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
Canadian Government Invests in World-Leading Health Research Projects
The Honourable Gary Goodyear, Minister of State (Science and Technology), recently announced the Government of Canada’s support for state-of-the-art research that will have direct impact on the health of Canadians and provide economic benefits for the country. The Government’s investment of over $19 million will go to 37 projects and will be provided through the Collaborative Health Research Projects (CHRP) grant—a partnership between the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). Grants offered under the CHRP assist with interdisciplinary collaborations between researchers in the fields of the natural sciences, engineering, and the health sciences. Grant recipients are selected following a rigorous peer review competition.
The Obama administration recently announced that 10 public-private partnerships across America will receive $20 million in total awards to help revitalize American manufacturing and encourage companies to invest in the United States. The 10 partnerships were selected through the Advanced Manufacturing Jobs and Innovation Accelerator Challenge, which is a competitive multi-agency grant process announced in May 2012 to support initiatives that strengthen advanced manufacturing at the local level. These public-private partnerships consist of small and large businesses, colleges, nonprofits and other local stakeholders that “cluster” in a particular area. The funds will help the winning clusters support local efforts to spur job creation through a variety of projects, including initiatives that connect innovative small suppliers with large companies, link research with the start-ups that can commercialize new ideas, and train workers with skills that firms need to capitalize on business opportunities.
U.S. Federal Agencies Unveil R&D Dashboard
Several federal agencies have joined forces to launch a new beta website that allows individuals to look at U.S. federal investments in science and engineering from two agencies — the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). The R&D dashboard gives users the ability to search and download data on grants issued by the federal government to research institutions (investments) and on output activities (e.g., patents and publications) from federally funded research by state, congressional district and research institution. Users also may search investments and outputs by select topic areas at the same geographic levels of detail. The information presented reports data on the grants issued by the Federal government to research institutions (“investments”), and the publications and patent activity produced by researchers funded by those investments (“outputs”). The site reports where investments have been made at the state, congressional district and research institution. In addition, the site provides information on what investments have been made by providing the user the ability to select topic areas at the same geographic levels of detail.
Editor's Pick
Who Dimmed the Lights? Canada’s Declining Global Competitiveness Rating
The Conference Board of Canada
This briefing provides a Canadian perspective on the findings of the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report 2012–2013. It provides an overview of Canada’s standing in the Global Competitiveness Index rankings, examines the underpinnings of Canada’s competitiveness, and draws attention to a number of obstacles that prevent Canada from becoming a more competitive and productive country. In particular it highlights how Canada continues to underutilize its strengths (e.g., institutions, infrastructure, higher education, and labour force) for innovation and performance success.
Innovation Policy
Compendium of Evidence on Innovation Policy
Manchester Institute of Innovation Research
This project develops a compendium of evidence on the effectiveness of innovation policy. To present the evidence, the researchers have built a typology of innovation policy measures, based not only on the previous typologies of innovation policy but also on the availability of evidence. For each type of innovation policy, the researchers present the evidence base in a report reinforced by summaries of key sources. Individual reports focus on issues such as cluster policy; training and skills; the impact of innovation policy schemes for collaboration; innovation networks; and the impact of direct support to R&D and innovation in firms, among others.
Diminishing Funding and Rising Expectations: Trends and Challenges for Public Research Universities
National Science Foundation, NSF
In the 2012 edition of Science and Engineering Indicators, the National Science Board reported a substantial decline over the last decade in per student state appropriations at the Nation’s major public research universities. This policy report highlights the importance of these universities to the local and national economies, rising public expectations for these institutions, and the challenges posed by recent trends in enrollment, revenue, and expenditures. In the wake of increasing enrollment and costs and declining per student state appropriations, the Board is concerned with the continued ability of public research universities to provide affordable, quality education and training to a broad range of students, conduct the basic science and engineering research that leads to innovations, and perform their public service missions.
