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
Ontario Government Remains Focused on Jobs and the Economy
Ontario is partnering with companies like Cisco Canada to attract investment, create jobs and strengthen the provincial economy. Cisco Canada is one of many businesses that are leading in their field around the world from right here in Ontario. With provincial support, Cisco has expanded its R&D projects. Partnering with business and fostering innovation are key components of the Ontario government’s plan to strengthen Ontario’s economy and to create jobs for families.
U.S. Mayors Form a New Innovation and Technology Task Force
Mayor Edwin M. Lee today announced the formation of a Technology and Innovation Task Force at the U.S. Conference of Mayors (USCM) that will demonstrate how cities can support growth of technology and new economy jobs and foster innovation in local governments through technology and transparency. Los Angeles Mayor and USCM President Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa appointed Mayor Lee to lead the newly formed task force today at the 80th Winter Meeting of the USCM. The Task Force is designed to identify and define mayoral innovation and technology priorities and to inform and advise the work of Congress and the Administration.
Editor's Pick
Attracting Global Mandates and Investment in Canada
Public Policy Forum (PPF)
As competition for global investment intensifies, it is essential to understand how multinational enterprises (MNEs) decide where to locate high-value business functions that drive innovation. It is also important to understand the role governments, the research community and others play in helping Canadian operations compete for and win global and regional mandates.In an effort to better understand how Canada might respond to these issues, Canada’s Public Policy Forum began to examine how MNEs award global mandates that drive investment and innovation in Canada across a range of industries, including information and communications technologies (ICT), aerospace, chemicals and auto parts. This report also explores how governments might facilitate and support the efforts of Canadian operations to win mandates and attract strategic investment by conducting interviews across a range of sectors.
Innovation Policy
The Center for American Progress
This report contends that increasing globalization, connectivity, access and acceleration of technology has caused an urgent need for investment in innovation. To resolve this issue, the authors believe that the U.S. government and institutions of higher education must work in partnership “not only to accelerate its investments in research and innovation but also to continually re-evaluate and redesign the traditional mechanisms (e.g., funding and public policy).” Five main recommendations are provided to stoke innovation through and around universities. The report provides specific policy prescriptions within each of the five main recommendations including the establishment of an independent Office of Innovation Analysis within the U.S. Treasury Department and the expansion of the National Science Foundation’s Partnerships for Innovation.
Science Progress
In response to these emerging challenges, Congress reauthorized the America COMPETES Act in January 2010. The law is a crucial piece of legislation that ensures investments in the building blocks of innovation and competitiveness: research, education, infrastructure, manufacturing, and innovation networks. But realizing that the COMPETES Act is only a stopgap measure, Congress also asked the Secretary of Commerce to complete two important studies of American national innovation capacity and economic competitiveness. The first, released earlier this month by Commerce Secretary John Bryson at an event at the Center for American Progress, was a comprehensive analysis of the competitive position of the U.S. innovation system. The second, due in January of 2012, will outline a 10-year strategic plan to give the national innovation engine a major tune-up. The Center for American Progress applauds this action by the federal government. But the U.S. needs to move faster. That’s why two CAP teams, one from Science Progress and the other from the Doing What Works project, convened a taskforce in early 2011 comprised of innovation policy experts to assess these same issues in tandem. This taskforce identified six key areas where policy barriers inhibit innovation and hold back national competitiveness: the structure of federal innovation programs; federal data and statistical systems; the U.S. workforce development system; federal R&D efforts; the U.S. immigration system; and strengthening the link between manufacturing and technoical innovation capacity. These six thematic areas are the basis for each of the six reports in the series.
Research, Science and Technology Parks: Vehicles for Technology Transfer
Albert N. Link and John T. Scott, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Research, science, and technology parks are increasingly seen as a means to create dynamic clusters that accelerate economic growth and international competitiveness through the transfer of knowledge and technology. As such, it is important to understand the academic literature related to research, science, and technology parks (hereafter R-S-T parks, or simply parks) because that literature, albeit embryonic, has had and will continue to frame public policies related to park formations and growth. The purpose of this chapter is thus to overview the extant academic literature on knowledge and technology transfer to and from parks, and to discuss its importance to public policy issues.
