ideas from elsewhere and build on them to create value at home has become a powerful facility for economic growth. Since some places are better at adopting and adapting borrowed ideas than others, the process of ‘innovation through adoption’ deserves more attention at both scholarly and policymaking levels. Based on such beliefs, this paper elaborates the notion of ‘innovation adoption’ and develops it further to advance the notion of ‘innovation efficacy’. The latter is interpreted here as the efficiency and effectiveness of innovation systems in terms of accessing, anchoring, diffusing, creating and exploiting innovations. This notion is further illustrated in a measurement tool based on a composite index, which we name the ‘Innovation Efficacy Index’. The ultimate contribution of the paper lies in its aim to shift the traditional focus of attention from a fixation with developing and exploiting new knowledge locally to the prospect of value creation through accessing, anchoring or diffusing knowledge acquired from elsewhere.
Policy Digest
The Competitiveness and Innovative Capacity of the United States
U.S. Department of Commerce and the National Economic Council
This report emphasizes, innovation has been a key driver of U.S. prosperity and competitiveness throughout its history. Government investments in the building blocks of innovation – basic research, education, and infrastructure – have helped fuel and sustain the ingenuity of the inventors and innovators. Innovation-based economic growth has brought us higher paying, higher quality jobs as well as improved health and quality of life. Federally-supported research has led to world-changing advancements in a variety of fields, including laying the groundwork for the integrated circuit and computer industry; the Internet; advances in chemicals, agriculture, and medical science; and GPS. Millions of workers can trace their industries and companies back to technological breakthroughs funded by the Federal government. This report emphasizes new challenges in each of the three pillar areas, and provides a roadmap for meeting these challenges to help ensure American global economic growth and competitiveness in the coming decades.
Sounding the Alarm
The U.S. economy reigned supreme in the 20th century, becoming the largest, most productive, and most competitive in the world; amazing new technologies were invented and commercialized; the workforce became the most educated in the world; and incomes soared while a large middle class emerged and thrived. As the 21st century approached, however, alarms began to sound about the U.S. economy’s ability to remain in this preeminent position. Incomes stagnated and job growth slowed. Other countries became better educated and our manufacturing sector lost ground to foreign competitors. Observers have expressed concern that the scientific and technological building blocks critical to American economic leadership have been eroding at a time when many other nations are actively laying strong foundations in these same areas. In short, some elements of the U.S. economy are losing their competitive edge which may mean that future generations of Americans will not enjoy a higher standard of living than is enjoyed in the United States today.
Lessons from the past: Federal investment as stimulant
Innovation is the key driver of competitiveness, wage and job growth, and long-term economic growth. Therefore, one way to approach the question of how to improve the competitiveness of the United States is to look to the past and examine the factors that helped unleash the tremendous innovative potential of the private sector. Among these factors, three pillars have been key: Federal support for basic research, education, and infrastructure. Federally supported research laid the groundwork for the integrated circuit and the subsequent computer industry; the Internet; and advancesin chemicals, agriculture, and medical science. Millions of workers can trace their industries and companies back to technological breakthroughs funded by the government. The U.S. educational system in the 20th century produced increasing numbers of high school and college graduates,
more so than anywhere else in the world. These highly skilled workers, in turn, boosted innovation. The transformation of infrastructure in the 20th century was nothing short of amazing: the country became electrified, clean water became widely available, air transport became ubiquitous, and the interstate highway system was planned and constructed. All of these developments helped businesses compete by opening up markets and keeping costs low.
The benefits of public investment last
Common to all three pillars—research, education, and infrastructure—is that they are areas where government has made, and should continue to make, significant investments. For a variety of reasons, the private sector under‐invests in these areas so the government needs to step in to bring investment up to the socially optimal levels. An additional common thread between these three pillars is that the benefits of these investments took years to be fully realized. For instance, the country is still benefiting today from investments made in the 19th century, such as the Morrill Act of 1862, which laid the foundation for the land grant university system in all states. In the 20th century, World War II‐era research became the basis of the transistor; and in the 1960s, all of the benefits from investing in science made the United States the leader of the space race as well as the information technology industry. This long‐term outlook should not be forgotten.
The first pillar: Research
The need for the Federal government to play an important role in the first pillar—research, particularly basic research–derives from the fact that there is a divergence between the private and social returns of research activities which leads to less innovative activity in the private sector than is what is best for the country. However, government support of basic research can remedy this problem. The benefits from Federal research and development (R&D) support are not just theoretical: as mentioned above, the Federal government has played a crucial role in the development of many key innovations of the mid‐ to late‐20th century.
Federal funding for basic research has been increasing, but at a slower pace than economic growth. To improve the trajectory of American innovation, thoughtful, decisive, and targeted actions are needed, some of which already have been proposed. These actions include sustaining the levels of funding for basic research by the Federal government, extending a tax credit for private‐sector R&D to give companies appropriate and well‐designed incentives to boost innovation above the baseline level that would have been reached absent these incentives, and improving the methods by which basic research is transferred from the lab into commercial products.