Ken Guy, European Commission Joint Rsearch Centre
Research and innovation policies are not formulated in a vacuum. They are shaped and influenced by myriad factors both internal and external to the realm of science and technology. In the context of a period of reflection on future support policies in Europe, this policy brief reviews the main drivers of change affecting the research and innovation landscape and their implications for EU policy. It observes that different drivers of change imply the need for similar sets of policy responses and concludes that wholesale changes are needed across a broad front, with a particular focus on eight distinct policy thrusts geared towards strengthening key elements of research and innovation systems, confronting major societal challenges, improving governance systems and enhancing international cooperation.
Plan I: The Case for Innovation-Led Growth
NESTA
A UK renaissance in science and technology is required to ring in a new economic age based upon innovation, according to charity the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA). The organization, which works to support research and big ideas among UK innovators, made its plea while unveiling its ‘Plan I’ proposals – a joined-up program to integrate inventive spirit into every layer of the British economy. Plan I (‘I’ for ‘innovation’) follows the July publication of NESTA’s Innovation Index, which indicated that a deteriorating UK climate for investment in research and intangible assets had led to a ‘lost decade’ of innovation. In particular, the charity found that British corporate finance for the development of intangible assets has fallen by £24bn since the dawn of the recession – a figure five times larger than the amount of money that the government spends each year on science and technology research. The plan outlines 12 recommendations that NESTA would like the government and businesses to follow, in order to arrest the decline and pave the way for new growth.
Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Lives: A Strategic Approach to Skills Policies
OECD
Recognizing both the complexity of skills policies and the potential for peer learning, the OECD has developed a global Skills Strategy that helps countries to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their national skills systems, benchmark them internationally, and develop policies that can transform better skills into better jobs, economic growth and social inclusion. This book presents a strategy that will help countries reach the goal of having and making the best use of a high-quality pool of skills. The OECD Skills Strategy shifts the focus from traditional measures of skills, such as years of initial education and training or qualifications attained, to a much broader perspective that includes the skills people can acquire, use and maintain–and also lose–over a whole lifetime. Without sufficient investment in skills, people languish on the margins of society, technological progress does not translate into economic growth, and countries can no longer compete in an increasingly knowledge-based global society. In addition, the book points out that for skills to retain their value, they must be continuously maintained and upgraded throughout life so that people can collaborate, compete and connect in ways that drive economies and societies forward.
Cities, Clusters & Regions
Creating an Innovation System for Knowledge City
Shanthi Nataraj et al., RAND Corporation
China’s Guangzhou Development District (GDD) will be the site of the new innovation cluster known as Sino-Singapore Guangzhou Knowledge City. Jointly developed by GDD and Singbridge of Singapore, Knowledge City will be a new environmentally and technologically advanced city that hosts innovative industries and their associated knowledge workers. To achieve this goal, GDD must design a strategic plan to pursue three primary goals: attract high-technology companies and enable their growth; attract and retain a highly skilled, innovative workforce; and ensure the availability of innovation-oriented finance. This report first presents a portrait of high-technology firms in Guangzhou and compares Guangzhou with other Chinese cities. It then presents an analysis of three case studies — Silicon Valley, the life sciences corridor in Maryland, and the technology cluster between Tel Aviv and Haifa in Israel — and describes the factors that led to their success. Finally, it provides an overview of the current innovation system in GDD and applies lessons learned from the case studies and from the literature on entrepreneurship, innovation, and cluster formation to GDD and Knowledge City. This is a companion volume to another RAND report, An Outline of Strategies for Building an Innovation System for Knowledge City, which outlines a strategic plan for Knowledge City and is intended to help the developers create conditions that are conducive to innovation and the commercialization of new technologies.
People or Place? Urban Policy in the Age of Austerity
Lizzie Crowley, Brhmie Balaram and Neil Lee, The Work Foundation
This report considers the current state of affairs for economic regeneration. Drawing on a detailed analysis of previous schemes, it asks whether whether policy should focus on people, places, or both? It warns that new approaches to economic development based on incentives for growth and flexibilities for local government are likely to exacerbate regional disparities and goes on to outline a range of recommendations for national and local policymakers.
