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
New York Launches New $500M Semiconductor Partnership
SSTI
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced the creation of the Power Electronics Manufacturing Consortium, a 100-member public-private partnership between public research universities, private sector companies, and other research partners to develop next generation of materials and processes used in the manufacturing of wide band gap semiconductors. The state will commit up to $135 million to help establish the new consortium and private sector partners will commit the remaining $365 million over five years. The partnership also is supported by the START-UP NY tax free initiative.
DOE Awards $3.2M to Launch National Clean Energy Incubator
SSTI
The Department of Energy (DOE) has announced the launch of the National Incubator Initiative for Clean Energy (NIICE). NIICE will serve a national support network for the nation’s clean energy startup community and the incubators that support them. The network will provide technical assistance and training services to help clean energy startups move their products closer to market readiness. It also will help establish a suite of technological and training resources, bring together energy industry partners, enhance incubator best practices, and increase access to information about industry resources to advance innovative clean energy technologies with commercial viability emerging from institutions of higher education and federal laboratories. DOE will commit most of the $3.2 million to support three clean energy-focused incubators to run their programs and commercialization services for clean energy startups and develop best practices for clean energy incubators that can be replicated nationwide.
SBA Announces Available Funding to Support Regional Clusters
SSTI
The Small Business Administration (SBA) announced it is accepting applications for the SBA Clusters Program. Through the SBA Clusters program, the SBA’s goal is to increase opportunities for small businesses to participate in and promote innovation within a regional innovation cluster and enhance regional economic growth in regions across the country. Up to four contracts may be made to lead organizations of innovation cluster initiatives from across the country.
Empire State Development Corporation Approves $200M in Grants
The Buffalo News
Empire State Development Corp.’s board of directors has approved up to about $200 million in previously announced funding for three Buffalo Billion projects. The board approved a grant of up to $107 million for the South Buffalo manufacturing hub commonly known as RiverBend that will house green energy businesses Silevo and Soraa. The funds will cover reimbursement for real estate acquisition, site and infrastructure development, and construction costs. The $107 million is part of a larger $225 million commitment by the state.
NIST Announces New Competition for Advanced Manufacturing Planning Awards
NIST Tech Beat
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recently announced a new competition for planning awards to support industry-driven consortia in developing research plans and charting collaborative actions to solve high-priority technology challenges and accelerate the growth of advanced manufacturing in the United States. NIST’s Advanced Manufacturing Technology Consortia (AMTech) Program anticipates awarding a total of $5.6 million in two-year grants during program’s second competition.
Editor's Pick
What Are Future Cities?: Meanings, Origins and Uses
CATAPAULT
What is a ‘future city’ and how is it different from a ‘smart city’? Or an ‘eco city’? Or a ‘sustainable city’? This new report, probes how the language we use to talk about cities is evolving, and what impact that can have on urban development. Compiled by The Business of Cities, the report covers new ground and brings together varied thinking around the use of the phrase ‘future cities’, and similar terms like ‘smart cities’ or ‘sustainable cities’. How we speak about cities directly impacts how they are being designed and built, and understanding the meaning behinds the words helps us recognise how cities can best respond to the needs of their citizens and countries.
Innovation Policy
Canada’s Billion Dollar Firms: Contributions, Challenges and Opportunities
Digital Entrepreneurship and Economic Performance Centre (DEEP Centre)
This report was commissioned through a partnership between the Business Development Bank of Canada, the Canadian Digital Media Network, Export Development Canada and Industry Canada. It presents a demographic analysis of Canada’s largest firms, their contributions to Canadian employment and research and development spending, as well as a jurisdictional analysis of Canada’s performance in producing globally competitive firms relative to a series of comparator economies, including Australia, Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. The analysis provides an overall positive view of the development of Canada’s billion-dollar firms. Compared to similar economies, Canada has an equivalent number of billion-dollar firms but the sectoral composition of this cohort is highly concentrated in natural resources and financial services sectors.
ICT Innovation Policy in China: A Review
Robert D. Atkinson, ITIF
China is not only a producer of manufactured goods, but it is increasingly a nexus for technological innovation as a growing share of home grown, high-tech companies compete in the global marketplace. The Chinese government sees information and communications technology (ICT) both as a key catalyst for China’s transition from a manufacturing to a knowledge-based economy and as a positive influence in boosting across the board productivity and overall quality of life in China. That is why a decade ago China designated “informatization,” the adoption and enhancement of ICT in every aspect of the economy and society, as a central facet of the nation’s economic modernization strategy. This report reviews the long-term, mid-term and industry-specific ICT policies China is utilizing to implement informatization and improve its overall international economic competitiveness. This includes the frameworks to enhance innovation and development in the “Internet of Things,” cloud computing and data innovation. The report concludes by noting that while Chinese policy is moving in the right direction, the nation still has a long way to go to match the ICT policy framework of the United States or Europe. This would include creating policies to attract, rather than compel, ICT foreign direct investment, while reforming existing regulations and requirements to ensure domestic and foreign firms are operating on a level playing field.
