News from the IPL
ANNOUNCEMENTS
Waterloo Innovation Summit
September 16-18, 2015
Join top business, academic and policy decision-makers in one of the world’s leading innovation ecosystems. Hear from influencers, share best practices with enablers and experience first hand what it takes to lift your region into global contention.
Obama Administration Announces More than $4 Billion in Investment in Clean Energy Innovation
The White House
President Obama and his Administration are committed to using every tool possible to combat climate change. While the President has taken several steps using the power of the federal government, harnessing the ingenuity of America’s entrepreneurs, innovators, and technology is a crucial part of the fight against climate change. America is leading the global transition to a low-carbon economy, and thanks to past investments, consumers are already benefitting from major advances in solar photovoltaics, wind power, advanced batteries, energy-efficient lighting, and fuel cells. In fact, the cost of solar energy systems has plummeted by over 50 percent in the past five years alone. The White House is hosting a Clean Energy Investment Summit where Vice President Joe Biden will deliver remarks highlighting more than $4 billion of independent commitments by major foundations, institutional investors, and other long-term investors to fund climate change solutions, including innovative technologies with breakthrough potential to reduce carbon pollution.
Small Business Association will Invest in Regional Clusters
SBA
The SBA is investing in regional clusters throughout the United States and intends to award a total of three contracts to contractors to head cluster initiatives. Each contract will be for a base year and four option years. If you’re involved with a cluster initiative, consider applying! Written proposals are due on August 4, 2015, no later than 3:00PM Mountain Time.
Editor's Pick
Manufacturing’s Next Act
McKinsey & Company
Mention “Industry 4.0” to most manufacturing executives and you will raise eyebrows. If they’ve heard of it, they are likely confused about what it is. If they haven’t heard of it, they’re likely to be skeptical of what they see as yet another piece of marketing hype, an empty catchphrase. And yet a closer look at what’s behind Industry 4.0 reveals some powerful emerging currents with strong potential to change the way factories work. It may be too much to say that it is another industrial revolution. But call it whatever you like; the fact is, Industry 4.0 is gathering force, and executives should carefully monitor the coming changes and develop strategies to take advantage of the new opportunities.
Innovation Policy
Unlocking the Potential of the Internet of Things
McKinsey & Company
The Internet of Things (IoT) —sensors and actuators connected by networks to computing systems—has received enormous attention over the past five years. This report attempts to determine exactly how IoT technology can create real economic value. Its central finding is that the hype may actually understate the full potential—but that capturing it will require an understanding of where real value can be created and a successful effort to address a set of systems issues, including interoperability. This report analyzed more than 150 use cases, ranging from people whose devices monitor health and wellness to manufacturers that utilize sensors to optimize the maintenance of equipment and protect the safety of workers. The analysis estimates that the IoT has a total potential economic impact of $3.9 trillion to $11.1 trillion a year by 2025. At the top end, that level of value—including the consumer surplus—would be equivalent to about 11 percent of the world economy.
Obama’s Three Ideas to Improve Digital Public Service
Joshua Bleiberg and Darrell M. West, Tech Tank
In a recent exclusive interview, President Obama discussed the efforts his administration has made to improve digital services in the federal government. The Obama administration has placed a priority on improving the government IT capacity through a variety of programs and initiatives including Federal Agency Digital Service Teams, 18F, and the Presidential Innovation Fellows. The president discussed his frustrations and hopes for how the government can better leverage technology.
Cities, Clusters & Regions
A Thriving Future of Places: Placemaking as the New Urban Agenda
Ethan Kent, Project for Public Spaces
Throughout much of the recent past, the story of cities has been one of expensive infrastructure and the unilateral vision of the “expert.” What is often left out of this story of city-building is the importance of public space, and the perspectives of the everyday people who continue to create and use it. Today, with a renewed interest in cities, a squeeze on municipal budgets, and a millennial-driven culture for disruptive change, a very different story is beginning to emerge. It is a story that focuses on what people do in cities, how our shared experience in cities drives both competition and collaboration, and how citizen participation is the key component in making them thrive. It is a story of emerging creativity, of cultural evolution, and growing shared value in our public realm – it is the story of Placemaking.
One Year After: Observations on the Rise of Innovation Districts
Bruce Katz, Jennifer S. Vey and Julie Wagner, The Brookings Institution
In the year since the Brookings Institution released “The Rise of Innovation Districts: A New Geography of Innovation in America,” it has visited or interacted with dozens of leaders in burgeoning innovation districts in the United States and Europe. In so doing, it has sharpened its knowledge of what’s happening on the ground and gained some important insights into how cities and metros are embracing this new paradigm of economy-shaping, place-making, and network-building. This short post records some of the key observations and lessons of that experience.