Cities, Clusters & Regions
The Brookings Institution
This year’s edition of the Global MetroMonitor reveals that amid a slowing recovery in 2011, the world’s largest metro economies continued to drive global growth, especially emerging-market metro areas in Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, as well as business services and manufacturing capitals worldwide. The report’s interactive feature provides detailed statistics for individual metropolitan areas.
The Next Metro Economy: Innovative Governance Solutions to Watch in 2012
Bruce Katz and Judith Rodin, The Brookings Institution
This is a series of essays that present ten state and metro-level innovations worth watching this year. The authors selected efforst based on their potential to create jobs, increase cross-sector collaboration, and eventually affect federal policy. Essays treat regional economic development initiatives in New York State, talent development in King County (WA), a new export council in L.A., San Diego’s push on electric vehicles, among others.
Globalization, Entrepreneurship and the Region
David B. Audretsch, Isabel Grilo and A. Roy Thurik
Perhaps one of the less-understood phenomena accompanying the increased globalization during the first decade of the 21st century has been a shift in the comparative advantage of high-wage countries towards knowledge-based economic activity. An important implication of this shift in this comparative advantage is that much of the production and commercialization of economic knowledge is less associated with footloose multinational corporations and more associated with high-tech innovative regional clusters, such as Silicon Valley in California, the Cambridge area in the UK, and the Montpellier area in France. Only two decades ago the conventional wisdom predicted that globalization would render the demise of the region as a meaningful unit of economic analysis. Yet the obsession of policymakers around the globe to “create the next Silicon Valley” reveals the increased importance
of geographic proximity and regional agglomerations as well as of the role of SMEs and entrepreneurial activity. The purpose of this paper is to resolve the paradox of globalization by explaining the emergence of entrepreneurship and geographic localization as the two key organizational platforms because of and not in spite of a globalizing economy.
Streets Ahead: What Makes a City Innovate?
Lizzie Crowley, The Work Foundation (Lancaster University)
Innovation – the successful exploitation of new ideas – is critical to the UK’s future prosperity. Innovation is a major drive of economic growth. To be able to rise to the challenge of dealing with public sector debt as well as a decade of low economic growth, the UK must harness innovation led growth. Cities don’t innovate – but they provide the support environment for firms, entrepreneurs and institutions within them to innovate. But cities are vital for innovation, they foster the creation of knowledge by bringing businesses, people and institutions together – the innovation ecosystem. They help the flow of ideas, facilitate localized knowledge spillovers and enable innovation. Different cities support very different types of innovation, and some cities are more successful than others. Some cities have a focus on technology led innovation; others support the creation of new products in the service or creative industries. And there is divergence of innovation performance between cities in the UK: London and cities in the greater South East have developed highly successful innovation ecosystems while cities in the north of England, as well as some coastal towns and ports, have struggled. This report addresses the support system for innovation in U.K. cities at multiple levels of governance. It provides a typology of innovative city types, crucial conditions for innovation and targeted policies for innovation.
Statistics & Indicators
Science and Engineering Indicators 2012
National Science Foundation (NSF)
This overview of the National Science Board’s Science and Engineering Indicators 2012 highlights some major developments in international and U.S. science and technology (S&T). The overview focuses on the trend in the United States and many other parts of the world toward the development of more knowledge-intensive economies in which research, its commercial exploitation, and other intellectual work are of growing importance. Industry and government play key roles in these changes. The overview examines how these S&T patterns and trends affect the position of the United States, using broadly comparable data wherever possible for the United States, the European Union (EU1), Japan, China, and other selected Asian economies (the Asia-8: India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand). The overview sketches an analytical framework for, and a broad outline of, the main S&T themes, which it then examines through the lens of various indicators. R&D and human resources indicators feature prominently, along with indicators of research outputs and their use in the form of article citations and patents. The overview then describes the growth and structural shifts in international high-technology markets, trade, and relative trade positions.
GE Global Innovation Barometer 2012 Website
GE
The GE Global Innovation Barometer was commissioned by GE and conducted by independent research and consulting firm StrategyOne to identify drivers and deterrents of innovation and to analyze perceptions around innovation opportunities and challenges. This year nearly 3,000 senior business executives in 22 countries, were surveyed on their companies’ innovation strategy and decision making.