The second pillar: Education
Education, the second pillar, is also critical to foster innovation and to increase living standards. The advances in education in the 20th century helped propel the economic rise of the United States as it became the richest nation on the planet. However, by many measures, the U.S. education system has slipped. By some accounts, the United States’ system of higher education remains the best in the world and educates the country’s and its competitors’ future scientists and engineers, factors such as poor preparation in math and science and the high cost of college tuition and expenses are restricting the flow of American science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) graduates from universities. Ongoing and new Administration initiatives are addressing these challenges by making college more affordable, spurring classroom innovation at all levels, expanding the size and quality of the STEM teacher ranks, and encouraging and facilitating students’ and workers’ continued STEM education.
The third pillar: Infrastructure
In the past, the United States led the way in several key areas of infrastructure development, the third pillar of innovative capacity, starting with the railroad system of the 1800’s. In today’s economy, the nature of infrastructure needed to compete is changing and the United States is lagging behind in certain key aspects of a 21st century infrastructure (such as broadband Internet access) and facing capacity constraints for other aspects (wireless communications) given the high demand for these services. Ensuring that the United States has the infrastructure it needs to be competitive in the 21st century will require both additional support by the government and an appropriate policy framework to enable the private sector to build on the government’s support.
Building innovative capacity
A crucial component of the United States’ future competitive strength is a flourishing manufacturing sector. Manufacturing creates high‐paying jobs, provides the bulk of U.S. exports, and spurs innovation. While manufacturing continues to play a vital role in the U.S. economy and provides jobs for millions of Americans, it also has faced significant challenges, especially over the last decade. Manufacturing’s share of GDP and the number of workers in manufacturing has fallen, while the trade balance in manufactured goods has worsened. In the manufacturing sector, the Federal government has historically played an important role in providing a level playing field and must do so with renewed vigor to ensure that manufacturing continues to thrive in the United States. The current and future health of the manufacturing sector is strongly linked to the investments we make in research, education, and infrastructure.
Increasing the competitiveness and the capacity to innovate goes beyond improving research, education, infrastructure and manufacturing. Many other policies that ensure the private sector has the best possible environment in which to innovate contribute to competitiveness, including incentives to form regional clusters, promotion of exports and access to foreign markets, the level and structure of corporate taxes, and an effective intellectual property regime (domestically and abroad). In each of these areas, the Federal government has an important role to play.
Events
Cambridge, UK, 19-21 January, 2012
The conference is open for all PhD students working within the broad field of economics, entrepreneurship and management of innovation and organizational change. We invite papers aiming at enhancing our understanding of the dynamics of technological, structural and institutional change at the level of firms, industries, regions and nations. DRUID is the node for an open international network – new partners are most welcome (we of course encourage DRUID Academy PhD students and students previously connected DRUID conferences to submit an abstract as well). Do not hesitate to apply even if you have not been in contact with DRUID previously.
Saint-Etienne, France, 26-28 January, 2012
Public and corporate actors are faced with pressing questions concerning innovation policy and the return of R&D investment. To answer these questions, new perspectives are necessary to overthrow received wisdom. This first European seminar on “Geography of Innovation” invites scholars from all disciplines to present their work on local and global processes of innovation, on the interaction between science, technology and policy, on clusters, entrepreneurship and competitiveness, and on green growth and sustainability. To further our understanding of innovation processes, the seminar intends to bring together a variety of disciplines including economic geography, regional science, economics of innovation, network theory and management science. We further welcome new contributions to the establishment of (European) databases as well as new analytical tools, including spatial econometrics, network analysis, (interactive) visualization, bibliometrics and policy evaluation tools.
The Governance of Innovation and Socio-Technical Systems: Theorizing and Explaining Change
Copenhagen, Denmark, 1-2 March, 2012
‘Governance’ is a notion that has gained increasing currency the past years in the field of (sectoral) innovation systems and socio-technical systems’ studies. Generally speaking, it refers to the ability of a society to solve collective action problems in issues that involve science, technology and innovation. However, there continues to be a considerable level of indeterminacy in the literature. Firstly, because the empirical literature on systems exhibits multiple understanding of change, and hence about how governance processes take place. This diversity has not been properly spelled out, obscuring the way in which change is linked to specific forms of (effective) governance. And secondly, because these empirical studies tend to use the notion ‘governance’ in rather loose conceptual terms and sometimes even only implicitly. This tends to underestimate or ignore the coordination aspect embedded in any form of systemic change. For these two reasons, the actual explanatory capacity of the notion ‘governance’ when studying systems’ change remains limited. This workshop aims at addressing this gap in the literature, asking how do agents and institutions coordinate in the process of generating change in complex socio-technical and (sectoral) innovation systems.