Creative New York
Center for an Urban Future
This finds that the nonprofit arts and for-profit creative industries were among the fastest growing segments of the city’s economy over the past decade. The study shows that New York significantly increased its share of the nation’s jobs in each of the 10 industries that make up the city’s creative economy, from advertising and design to visual and performing arts. It points out that while the tech sector has grown more rapidly in recent years, and industries such as health care have more jobs overall, the creative sector arguably provides New York with its greatest competitive advantage. Yet the report concludes that the city’s working artists, nonprofit arts organizations and for profit creative businesses are experiencing more challenges than ever before, and that New York faces growing threats from a number of cities—from Shanghai and Berlin to Portland and Detroit—that are aggressively cultivating their creative economies.
Creativity, Clusters and the Competitive Advantage of Cities
Roger Martin, Richard Florida, Melissa Pogue and Charlotta Mellander, The Martin Prosperity Institute
The article marries Michael Porter’s industrial cluster theory of traded and local clusters to Richard Florida’s occupational approach of creative and routine workers to gain a better understanding of the process of economic development. By combining these two approaches, four major industrial-occupational categories are identified. The shares of U.S. Employment in each – creative-in-traded, creative-in-local, routine-intraded and routine-in-local – are calculated and a correlation analysis is used to examine the relationship of each to regional economic development indicators. Our findings show that economic growth and development is positively related to employment in the creative-in-traded category. While metros with a higher share of creative-in-traded employment enjoy higher wages and incomes overall, these benefits are not experienced by all worker categories. The share of creative-in-traded employment is also positively and significantly associated with higher inequality. After accounting for higher median housing costs, routine workers in both traded and local industries are found to be relatively worse off in metros with high shares of creative-intraded employment, on average.
Rethinking Smart Cities from the Ground Up
Nesta
This report tells the stories of cities around the world – from Beijing to Amsterdam, and from London to Jakarta – that are addressing urban challenges by using digital technologies to engage and enable citizens.
Core Values: Why American Companies are Moving Downtown
Smart Growth America
Hundreds of companies across the United States are moving to and investing in walkable downtown locations. As job migration shifts towards cities and as commercial real estate values climb in these places, a vanguard of American companies are building and expanding in walkable downtown neighborhoods. Why are companies choosing these places? What are the competitive advantages they see in these locations? And what features do they look for when choosing a new location? This report examines the characteristics, motives, and preferences of companies that have either relocated, opened new offices, or expanded in walkable downtowns between 2010 and 2015.
Entrepreneurial Ecosystems and Regional Policy: A Sympathetic Critique
Erik Stam, Utrecht University
Regional policies for entrepreneurship are currently going through a transition from increasing the quantity of entrepreneurship to the quality of entrepreneurship. The next step will be the transition from entrepreneurship policy towards policy for an entrepreneurial economy. The entrepreneurial ecosystem approach has been heralded as a new framework accommodating these transitions. This approach starts with the entrepreneurial actor, but emphasizes the context of productive entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is not only the output of the system, entrepreneurs are important players themselves in creating the ecosystem and keeping it healthy. This research briefing reviews the entrepreneurial ecosystem literature, its shortcomings, and provides a novel synthesis. This article provides a novel synthesis including a causal scheme of how the framework and systemic conditions of the ecosystem lead to particular entrepreneurial activities as output of the ecosystem and new value creation as outcome of the ecosystem. In addition it provides a framework for analyzing the interactions between the elements within the ecosystem.
Statistics & Indicators
Future Cities: Benchmarking Innovation Policy in Cities
Future Cities
Future Cities in collaboration with Nesta and Accenture has published a new guide called CITIE that will help policymakers in cities create the best possible environment for innovation and entrepreneurship. The guide provides a means of benchmarking the way in which cities encourage innovation, assessing them on criteria such as investment, regulation and willingness to adopt new technologies and processes. The approach was developed through consultation with city government leaders, policy experts, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurs, ultimately identifying 36 policy levers that enable innovation and entrepreneurship. The CITIE analysis reveals New York as having the most effective policy environment to foster innovation, followed by London, Helsinki, Barcelona and Amsterdam.
