The IPL newsletter: Volume 16, Issue 323

News from the IPL

ANNOUNCEMENTS

World Future Cities Summit

The technology driven transformation of cities into Smart and Intelligent Cities is a one trillion dollar business with Smart City conferences and exhibitions springing up all around the world to discuss opportunities. The Greater Toronto Region is a world leader in smart urban transformation but it has  no permanent globally recognized conference. On October 13-15, 2015 the Metro Toronto Convention Centre will host the World Future Cities Summit and will inaugurate the annual Greater Toronto conference. The Summit will feature the Mayors’ Summit and ten universities participating in six future city technology conferences all running in parallel. Mayors’ Summit speakers from Europe, the US, the UK, Abu Dhabi, Dubai and India will join Canadian Mayors, civic and government leaders and leaders from industry, academic and research institutions.

University of Toronto to Transform Regenerative Medicine Thanks to Historic $114M Federal Grant

Terry Lavender, U of T News
The research grant, the largest in U of T’s history, is the first to be awarded under the Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF), established by the federal government last year. Spread over seven years, the funding will allow U of T and its partners, which include the Hospital for Sick Children, the University Health Network, and Mount Sinai Hospital, to deliver a new program called Medicine by Design.The initiative and the new funding build on years of support for U of T’s regenerative medicine researchers from federal granting councils, the Canada Foundation for Innovation and support from the Canada Research Chairs and Canada Excellence Research Chairs programs. The mandate of Medicine by Design is to undertake transformative research and clinical translation in regenerative medicine, enhance capability in synthetic biology and computational biology and foster translation, commercialization and clinical impacts.

New Tool for City Leaders to Stimulate Innovation and Entrepreneurship: CITIE

City Initiatives for Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CITIE) provides city policymakers with a resource to help them develop the policy initiatives that catalyze innovation and entrepreneurship in cities. The CITIE website contains a policy framework, diagnostic tools and case studies. More detail about the project is included in a report.

DOD Awards $110M Integrated Photonics Manufacturing Institute to New York

SSTI Weekly Digest
Vice President Joe Biden announced that the Research Foundation for the State University of New York will receive a $110 million federal grant from the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory to lead the American Institute for Manufacturing Integrated Photonics (AIM-Photonics). The Department of Defense-funded grant will be supplemented by a $250 million investment from the state of New York with additional funding commitments from public and private partners expected to exceed $245 million over the next five years. Headquartered in Rochester, NY, AIM-Photonics is intended to develop the next generation of integrated photonics while helping to  create and support thousands of advanced research and manufacturing jobs in New York state and across the nation. 

Software Deals Drive Venture Capital Surge to Dot Com Era Levels

SSTI Weekly Digest
Venture capital (VC) firms invested more than $17 billion in 1,189 deals in the second quarter of 2015, the highest level of activity since 2000, according to the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC). Megadeals (deals greater than $100 million) in the software sector drove much of the growth, with 26 deals such deals, including one that exceeded $1 billion. With $7.3 billion in investments, software deals in the second quarter exceeded total investment across all sectors in 51 of the last 82 quarters. The industry is on track to surpass the $50 million invested last year.

32,000 New Jobs by 2020: The Digital Health Sector is Creating a Strong Demand for Talent in Canada

ICTC/CTIC
Innovations in information and communications technologies (ICTs) have heightened the way Canadians experience healthcare. With the growth of digital health solutions, companies in the ICT sector have been at the forefront of development. Upscaling technologies and adoption of digital health solutions have led to numerous economic opportunities, including the creation of employment, improved productivity, cost reductions, revenue generation, and increase in collaborative innovation.

White House Launches Decades-Long Supercomputing Initiative to Meet Big Data Challenges

SSTI Weekly Digest
Recently, President Obama launched a new National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI) by executive order. The multi-agency effort will seek partnerships with academia and industry to build high-performance computing systems capable of exascale processing and more than 10 times as fast as existing supercomputers. NSCI will support the design of systems that are not only fast, but also capable of manipulating the large and dynamic datasets typically characterized as “big data.” Partner agencies will invest in efforts to make exascale processing less energy-intensive, more available and simpler to use.