Statistics & Indicators
Industrial Research and Development Characteristics, 2012
Statistics Canada
Businesses in Canada anticipate spending $15.5 billion on industrial research and development (R&D) in 2012, edging up 0.9% from 2011. Industrial R&D spending remains below its most recent peak of $16.8 billion reached in 2007. The recovery of industrial R&D spending after three years of decline will be driven by growth in the manufacturing sector, up by $228 million (+3.1%) from 2011 to $7.6 billion in 2012. Within the manufacturing sector, communications equipment intends to spend $1.5 billion on R&D in 2012, up by $129 million from 2011. Overall, businesses in the services sector anticipate spending slightly less on R&D in 2012 than they did in 2011 (down 0.2% or $12 million) to $6.8 billion, with most of the decline occurring in scientific research and development services (down $22 million or 1.3%).
Insight: High-Skill Equilibrium
Martin Prosperity Institute
This Insight looks at highly skilled occupations in the OECD working paper; “Skills for Competitiveness: Country Report Canada”. The report is part of an ongoing project, Skills for Competitiveness, that covers three countries: Canada, the U.K. and Italy. The goal of the OECD study was to investigate how regions can move towards a higher “skill equilibrium” by examining the attributes of a high wage economy that has shifted from a low value equilibrium (defined as lower value products, services and wages) to a high value equilibrium (defined as higher value products, service and wages). This Insight will discuss findings from the Canadian case study, which uses 2006 Census data that has been aggregated at the Employment Insurance (EI) level, to analyze the supply and demand of the labour force.
Policy Digest
The State of Science and Technology in Canada, 2012
Council on Canadian Academies
A detailed understanding of the state of Canadian science and technology (S&T) is fundamental to decision-making related to S&T and innovation, and increasingly important in the rapidly evolving global S&T environment. The Government of Canada, through the Minister of Industry, requested the Council of Canadian Academies (the Council) to undertake an assessment of science and technology in Canada in order to answer the following question: What is the current state of science and technology in Canada? This report provides considerable evidence that Canada’s S&T enterprise is highly competitive internationally, with particular strengths in at least six fields of research, in several sub-fields, and in a number of rapidly emerging research clusters. Although representing only a snapshot in time, this report can inform policy formulation and decision-making related to science, technology, and innovation by governments, academic institutions, and industry.
The Current State of S&T in Canada
Canadian S&T, within the scope of this assessment, is healthy and growing in both output and impact. With less than 0.5 per cent of the world’s population, Canada produces 4.1 per cent of the world’s scientific papers and nearly 5 per cent of the world’s most frequently cited papers. In 2005–2010, Canada produced 59 per cent more papers than in 1999–2004, and was the only G7 country with an increase above the world average.
Canadian S&T experts also rated Canada’s S&T enterprise as strong, although half of those surveyed considered Canada to have lost ground in the past five years. Canada is part of a network of international S&T collaboration that includes the most scientifically advanced countries in the world. Canadian S&T attracts high quality researchers from abroad, with a sample of publishing researchers in 1997–2010 demonstrating a net migration of researchers into the country.In contrast to the nation’s strong performance in knowledge generation is its weaker performance in patents and related measures. Despite producing 4.1 per cent of the world’s scientific papers, Canada holds only 1.7 per cent of world patents, and in 2010 had a negative balance of nearly five billion dollars in royalties and licensing revenues. Despite its low quantity of patents, Canada excels in international comparisons of quality, with citations to patents (ARC scores), ranking second in the world, behind the United States.
Improving and Declining Fields of S&T
Real improvements have occurred in the magnitude and quality of Canadian S&T in several fields including Biology, Clinical Medicine, ICT, Physics and Astronomy, Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, Public Health and Health Services, and Visual and Performing Arts. Two of the four areas identified as strengths in a previous report — ICT and health and related life sciences and
technologies — have improved by most measures since 2006. The other two areas identified as strengths in the 2006 report — natural resources and environmental S&T — have not experienced the same improvement as Canadian S&T in general. In the current classification system, these broad areas are now represented mainly by the fields of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Forestry; and
Earth and Environmental Sciences. The Experts Panel that compiled this report mapped the current classification system for these fields to the 2006 system and is confident that the overall decline in these fields is real, and not an artefact of different classifications. Scientific output and impact in these fields were either static or declined in 2005–2010 compared to 1994–2004. It should be noted, however, that even though these fields are declining relative to S&T in general, both maintain considerable strength, with Canadian research in Agriculture, Fisheries, and Forestry ranked second in the world in the survey of international researchers, and Earth and Environmental Sciences ranked fourth.