CALL FOR PAPERS – 2012 Conference on Entrepreneurial Universities
Muenster, German, 25-27 April, 2012
The conference will be a European discussion forum for researchers and practitioners on Entrepreneurial Universities, where theory and practice are equally emphasised in the programme. We are now calling for presentation papers, workshops and posters on the themes of the conference. We would like to encourage you to submit abstracts of conceptually or empirically focused proposals. All papers will be double-blind reviewed and published in the conference proceedings.
Delft, Netherlands, 13-16 May, 2012
Regions and cities are increasingly interdependent; economically, socially and environmentally. They are, for example, becoming more reliant on interregional flows of trade, labour and resources. Patterns of interactions between regions are experiencing rapid changes as a result of dramatic shifts in production and consumption patterns, advances in communication technologies and the development of transport infrastructure. These changes pose many challenges for the analysis and management of regions. They are also leading to new patterns of activities and relationships and new forms of clustering and networking between regions. At the same time, regions are becoming increasingly fragmented in many ways; economically, socially, environmentally and also politically. Classic forms of government based on clear cut arrangements between administrative levels, policy sectors and the public and private domain are no longer sufficient. The governance of regions faces multi-level, multi-actor and multi-sectoral challenges. New spatial interactions at new scales demand new approaches for consultation and coordination. More flexible (‘softer’) forms of governance are beginning to emerge which seek to work around traditional governmental arrangements.The result is a complex pattern of overlapping governance and fuzzy boundaries, not just in a territorial sense but also in terms of the role of both public and private actors. These new arrangements pose many as yet unresolved dilemmas concerning the transparency, accountability and legitimacy of decision-making. The 2012 RSA conference in Delft provides a timely opportunity for participants to come together and reflect on the various strengths, weaknesses, challenges and opportunities of networked cities and regions within these different contexts of fragmentation.
Karlsruhe, Germany, 12-13 June, 2012
The Lund Declaration, which was handed to the Swedish Presidency of the Council of the European Union by 400 prominent researchers and politicians in 2009, states that “European research must focus on the Grand Challenges of our time moving beyond current rigid thematic approaches. This calls for a new deal among European institutions and Member States, in which European and national instruments are well aligned and cooperation builds on transparency and trust.” The declaration thus asks EU institutions to play a crucial role in bringing the relevant public and private actors together, and helping to build more cooperation and trust in order to address the overarching policy objectives.This declaration has taken up and reinforced a development in the past few years in which governments and the European Union have adopted a new strategic rhetoric for their research and innovation policy priorities which addresses the major societal challenges of our time. This is evolving into the third major policy rationale besides economic growth and competitiveness. It is not yet clear whether and how any transformative effects from this new mission-oriented approach can already be identified. The conference aims to attract papers that discuss possible transformative effects at different levels, i.e. on the actors performing research, innovation processes, scientific fields and technological sectors, the institutional funding and research landscape, society, the demand and user/beneficiary side, research and innovation policy and financing, and national and European political framework conditions. It also invites contributions that critically discuss methodological issues, conceptual developments and novel normative challenges around innovation and R&D policy triggered by the – alleged – mission oriented turn.
CALL FOR PAPERS – Entrepreneurship and Innovation Networks
Faro, Portugal, 14-16 June, 2012
Following the tradition established by the previous symposia, starting in 1998, the symposium is designed to bring together leading-edge views of senior academic scholars and mix them with the critical and creative views of postdocs and PhD students engaged in their thesis work. We welcome researchers from various fields, such as economic geography, economic history, entrepreneurship,
international business, management, political science, regional economics, small business economics, sociology and urban and regional planning. The objectives of the fifteenth Uddevalla Symposium 2012 are: i) to provide a unique opportunity for scholars including senior and junior researchers to discuss path-breaking concepts, ideas, frameworks and theories in plenary key-note sessions and parallel competitive paper sessions, and ii) to facilitate the development and synthesis of important contributions into cohesive and integrated collections for potential publication. Therefore, unpublished complete papers are invited for presentation and feedback from other scholars. A selected list of these papers will be subjected to review and development for publication in scholarly venue.
CALL FOR PAPERS – XXIII ISPIM Conference: Action for Innovation: Innovating from Experience
Barcelona, Spain, 17- 20 June, 2012
The plea for innovation is universal. Managers and politicians have understood that innovation is needed on an everyday-basis to strengthen the competitiveness of organisations, regions and countries. Innovation, however, requires more than good ideas and intentions. Leadership, foresight, courage, investment, inspiration and perspiration are needed to turn intentions and ideas into effective action. Even with these elements in place, not every initiative is successful. However, every action and each experience provide new insights into the causes of failed and successful innovation. Successful innovators, be they individuals, organisations, intermediaries or policy makers, must therefore overcome the paradox of building on experience, and yet breaking away from the status quo, with a permanent innovation mindset. These challenges of “Action for Innovation” are the core focus of this conference.
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This newsletter is prepared by Jen Nelles.
Project manager is David A. Wolfe.