 

Editor's Pick

OECD Digital Economy Outlook 2015

OECD
The Digital Economy Outlook is a biennial series which examines and documents evolutions and emerging opportunities and challenges in the digital economy. It highlights how OECD countries and partner economies are taking advantage of ICTs and the Internet to meet their public policy objectives. It asks how OECD countries can maximize the potential of the digital economy as a driver for innovation and inclusive growth.

Innovation Policy

Deloitte Top Mining Innovation Trends

Deloitte
Innovation is critical to success and growth at a time when the mining industry is at crossroads. How can majors, juniors and service companies successfully navigate the downturn? PDAC and Monitor Deloitte examine the strategic, organizational, financial and performance requirements to develop and support an innovative environment within companies.

Policy Lessons from Financing Innovative Firms

Karen E. Wilson, OECD
There has been increasing global concern from policy makers over the lack of access to finance for young innovative firms. As a result, governments in many OECD countries have sought to address the financing gap and perceived market failures by supporting the seed and early stage market. This paper seeks to summarize the lessons learned in seed and early stage finance based on OECD work focused on policies related to financing high growth firms, including angel investment and venture capital. Growth in seed and early stage finance policies highlights the role that financial development and other policies play in firm dynamics and job creation.

Social Innovation Lab Guide

Frances Westley and Sam Laban, Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience
This Guide to a Social Innovation Lab is offered as a resource to peers, colleagues, practitioners, leaders from all sectors, and concerned citizens – all who have and/or will participate in change-making processes. One goal this work is that these ideas on social innovation and these recommendations for new practice will result in a greater sense of agency for those who work on what often seem like impossible aspirations for a different, better world.

The Dowling Review of Business-University Research Collaborations

Ann Dowling, BIS
The review makes recommendations for the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) on how government can: support relationships between UK businesses and the UK’s world-leading university researchers by reducing complexity; and foster and support relationships between researchers and business, particularly for smaller firms looking to innovate.

Cities, Clusters & Regions

New York City: The Great Reset

Richard Florida, Hugh Kelly, Steven Pedigo and Rosemary Scanlon, Creative Class Group
Over the past 15 years, New York City has endured the devastating attacks of 9/11, two recessions, a financial crisis that nearly annihilated the world’s economy, and a catastrophic super storm that destroyed billions of dollars of its infrastructure. New York City has been through the mill many times, yet it has always bounced back-chastened and changed-but stronger than ever. Creative destruction has been in the City’s DNA since its inception. What’s in store for its future? The report also offers a series of key recommendations for ways that the city can leverage its assets to build an even stronger and more creative economy going forward.

Statistics & Indicators

How Cities Are Governed: Building A Global Database for Current Modes of Urban Governance

LSE Cities, UN Habitat and UCLG
Global comparative research on urban governance is confronted with a substantial data challenge. Regardless of the ever-increasing availability of information on institutional arrangements in individual cities, knowledge and methodologies to capture and compare the wide spectrum of different urban governance systems is limited. This survey addresses this data challenge and explores new ways of communicating and ‘mapping’ urban governance for public dissemination, comparative policy and research analysis. This online platform presents the results for the 1st phase of the survey. It also contains more in depth analysis of existing institutional arrangements and governance challenges faced by cities around the world. Please note that the information presented on this website is based on self reported data and reflects local government’s officials perceptions.

2015 Global Startup Ecosystem Ranking

Compass
It has been almost three years since the last Startup Ecosystem Report was released in November 2012, and since then the startup sector has grown at a booming pace. The centerpiece of the 2015 Startup Ecosystem Ranking is an updated and revamped component index, which ranks the top 20 startup ecosystems around the world. The index is produced by ranking ecosystems along five major components: Performance, Funding, Talent, Market Reach, and Startup Experience.

Policy Digest

CITIE – City Initiatives for Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship – A Resource for City Leadership

John Gibson, Matthew Robinson and Scott Cain
This report is an introduction to the CITIE framework, analysis and results for 2015. It complements the CITIE website, where more detail including full case studies and a diagnostic tool can be found.

