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 Connects Science Grads and Students with Businesses in Southern Ontario
The Canadian government recently announced a contribution of up to $4,227,500 to Mitacs Inc. that will give graduate students and recent graduates of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) programs real world business skills and experience through internships with small- and medium-sized businesses in southern Ontario. This investment is being provided through FedDev Ontario‘s Graduate Enterprise Internship, which provides funding for not-for-profit organizations and post-secondary institutions to arrange internship and mentoring opportunities for recent graduates and graduate students with small- and medium-sized enterprises.
Recently the President announced a new proposal for a National Network for Manufacturing Innovation, to build a network of up to fifteen Institutes for Manufacturing Innovation around the country, serving as regional hubs of manufacturing excellence that will help to make our manufacturers more competitive and encourage investment in the United States. The President’s Budget proposes a $1 billion investment to create this new National Network for Manufacturing Innovation. He also announced that the Administration will take immediate steps to launch a pilot institute for manufacturing innovation as part of its We Can’t Wait efforts. The pilot institute will be funded from $45 million of existing resources from the Departments of Defense, Energy, and Commerce and the National Science Foundation, and will be selected from a competitive application process.
Editor's Pick
Leading Innovation: Insights from Canadian Regions
Canada’s Public Policy Forum
This report stems from an initiative which sought to uncover what makes some of Canada’s key regions more innovative, and what lessons can be learned from these leading examples. Seven sessions were convened in regions across the country over the course of six-months featuring participation of entrepreneurs, business leaders, policy makers and researchers. The report is the result of a collaborative venture between the Public Policy Forum, BMO Financial Group, Deloitte, Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC), the Government of Ontario and the Canadian Tourism Commission. The report details the direction Canadians are moving to build an innovation brand, and the actions being taken to help advance this goal.
Innovation Policy
Technology and Innovation Centres: The Key to Improving Collaboration?
Giles G. Patry and David Moorman, Policy Options
The authors of this report make a strong case for creating Canadian innovation centres, where academic researchers and the private sector come together to collaborate — a cooperative undertaking that could be a catalyst for improving the country’s productivity. They also take us on a tour of several leading R&D nations, and suggest Canada could learn from the innovative
solution developed in other countries.
High Impact: How IT is Empowering the Next Generation of Entrepreneurs
Technology CEO Council
This report points to new research from Catherine L. Mann of Brandeis University indicating companies that were intensive users of IT grew jobs at a rate of 5.1 percent from 2001-09, while overall employment shrank by 0.5 percent. And, although small IT-intensive service firms represent only 5 to 6 percent of all employment, they averaged 34 percent of new jobs created between 2002 and 2008. The next gazelles, or high-growth enterprises, will be those businesses best able to use technology to pioneer new management techniques, capitalize on new production methods, exploit distribution channels and maximize organizational structures, according to the authors. In addition to being good at technology, the report indicates that having access to talented people, markets, and capital are the factors that best enable high-growth companies to succeed. Several policy recommendations are outlined in support of these factors. However, the take-away from the authors is that technology will prove even more essential to business success and survival in the future and those not taking advantage of new technologies will be left behind.
CONNECT Innovation Institute
Innovation is the key to America’s competitiveness. However, inn
ovation needs to be understood more broadly than it typically has been. Conventional conversations about innovation focus on breakthrough novel developments that give rise to “game-changing” technology. This type of innovation has been the hallmark of the American economy since the beginning of the industrial revolution and has been the source of enormous wealth and value for the nation. Current trends towards globalization of design, production, sophisticated manufacturing, and distribution require a new, expanded approach to innovation—in processes and production, as well as incremental product innovation—in order to avoid the risk of losing jobs and industrial capabilities essential to the overall competitiveness of the U.S. economy. A strategy for manufacturing products and production innovation must recognize the growing interdependence of services and manufacturing in the new global landscape. The focus should be on these four building blocks: 1) shared production assets: firms need to fund and use assets held in common by a variety of contractual and institutional mechanisms; 2) effective innovation network structures: markets, contracts, and firms no longer provide an adequate “glue” for effectively linking together pools of innovators; 3) flexible business models: restructuring the traditional definitions of supply and demand functions in markets is often as important as an innovative product; 4) specialized financial institutions: risk assessment capacity and lending/investment models appropriate to different types of innovation are necessary.
Cities, Clusters & Regions
Export Nation 2012: How U.S. Metropolitan Areas are Driving National Growth
Emilia Istrate and Nicholas Marchio, The Brookings Institution
The Great Recession reset the world economic map. Suddenly, with the bulk of the world’s economic growth transferred beyond the borders of a recession-mired West and into emerging markets, American metropolitan areas and the nation as a whole were left to cast about for new sources of growth. Such a search for growth is why, in the months after the crash, a chorus of business leaders and economists called for a new emphasis on exports in a “rebalanced” American economy. It is why, too, that President Obama — recognizing the power of exports to help reorient the American economy after the recession — launched the National Export Initiative (NEI) in March 2010, with the goal of doubling exports by the end of 2014.