Universities, Business and the UK Economy
UK-IRC
What role should universities play in stimulating innovation and growth? For at least the past 15 years and particularly since the financial crisis began in 2007, academic researchers have been seen as a key source of the innovative ideas that will promote growth in ‘knowledge-driven economies’. They have been urged to engage more with the private sector, notably through the commercialization of science by licensing their discoveries and inventions to existing businesses or establishing start-up companies. But as a series of studies from the UK Innovation Research Centre (UK~IRC) shows, while such ‘technology transfer’ is an important element of ‘knowledge exchange’ between universities and wider society, there is much more to it than that. The
research shows that such interactions are by no means limited to the science and technology-based disciplines, to the creation and management of intellectual property via patents and licenses, and to ‘high-tech’ industries or the private sector in general. Knowledge exchange involves academics from the arts, humanities and social sciences as well as natural scientists. It is a wide and varied process, including many people-based, problem-solving and community-driven activities as well as those surrounding the commercialisation of knowledge. And universities are engaged with a broad range of partners – in manufacturing, in high-tech, in the services sector, in the public sector and in the ‘third sector’ of charities, voluntary organizations and social enterprises.
Overall, UK~IRC research shows that there is wide-scale knowledge exchange in the UK and that the notion of an academic ‘ivory tower’ is a myth.
Cities, Clusters & Regions
Future Cities: UK Capabilities for Urban Innovation
ARUP
Cities are at the forefront in responding to global challenges of resource scarcity, climate change, unemployment, and ageing populations – and with these challenges come major new business and innovation opportunities. This report, sets out the UK’s strengths in the global market for urban solutions. These strengths include the UK’s heritage in urban planning and reinvention, its commercial expertise in managing large scale urban projects, its diverse creative services, combined with its fast growing digital expertise and development of world leading standards for urban design and open data, among other areas.
Creating Growth Clusters: What Role for Local Government?
Julian Kirchner, Gundbert Scherf and Katrin Suder, McKinsey & Company
Many governments in industrialized countries aim to encourage entrepreneurship and start-up activity to spur job creation and economic growth. To what extent governments are capable of doing so is uncertain. Nonetheless, policy makers at the regional and municipal levels are closer to the sources of innovation than those at the national level. Local initiatives can help link entrepreneurs to schools and universities, ease administrative matters for foreign workers and founders wishing to settle in a location, support development of suitable infrastructure and connectivity, and communicate and market the attractiveness of a location vis-à-vis other start-up centers. Establishing a coherent and supportive entrepreneurial policy at the city level is challenging. Municipal decision makers should identify bottlenecks in the start-up ecosystem and design and carry out initiatives to address them. These moves require a project-oriented, dynamic, and capable organizational structure. This article outlines an implementation approach that local policy makers can use to strengthen a start-up ecosystem.
Statistics & Indicators
Main Science and Technology Indicators – Volume 2014, Issue 1
OECD
This biannual publication provides a set of indicators that reflect the level and structure of the efforts undertaken by OECD member countries and seven non-member economies in the field of science and technology. The indicators cover the resources devoted to research and development, patent families, technology balance of payments and international trade in highly R&D-intensive industries. Also presented are the underlying economic series (a reference year and for the last six years) used to calculate these indicators. Series are presented for the last six years for which data are available.
Policy Digest
The Digital Adoption Roadmap: Advancing Canada’s Place in the Global Economy
Information Communications Technology Council (ICTC), CATAAlliance and CIOCAN
The paper outlines the economic and social benefits of digital adoption, and asserts 13 advocacy points to help achieve those. This paper explores in a short space the opportunities that exist to accelerate digital adoption by Canadian enterprises, the challenges to greater adoption, concrete solutions for overcoming those, and suggested next steps.
The adoption roadmap paper is the most recent initiative of the Digital Adoption Consortium, following the submission of an advocacy paper in February 2014 to Industry Canada’s consultation on innovation. As is advocated for in the full advocacy paper. Once published, the Consortium partners will begin the selection of organizations and case studies to be contributed to a Canadian Digital Adoption Hub – a collaborative, information-rich, one-stop shop for digital adoption learning and resources.
ADVOCACY POINTS:
1) Large companies can assist smaller Canadian ones by helping them adopt the technology necessary to integrate into global supply chains, or adopt technologies that strengthen the whole ecosystem.