Policy Digest
Local Economic Leadership
OECD
This report on Local Economic Leadership builds on a substantive body of work that the OECD has done since the crisis began in 2008. In “Recession, Recovery and Reinvestment” it looked at how 41 local leaders were responding to the crisis. It found inspiring and confident solutions and actions emerging which helped local areas protect their futures. In “Organising Local Economic Development” (2010) the OECD focused on development agencies, the original crisis response mechanisms and then in “New Growth and Investment Strategies” (2013) it focused on the recovery. This body of work has led to a specific focus on local economic leadership and the critical role that it plays in creating the framework conditions for inclusive growth.
Key elements of the leadership dividend To articulate with more precision what effective local economic leadership means in practice, the OECD LEED Programme has also reviewed evidence worldwide and found that that there are some common elements that underpin successful local economic development leadership. These elements are not prescriptive – different places take different approaches. None the less, it appears that the following elements are significant:
• Vision, strategy, and agenda setting; looking to the longer future.
• Evidence based leadership that sifts options and alternatives to intervene and engage markets.
• Customer orientation that recognises employers, investors, entrepreneurs and workers as having distinctive preferences and requirements that a local economy needs to meet.
• Systemic and integrating leadership that embraces all the entities that can impact on local economic performance.
• Promotional skills that understand how to position a local economy within contested markets and how to leverage assets and opportunities.
• Collaboration and alignment between different tiers of government and horizontal co-ordination.
• The advocacy role of leadership that makes the case for better ways to organise, reform, or regulate a local economy and its institutions.
Case studies and learning models
For this report the OECD has analysed four internationally oriented, mid to higher ranking EU cities to share lessons about how local economies can capture the leadership dividend. These cities are Amsterdam, Hamburg, Manchester (encompassing the city-region) and Stockholm. This European quartet has been actively engaged in the challenge to re-build their jobs base, attract employers and grow investment, raise the investment rate, ensure adequate supply of business space, expand new sectors, and build economic inclusiveness in a higher skilled economy. Their leadership models also stand out for their success in shaping their local economies.
Amsterdam has evolved into a mature poly-centric economy whose growth leverages existing finance and advanced professional services specializations, strong trade and logistics capabilities, and growing value in emerging creative and scientific sectors. The city’s economic, infrastructure and space pressures require inter-municipal solutions. In lieu of powerful individualised leadership, Amsterdam has gradually overcome institutional complexity and a strong network of leaders now exists. Local leaders have patiently built coalitions that cut across party political and public-private sector lines, while the consolidation of business-facing advisory networks is rapidly improving management of economic development in the region.
Hamburg’s local economic development is underpinned by several cycles of investment into hard infrastructure, workforce development, employment innovation and research expertise. Despite an advanced innovation system, the city has nevertheless faced strategic challenges – especially around housing, congestion and port expansion – that have needed strong leadership and deeper inter-governmental co-operation. Since 2011 Hamburg’s leaders have pursued a counter-austerity inclusive growth strategy that has begun to yield significant results. The city has pursued a rational and professional approach to short-term delivery of fiscal prudence, increased housing supply, and a more flexible labour market, within a broader framework of a more globalized local economy.
Manchester’s distinctive model of can-do public sector leadership and mature public-private partnership has driven significant progress in local development, employment and institutional frameworks in the past five years. Despite existing strengths in retail, technology, culture and higher education, business leadership assessments have highlighted fundamental labour market and productivity challenges and re-focused priorities on the local development system and the catalytic role of the private sector and international investment. Greater Manchester’s ambitious leaders have successfully made the case for more devolved powers to deliver public services, stronger investment models and executive capacity at the combined authority level
Stockholm is one of Northern Europe’s largest and fastest growing cities, having become an increasingly attractive location for international companies, migrants and small employers alike over the past decade. Sweden’s capital has a highly mature innovation system and is now a European hub in a number of sectors such as life sciences, ICT, automation and clean technology. The locality’s main development challenge is a housing deficit that may require solutions and leadership beyond the administrative county boundary. Stockholm has mobilized municipalities across the wider region with a unifying brand – ‘Capital of Scandinavia’, advocated and managed by new sources of voluntary partnership such as Stockholm Business Alliance.