Chicago Plan for Economic Growth
World Business Chicago
This first draft of this plan is intended to embody a living process that marks the beginning of a coordinated effort to assess the Chicago economy and help it expand at a faster rate. It is designed to give direction to the vital discussion about how to make the most of the city’s and the region’s existing assets, and how to foster the new assets it needs to flourish in the economy of the future. It seeks to provide a clear set of goals for economic growth, an overarching framework for research and analysis, and an initial set of strategies for which actionable initiatives can be developed.
Innovation and Cities: Reframing the Dialogue
National League of Cities (NLC)
These are tough times for cities, economically and politically. Recent NLC research points to a period of managed retrenchment where city leaders are confronted with undesirable choices — cuts in vital services, laying off personnel, delaying needed infrastructure investments, to name a few. But, times like these often open opportunities for innovation, to rethink the roles and structures of cities. “Never waste a crisis,” as the oft-cited saying goes. Unfortunately, innovation in cities is challenged by a national malaise about the role of government or by advocates who present city leaders with trendy or fad-ish options, rather than guidance for addressing issues most likely to improve the success of cities in the future. Not wasting the current crisis and fostering innovation in cities requires that we reframe much of the current dialogue about the forces shaping our communities. This posting briefly suggest reframing conversations and debates about a number of issues in order to provide a platform for the future success of cities.
Statistics & Indicators
Hotspots: Benchmarking Global City Competitiveness
Economist Intelligence Unit
Well over half of the world’s population now lives in cities, generating more than 80% of global GDP. Already, global business is beginning to plan strategy from a city, rather than a country, perspective. Given the rapid growth and development of many cities, particularly in emerging markets such as China and India, competition between them for business, investment and talent will only get fiercer. Size alone does not determine a city’s growth potential. While some megacities, such as New York and Tokyo, are immensely influential, there are smaller ones, such as Hong Kong and Singapore, which have established themselves as globally competitive centres in recent years. Meanwhile, emerging market cities such as Ahmedabad and Tianjin are witnessing double-digit economic growth and have the potential to grow even faster. Competitiveness, however, is a holistic concept. While economic size and growth are important and necessary, several other factors determine a city’s overall competitiveness, including its business and regulatory environment, the quality of human capital and indeed the quality of life. These factors not only help a city sustain a high economic growth rate, but also create a stable and harmonious business and social environment. With this in mind, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) was commissioned by Citigroup to develop a “Global City Competitiveness Index” to rank cities according to their demonstrated ability to attract capital, businesses, talent and visitors.
ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation
The CCI Creative City Index (CCI-CCI) is a new approach to the measurement and ranking of creative global cities. It is constructed over eight principal dimensions, each with multiple distinct elements. Some of these dimensions are familiar from other global city indexes, such as the MORI or GaWC indexes, which account for the size of creative industries, the scale of cultural amenities, or the flows of creative people and global connectedness. In addition to these indicators, the CCI-CCI contributes several new dimensions. These measure the demand side of creative participation, the attention economy, user-created content, and the productivity of socially networked consumers. Global creative cities can often seem alike, in respect of per-capita measures of factors such as public spending on cultural amenities, or the number of hotels and restaurants. This is to be expected when people and capital are relatively free to move, and where economic and political institutions are broadly comparable. However, the report finds that different cities can register far larger differences at the level of consumer-co-creation and especially digital creative ‘microproductivity’. To explain this finding, it reviews the logic and rationale of creative and global city index construction and present a review of previous and contemporary indexes.The report sets out the case for our new model of a creative city index by showing why greater attention to consumer co-creation and microproductivity are important, as well as examining how these factors have been previously overlooked.
Policy Digest
The Global Innovation Policy Index
Robert D. Atkinson, Stephen Ezell and Luke A. Stewart, ITIF
This report provides a structured assessment of policies informing the innovation capacity of fifty-five countries. Moreover, it highlights the most effective policies countries are using to build their innovation capacity, and describes how countries can learn from one another in deploying the best policies. The fifty-five countries analyzed in this report include all members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), all European Union (EU) member states, and nineteen of the twenty-one Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) member economies, as well as the large developing nations of Argentina, Brazil, India, and South Africa.
The report assesses these countries on their strength in seven core policy areas:
- Open and non-discriminatory market access and foreign direct investment policies;
- Science and R&D policies that spur innovation;
- Openness to domestic competition and new firm entry;
- Effective intellectual property rights protection policies;
- Digital policies enabling the robust deployment of ICT platforms;
- Open and transparent government procurement policies; and
- Openness to high-skill immigration.
To maximize global innovation, countries need to implement their policies with regard to trade, science and R&D, ICT, intellectual property rights, domestic market competition, government procurement, and high-skill immigration in ways that maximize their innovation capacity but without distorting global trade. To accomplish this, countries’ policies will have to be predicated on transparent, non-discriminatory, market-based principles that embrace both global standards and the free flow of talent, capital, information, products, services, and technologies. The following provides a brief summary of the key points in each of the seven core innovation policy areas.