Section one makes the case for innovation and entrepreneurship, and introduces our approach Innovative tech companies are attractive to cities. Not only do they produce the jobs of tomorrow, but they are increasingly perceived as a symbol of civic vitality. There is a growing feedback loop between entrepreneurship outside of the city hall, and innovative governance within them. As a result, a growing number of city governments are turning their attention to what they can do to grow this part of their economy. While city authorities can’t create tech communities or entrepreneurs, what they can do is optimize the policy levers that are within their control to design the best set of conditions for innovation to flourish. CITIE aims to help city leaders around the world understand how best to approach this. For this report the authors researched how 40 leading cities from around the world are supporting innovation and entrepreneurship. They tested against a series of metrics that collectively answer three questions: 1. How open is the city to new ideas and new businesses? 2. How does the city optimize its infrastructure for high-growth businesses? 3. How does the city build innovation into its own activities?

Section two provides detail on the nine policy roles that are at the heart of the analysis. The analysis revolves around nine policy roles that city governments can adopt to support innovation and entrepreneurship. The roles are Regulator, Advocate, Customer, Host, Investor, Connector, Strategist, Digital Governor and Datavore. They are designed to cover the full range of a city’s operations. For each of these roles, the report: • Sets out why it is important. • Identifies the specific actions we look for to indicate good practice. • Shows how each city performs. • Describes examples of good practice, and extracts of the detailed case studies that can be found at www.citie.org. This case study material is designed to highlight what good practice looks like globally so that other cities can learn from it.

Section three gives an overview of the results for 2015, and draws out some lessons from top performing cities We have assessed 40 cities against our framework. The purpose of doing this is to help them identify their relative areas of strength and weakness in order to guide policymaking efforts. The cities are clustered into four tiers of performance: ‘Front Runners’, ‘Challengers’, ‘Builders’ and ‘Experimenters’. This is to provide each city with a group of comparable peers that they can benchmark themselves against and learn from. The report also highlight the five cities that we currently think represent best practice globally for 2015: 1. New York City 2. London 3. Helsinki 4. Barcelona 5. Amsterdam. Although the cities in this leading group tend to perform consistently well across our indicators, there are also marked variations in the approaches that they take. The analysis of 40 cities globally shows a rich diversity of approaches to catalyzing innovation and entrepreneurship. This kind of diversity is apparent across all 40 cities.

There is no single pathway to success. Nevertheless, there are certain things that high-performing city governments share:

1. They make sure that very different areas of policy need to work in concert. Good policy in one area can be undermined by bad policy in another. As a result, they tend to have teams, individuals or strategies in place who champion innovation across departmental siloes.

2. They are open by default. They recognize that the kind of knowledge and ideas needed to drive change are unlikely to reside entirely within the city hall. As a result, they habitually find ways to work with outsiders in solving urban problems.

3. They employ styles of working that are more closely associated with start-ups than bureaucrats. They are happy to try things out and not afraid to fail. And they are increasingly delivering agile projects, prototyping, deploying user-led design and developing digital services. As a result, they are able to move quickly as the world changes around them. 

Events

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.

World Future Cities Summit

Toronto, 13-15 October, 2015
The technology driven transformation of cities into Smart and Intelligent Cities is a one trillion dollar business with Smart City conferences and exhibitions springing up all around the world to discuss opportunities. The Greater Toronto Region is a world leader in smart urban transformation but it has  no permanent globally recognized conference. On October 13-15, 2015 the Metro Toronto Convention Centre will host the World Future Cities Summit and will inaugurate the annual Greater Toronto conference. The Summit will feature the Mayors’ Summit and ten universities participating in six future city technology conferences all running in parallel. Mayors’ Summit speakers from Europe, the US, the UK, Abu Dhabi, Dubai and India will join Canadian Mayors, civic and government leaders and leaders from industry, academic and research institutions.

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This newsletter is prepared by Jen Nelles.
Project manager is David A. Wolfe.