These cities have experienced different economic and employment conditions in the past decade, especially during the years of macro-economic uncertainty that followed the global economic crisis. Figure 1 shows the adult (20-64 years) employment rate for the four cities versus the 19 country Euro area average. It shows that Stockholm has retained the highest employment rate, at well above 80% throughout the last ten years. This is one of the highest figures of any urban area in Europe, alongside Zurich and Oslo. Meanwhile Hamburg has increased its employment rate by over 8% since 2005, one of the fastest improvements of any city in Europe. Manchester’s rate of employment has recovered strongly since 2010 and is now 5% above the Euro area average, while in Amsterdam job creation has been more challenging in the post-crisis period, although the overall rate in still in the top quarter of European cities (Eurostat, 2015).
Events
ZEW/MaCCI Conference on the Economics of Innovation and Patenting
Mannheim, Germany, 2-3 July, 2015
This conference aims at stimulating discussion between international researchers conducting related empirical, and theoretical analysis. In addition, the conference will focus on policy implications of recent research. Theoretical, empirical and policy-oriented contributions from all areas of the economics of innovation and patenting are welcome. The conference is sponsored by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation.
Divergent Cities: Why Do Cities Differ in Growth and Performance?
Cambridge, UK, 16-17 July, 2015
For the first time in human history, more than half of the world’s population now lives in cities. Geographers and economists alike point to the increasing concentration of economic activity and wealth creation in cities, especially large and capital cities, many of which are also the key nodes that articulate and shape the global economy. However, not all cities have experienced success: both in Europe and the United States, economic growth rates have varied significantly across cities, and some cities have shrunk rather than expanded economically. This divergent experience raises questions as to what determines city growth. Why do some cities lead while others fall behind? Such issues pose a challenge to both theory and policy. There would seem much to learn from experience around the world. This one and half day workshop will bring together academics, policy makers and other individuals who have a direct interest in the growth and success of cities. Presentations will include those drawing on new research from the Centre for Cities, the World Bank and the UK Governments Foresight Future of Cities project.
4th Global Conference on Economic Geography
Oxford, UK, 19-23 August, 2015
This conference unites economic geographers, regional scientists, policy makers and researchers in related disciplines to discuss this year’s topic: “Mapping Economies in Transformation”.
11th Regional Policy Conference of the Technopolicy Network – Internationalization of Technology Clusters
Moscow, Russia, 7-9 September, 2015
The 7th of September will be spent well to get to know the surrounding of Zelenograd, and the participants of the conference through a social tour to the Technounity cluster of the city. Zelenograd was built in 1958 as a reflection of the California Silicon Valley and is also known as Soviet/Russian Silicon Valley. It was already one of the most influential centres of electronics, microelectronics and computer industry in the Soviet Union and still plays a similar role in modern Russia. Nowadays the city is the headquarters of its microelectronic solutions department. On the 8th and 9th of September, participants will have two days of activating sessions, with a focus on cluster management and regional development policies. Also, the conference will introduce a keynote speakers who will be leading experts on the subjects of internationalization, technology clusters, and innovation.
Waterloo Innovation Summit
Waterloo, September 16-18, 2015
Join top business, academic and policy decision-makers in one of the world’s leading innovation ecosystems. Hear from influencers, share best practices with enablers and experience first hand what it takes to lift your region into global contention.
Atlanta Conference on Science and Innovation Policy
Atlanta, Georgia, 17-19 September, 2015
The Atlanta Conference on Science and Innovation Policy provides a showcase for the highest quality scholarship addressing the multidimensional challenges and interrelated characteristics of science and innovation policy and processes. The conference attracts over 300 researchers from more than 35 countries and includes a series of plenary talks; parallel paper sessions to discuss ongoing research; and a young researcher poster competition. Next year’s session will explore the research front addressing the broad range of issues central to the structure, function, performance and outcomes of the science and innovation enterprises.
4th European Colloquium on Culture, Creativity and Economy
Florence, Italy, 8-10 October, 2015
During the past decades myriad links between culture, creativity and economic practice have become major topics of interdisciplinary study. This colloquium aims to bring together leading edge scholars from across the social sciences to critically examine the intersections between these spheres and symbolic and culturally embedded values in particular, and how they are pervaded by and pervade the global economy. Our aim is to create a space for vibrant critical discussion about how ‘creativity’, cultural meanings, cultural phenomena, cultural workers and organizations are not only valuable to the market but increasingly drivers and framers of the systems of value and taste that economic actors attempt to capture and trade upon. Though culture and creativity have always been central to human civilization there is increasingly a need to understand culture and creativity as central agencies and motifs in the current stage of globalized capitalism, in the digital and knowledge economy, and in the development of human values, communities, regions and cities.
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This newsletter is prepared by Jen Nelles.
Project manager is David A. Wolfe.