Trade: As innovation and trade policy have become increasingly intertwined, openness to trade characterized by open market access and receptivity to foreign direct investment has become a bedrock pillar of a country’s innovation capacity:
- Free trade benefits all countries by allowing each to specialize in producing the products or services in which they have a comparative or competitive advantage;
- Countries should not specialize in all technologies and industries; rather, trade enables them to specialize in what they are good at and then trade for the rest;
- A vital component of free trade is openness to both inward and outward foreign direct investment.
- Another critical component is the use of voluntary, market-led, global standards.
Science and R&D: Science and R&D policies boost countries’ innovation potential while enhancing their ability to benefit from technology-based innovation:
- Developed nations should focus on implementing science and R&D policies that increase the supply of ideas, knowledge, and technology in their economies and then incentivize their commercialization;
- Developing nations should focus more on implementing science and R&D policies that enable their organizations to adopt newer and better technologies;
- Countries should utilize a diverse portfolio of science and R&D tools, targeting strategic and broad technologies and industries at all stages of their development;
- Technology and R&D policies should be coordinated by a National Innovation Foundation to take advantage of inherent synergies between policies;
- Science and R&D policies should not discriminate against foreign firms operating domestically.
Domestic Competition: Vibrant domestic markets supported by a sound and rules-based regulatory environment that allows both existing and new firms (whether domestic- or foreign-owned) to compete on a level playing field remain a lynchpin of prosperity:
- Competitive marketplaces are one of the strongest drivers of innovation and productivity growth;
- Countries should remove onerous regulatory restrictions, incumbent protections, cross-border trade restrictions, and labor market restrictions that inhibit competition;
- Leading countries feature regulatory systems that are transparent and non-discriminatory, provide due process, and include opportunities for the meaningful engagement of all stakeholders;
- Countries should create an environment that fosters entrepreneurship throughout all sectors of the economy.
IPR: Recognition of intellectual property rights (IPR) is a vital element if global trade and foreign direct investment are to thrive:
- Effective protection and enforcement of IPR encourages innovators to invest in research, development, and the commercialization of technologies while promoting their dissemination;
- Weak intellectual property rights protections reduce the flow of foreign direct investment and technology transfer;
- Without adequate intellectual property protections, there will be less innovation overall, and this hurts all countries;
- IPR reform tends to deliver positive economic results regardless of a country’s level of development.
Digital Policies: Information and communications technology is the global economy’s strongest enabler of productivity and innovation:
- Effective digital policies focus first and foremost on spurring ICT use throughout the economy;
- The vast majority of benefits from ICT come from the widespread use of ICT in all sectors as opposed to its production;
- Leading countries recognize that the greatest opportunity to improve their economic growth lies in increasing the productivity of their domestic sectors, particularly through the application of ICT.
Government Procurement: Because government procurement accounts for such a large share of economic activity in most countries, government procurement policy is an important and legitimate component of countries’ innovation strategies:
- Governments should orient their procurement policies to become strong drivers of innovation;
- Government purchases should be made on the basis of the best value for government, not on the basis of national preferences;
- Government procurement policies should be transparent, non-discriminatory, openly competitive, and performance-based;
- Countries should refrain from adopting measures that make the location of the development or ownership of intellectual property, or any requirement to license intellectual property to a domestic entity, a condition for government procurement eligibility.
High-Skill Immigration: Talent has become the world’s most sought-after commodity. Thus, having a highly skilled talent pool to draw from has become vital to countries’ economic well-being:
- High-skill immigrants play a critical role in bringing skills, talent, and knowledge to societies while contributing to new firm development, employment, and economic growth;
- Immigration policies play an important part in contributing to a country’s knowledge pool and creative ability by bringing in new perspectives and needed skills and knowledge
Events
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.
CALL FOR PAPERS – Sustaining Regional Futures
Beijing, China, 24-26 June, 2012
The Conference will address some of the biggest issues facing regions and sub-national areas around the world, gateways are being organised on the causes and implications of different patterns of regional development. The gateways are dedicated to assessing the forms and successes of regional policies in managing regional disparities; establishing basic public services; supporting endogenous growth and the comparative advantages of regions; promoting regional competitiveness and sustaining harmony between the economy, society and the environment. Papers on each of these themes are encouraged – on different countries’ and regions’ experiences, and on comparative studies.
13th International CINet Conference: Continuous Innovation Across Boundaries 
Rome, Italy, 16-18 September, 2012
The Continuous Innovation Network (CINet) is a global network set up to bring together researchers and industrialists working in the field of Continuous Innovation. The mission of CINet is to develop into a school of thought on Continuous Innovation. Consistent with this mission, CINet organises an annual conference. This announcement concerns the 13th CINet conference, which will take place in Rome, Italy, on 16-18 September 2012. Furthermore, CINet promotes a PhD Network to foster research collaboration among PhD students and their institutions on innovation in the widest sense of the word. As part of that initiative, a PhD workshop is organised just prior to the 13th CINet conference, on 14-15 September. Besides that a CIYA Workshop will be organized, aimed at young academics working in the field of continuous innovation.
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.