2) Canadian enterprises are able to able to avail themselves of excellent programs such as the Scientific Research and Experimental Development tax credit, but a patent box or innovative mechanisms such as crowdfunding could bolster the pool of capital available to innovative, early-stage technology companies that are otherwise not as well served by risk-averse Canadian financial institution.
3) SMEs should be encouraged to build links with the educational system in schools, colleges and universities to ensure a healthy supply of the skills necessary to create and adopt innovative technologies.
4) For corporate and business managers, up-skilling and continuous learning will be critical throughout the course of Canadians’ professional lives.
5) More of Canada’s populations under-represented in ICT careers (Aboriginal Canadians, for instance, and women) should be encouraged to pursue tech careers to boost the supply of talent available to companies adopting emerging technologies.
6) At the university and college level, greater use of vocational training including through co-ops and placements should be employed to ensure skills are immediately relevant when students graduate into the workplace.
7) In a manner similar to how the Government of Canada’s Industrial Research Assistance Program has approximately 250 experienced Industrial Technology
8) Advisors on the ground to coach/advise/educate tech-based SMEs on how to grow their business and develop new technology products and services, the most direct way to help non-tech SMEs is with a dedicated network of “Digital Technology Adoption Advisors”.
9) From high-powered computing to access to open data sources and the training necessary to take advantage of those, policies at research institutions and by governments should consider small business in their operating models and offerings to have the greatest impact for the largest number of Canadians. And, it would help to ensure there is the necessary funding to acquire technologies to enable new offerings in this arena.
10) Technology training that builds trust in new platforms is well delivered through formal education channels, but the role of not-for-profits such as MediaSmarts working in partnership with industry to delivery media and digital literacy skills is also critical.
11) Within the formal education system; There is a need for learning to occur outside, as well as inside, schools; The specific competencies required by industry, and by the digital workforce writ large, must be incorporated into curriculum from a relatively early age; Public education must be adequately funded; Parents need to be equipped with digital skills in order to partner in their children’s education; Industry players have a role and responsibility to assist schools in teaching digital skills and literacy.
12) Telecommunications and other infrastructure ricing should continue to be monitored, and the government is urged to take action in instances where high network pricing becomes a hurdle to technology adoption.
13) The responsibility to articulate the value and bring the discussion from the back office to the boardroom rests with the whole C-suite. ICTC and its consortium partners are proposing to create a virtual learning hub that will facilitate information exchange such as best practices, case studies, and practical adoption advice.
Events
DRUID Society Conference 2014: Entrepreneurship-Organization-Innovation
Copenhagen, Denmark, 16-18 June. 2014
he conference will include a number of distinguished plenary presenters and intends to map theoretical, empirical and methodological advances, contribute with novel insights, clarify and develop intellectual positions and help identify common grounds and lines of division in selected current scientific controversies within the field. In 2014, the DRUID Special Flavor will be on Food Innovation. During the last decade, the food industry has seen notable innovation and entrepreneurship throughout its value chain, including, for example, search for original raw materials, adaption of advanced process technologies, exploration of new cooking methods and development of unique restaurant models. DRUID2014 will feature scientific as well as social activities reflecting Food Innovation, including paper sessions on innovation and entrepreneurship in the food industry, talks by leading chefs, and samples of innovative food and drink. With its New Nordic Cuisine, a burst of new Michelin-starred restaurants, and capturing the World’s Best Restaurant as well as Bocuse d’Or awards for several consecutive years, Copenhagen has established itself at the heart of food innovation. In addition, there is a broader movement around the notions of regional and modernist cuisine. The DRUID Society will of course take advantage of its local connections to present conference participants with samples of just how innovative the local food scene can be.
Kevin Morgan: Smart Specialization and the Entrepreneurial State
Toronto, Ontario, 25 June, 2014
The European Union unveiled the most ambitious regional innovation strategy in its history earlier this year when it launched theResearch and Innovation Strategy for Smart Specialisation (RIS3) program. Although it builds on the past, the RIS3 program also aims to break with the past by privileging the “process of entrepreneurial discovery”, a process in which firms, governments, universities and civil society organisations are enjoined to collaborate to fashion more regionally distinctive models of innovation and development. The birth of RIS3 was influenced by a number of recent theories, like the advent of evolutionary economic geography and the social learning approach in innovation studies. The pertinent point , however, is that the RIS3 program makes enormous demands on each of the regional stakeholders, not least the regional state, which is expected to act in more entrepreneurial and experimental ways than ever before. This seminar explores the theory, policy and practice of the RIS3 program and poses the question: are old industrial regions are up to the challenge?
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This newsletter is prepared by Jen Nelles.
Project manager is David A. Wolfe.