Emerging Areas
Although robust methods of identifying emerging areas of S&T are still in their infancy, the Panel used innovative bibliometric techniques to identify research clusters and their rates of growth. Rapidly emerging research clusters in Canada have keywords relating, most notably, to wireless technologies and networking, information processing and computation, nanotechnologies, and
digital media technologies.
In another measure of emerging areas, Canadian S&T experts identified personalized medicine and health care, several energy technologies, tissue engineering, and digital media as areas in which Canada is well placed to become a global leader in development and application.
Events
Venture Capital and the U.S. National Innovation System
Toronto, 18 October, 2012
This seminar in the Innovation Policy Lab Seminar Series at the Munk School of Global Affairs (University of Toronto) features Professor Martin Kenney from UC Davis (Dept. Human and Community Development) speaking about venture capital in the United States.
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.
Triple Helix Workshop: Building the Entrepreneurial University
Stanford, CA, 12-16 November, 2012
T he Triple Helix Research Group at Stanford University’s Human Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute (H-STAR) announces a new initiative for 2012: the Triple Helix Workshop Series that starts with the five-day intensive workshop “Building the Entrepreneurial University”. The event is organized to meet a growing demand for learning about the university’s “third mission”, next to education in research – the involvement in economic development and growth creation at regional and national level. The workshop presents the experience of some of the most successful US entrepreneurial universities, including Stanford, MIT, Utah, Arizona State, Berkeley, CalTech, Boston, University of Southern California. We are also discussing various innovation initiatives at the university-industry-government interface, US federal and state policies and mechanisms to support them, the successful trajectory of some high-tech companies emerging from university research, and the role of venture capital and business angel investments in this effort.
London, UK, 23 November, 2012
One of the major impacts of the current economic crisis is the way it is deepening territorial inequalities at a time when the scope for public intervention to tackle inequality is being diminished as a result of widespread austerity measures. These developments pose many challenges for the analysis and management of territorial development strategies, particularly at the scale of cities and regions. Some of the many challenges centre on which regions and industries will suffer and which will show greater capacity to adapt and thrive in an uncertain political and economic environment. How will extant (and classic) forms of urban and regional development policy be affected? Will the current crises expose the failures of these policies or demonstrate their strengths? What alternative models of territorial development are there? Should any of these alternative models be considered, that is, are they likely to redress some of the structural inequalities reinforced in the current context? To address these issues future research is needed interpreting regional inequality trends, combined with an analysis of their impact in particular places. This should take into account both macro-processes and local dynamics as this will be crucial in deepening our understandings of how an international financial crisis and the politics of ‘expansionary austerity’ affect the prospects of cities and regions. We also need to evaluate the opportunities and challenges ahead, reflect on the usefulness of previous approaches, and explore the potential of alternative territorial development strategies. In vogue concepts such as ‘city regions’ and ‘creative places’ need to be re-evaluated while emerging notions of ‘shrinking cities’ and ‘smart specialization’ must be carefully evaluated. Equally, the notion of managing decline, both economic and environmental, is likely to become more relevant as opportunities for significant public investment are reduced.
Madrid, Spain, 10-12 April, 2013
The Conference aims to encourage dialogue betweens academics and practitioners to improve innovation policy design, implementation and evaluation. The conference will offer keynote speeches, parallel thematic sessions, roundtable discussions, special activities for young researchers and ample space for all participants to interact. Visits to research and innovation centres both in public and private institutions will be offered after the conference.
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This newsletter is prepared by Jen Nelles.
Project manager is David A. Wolfe.