GE Global Innovation Barometer 2012 Report
GE
This study compares Canada’s perception of innovation – as it relates to satisfaction and optimism within the country – to 21 other markets from around the world , including the US, China, Brazil and Germany. This builds on the first report that included 11 countries and was released at Davos in January 2011. Overall, Canadian respondents show an above average satisfaction with the way the country’s innovation framework has evolved over the last five years and are optimistic about the value innovation brings to society as a whole. However, dissatisfaction was expressed with the speed at which innovative products are coming to market, the availability of private investments, and the efficiency of government in its approach to organizing, coordinating and allocating reesources to support innovation. This report validates the importance of investing in innovation as a critical piece of global competitiveness. This investment comes in many forms – from traditional R&D to new products, markets and business models. Governments and business both have an important role in ensuring the right conditions for meaningful innovation are supported in order for countries to deliver value and meaningful solutions that promote competitiveness and prosperity.
Report on S&T Cooperation Between Europe and the United States of America
Ales Gnamus, European Commission
While the US is one of the EU’s most important industrial partners, information on the means and extent of S&T cooperation between Europe and the US is neither systematically nor readily available. Countries themselves often re-orientate their strategies and the internationalization of their S&T policies according to emerging competitiveness and economic challenges. To obtain a better insight into current S&T cooperation between Europe and the US, a questionnaire was circulated to the delegates of the Strategic Forum for International S&T Cooperation (SFIC) in 2010. This report provides an analysis of this data. Where possible, it points to underlying reasons for successful practices in EU-US S&T cooperation in different thematic areas, especially in the field of energy research. Thus good practices, common objectives and open questions were identified, which, in turn, fed more focused discussions and the possible transnational coordination of certain internationalisation policies between SFIC members and observers and the US.
U.S. Metro Economies: 2012 Employment Forecast and the Impact of Exports
IHS Global Insight/United States Conference of Mayors
Job growth for nearly all of the nation’s metro areas will increase this year but not fast enough to force the unemployment rate below 8 percent, according to this report, which is part of the US Conference of Mayors’ US Metro Economy series. The report forecasts job growth for all metro areas but mild to weak for many, and predicts that 22% of metro areas hardest hit by housing crisis will take five years to recover. At the close of 2011, 125 cities and their metro areas had not seen any net job growth. By the end of last year, the economy as a whole had regained only 30 percent of jobs lost from the Great Recession. The outlook for 2012 is better. By the end of this year, the report forecasts that almost every one of our 363 metro economies will see job gains and the nation will have gained back 48 percent of its lost jobs. But despite this progress, the recovery remains slow and uneven. For almost 80 of the nation’s metro areas, it will take more than five years to get back to pre-recession levels of employment.
Policy Digest
Beyond the Business Cycle: The Need for a Technology-Based Growth Strategy
Gregory Tassey, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
Facing the worst economic slowdown since the Great Depression, efforts to reestablish acceptable growth rates in both Europe and the United North America are relying to a great degree on short-term “stabilization” policies.This paper assesses the limitations of monetary and fiscal policies for establishing long-term growth trajectories and then describes the basis for a technology-based economic growth strategy targeted at long-term productivity growth. This growth model expands the original Schumpeterian concept of technology as the long-term driver of economic growth where technology is characterized as a homogeneous entity that is developed and commercialized by large-firm dominated industry structures. Instead, the new model characterizes technology as a multi-element asset that evolves over the entire technology life cycle, is developed by a public/private investment strategy, and is commercialized by complex industry structure that includes complementary roles by large and small firms.
The global economy is experiencing unparalleled expansion, characterized by an enormous influx of new workers. The skills of these workers are increasing rapidly, leveraging the convergence of emerging economies. This process of convergence has been repeated to varying degrees for centuries. The difference this time is the breadth and size of the converging economies, whose workers are increasingly providing intense competition for labor in industrialized nations.
Increase technology intensity
Making an economy more technology intensive is a challenging systems problem. The United States undertook the greatest technical systems challenge of all time by setting out to put a man on the moon in less than a decade. Similarly, restoring a competitive economic system based on technology development and commercialization will be a daunting challenge, requiring greater investment in a number of critical asset categories.
Upgrade economic assets
The transition to sustained competitiveness will require upgrading all categories of economic assets: technology, labor, plant and equipment, organization, marketing, and a broad technical infrastructure to support all the other categories. Because many of the world’s economies have already adopted new technology-element growth models and are making substantial investments to implement them, the U.S. response can be neither small nor inefficient. R&D spending, for example, must now be managed by the metrics defined earlier: amount, composition, and efficiency of conduct.
Align R&D incentives
In terms of the amount of R&D, the major requirement is to upgrade the currently inadequate incentives for both U.S.-based and foreign-based firms to locate R&D in the domestic economy by providing a competitive R&D tax incentive and an adequate supply of skilled R&D workers. R&D composition inefficiencies must be addressed by (1) reversing the Federal Government’s declining spending relative to GDP, and (2) creating a holistic and economic-growth driven Federal R&D policy. Finally, efficient national R&D strategies will be dependent on new publicprivate research infrastructures in the form of regional technology-based clusters.
Increase technology budgets
When a society decides to increase the portion of its government’s budget allocated to developing new technologies, it happens. The Russian space program in the late 1950s was a wake-up call, which elicited an immediate and substantive response in terms of increased U.S. R&D spending. This was followed by President Kennedy’s 1961 speech on the need to invest more in science and technology. Kennedy recognized that the United States was being challenged technologically for the first time and that this pressure would grow and expand its scope in the years ahead.
Re-prime the innovation engine
President Obama in his 2011 State-of-the-Union address repeatedly called for a return to innovation as the engine of U.S.
competitiveness. Since that speech, government policies aimed at reviving and expanding the technologybased sector of the U.S.
economy, especially manufacturing, have begun to form. Unfortunately, budget deficits and the consequent ratio of U.S. debt to GDP are much higher today than in the 1960s. This fact combined with the installed-wisdom effects from past economic growth strategies are providing substantial barriers to adaptation.
Address structural problems
While “macrostabilization” efforts work reasonably well in normal economic downturns, more serious declines that are the manifestation of underlying structural problems will not be adequately mitigated by these policies. In such cases, macroeconomic stimulus efforts generate at best weak multiplier effects. The globalization of markets further reduces the fiscal multiplier traditionally expected from short-term stimulus. The result is that the economy does not attain self-sustaining growth. Debates over amounts and types of government spending become increasingly bitter, as political factions argue over how to divide up a stagnant economic pie.
The overall policy response is to create a national innovation system that will be characterized by (1) increased joint industry-government strategic planning at the technology-platform and infratechnology phases of the R&D cycle, (2) a more elaborate and better defined set of public and private roles through application of the technology-element growth model, and (3) movement toward a holistic innovation system, which supports the complete technology life cycle; i.e., the science, technology, innovation, and diffusion/scale-up (STID) phases of modern technology-based economic growth.
Events
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.
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.
Towards Transformative Governance? Responses to Mission-Oriented Innovation Policy Paradigms
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.
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.
The Governance of a Complex World 
Nice, France, 1-3 November, 2012
In a period of crisis – according to many commentators the most important one since the Great Depression – the governance of an ever increasingly complex world is a major challenge to economics and social sciences, especially in the current stage where no clear consensus has emerged so far in our scientific communities. The aim of the 2012 International Conference on “The Governance of a Complex World” is the identification of major propositions of political economy for a new society, grounded on structural, technological and institutional change. We encourage submissions dealing with different levels of governance (countries, industries, firms, individuals), where innovation is viewed as a key driver to stir our complex world out of the crisis. We especially welcome analyses in the field of knowledge dynamics, industrial evolution and economic development, dealing with key issues of the emergence and persistence of innovation, entrepreneurship, growth of firms, corporate governance and performance, agglomeration/dispersion of industrial activities, skills dynamics, economics of science and innovation, environment as a driver of innovation.
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This newsletter is prepared by Jen Nelles.
Project manager is David A. Wolfe.