News from the IPL
ANNOUNCEMENTS
U.S. Venture Capital on Track for an Historic Year
SSTI Weekly Digest
In the first three quarters of 2015, U.S. venture capital firms have invested $47.2 billion, more than the year-end totals for 17 of the past 20 years, according to new data from the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). About $16.3 billion was invested in 1,070 deals in the third quarter, bringing the 2015 total to $47.2 billion in 2,239 deals. Investment activity is on track to reach its highest annual level since 2000, and the second highest year since the beginning of PwC’s Moneytree report. Both dollars and deal slightly fell in the third quarter, but still managed to rank as the second most active quarter since 2000. Seed stage and later stage investments were both up, while early stage and expansion stage were down. Seed stage investment activity, however, is well below its levels five years ago.
SBA Funds Three New Regional Innovation Clusters
SSTI Weekly Digest
The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) recently announced the addition of three more cluster organizations to the portfolio of communities supported through the SBA Regional Innovation Clusters initiative, raising the total number of awardees in the program to 14. The three new Regional Innovation Clusters—each receiving $500,000 for the base year of the contract, with four option years to be exercised at the SBA’s discretion, for up to a total of $2.5 million per cluster initiative—are:
- BioSTL Bioscience Cluster, St. Louis, Missouri. Contractor: BioSTL
- Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) Cluster, South Kansas and Oklahoma. Contractor: Development Capital Networks
- Wood Products Cluster, Appalachian Ohio Region. Contractor: Appalachian Partnership, Inc.
The three new awardees competed with more than 40 other applicant cluster organizations.
Editor's Pick
A Strategy for American Innovation
National Economic Council and Office of Science and Technology Policy
America has long been a nation of innovators. The United States is the birthplace of the Internet, which today connects three billion people around the world. American scientists and engineers sequenced the human genome, invented the semiconductor, and sent humankind to the moon. And America is not done yet. In 2009, President Obama first issued the Strategy for American Innovation, and it was updated in 2011. In this final refresh of the President’s Strategy, the Administration has identified additional policies to sustain the innovation ecosystem that will deliver benefits to all Americans.
Innovation Policy
Innovation Policy Toolkit: Tradecraft for Innovation Diplomats
NESTA
Governments around the world are recognising the importance of innovation diplomacy. These practices sit somewhere between science diplomacy, which tends to focus on supporting academic research partnerships, and economic diplomacy, which tends to focus on trade and international regulations. This guide is designed for UK innovation diplomats looking for a set of practical tools and examples to help them think about how to improve support for innovation collaboration. Innovation diplomacy includes everything from helping build academic partnerships with industry, enabling open innovation and collaboration to influencing intellectual property regimes, building global value chains and developing and scaling innovative solutions to global problems. The guide is based on the practices of the UK Science and Innovation Network. It is organized by four roles that an innovation diplomat can take when supporting innovation collaboration: explaining and informing; influencing and promoting; cultivating and connecting; and activating and scaling.
Making Open Science a Reality
OECD
Open science commonly refers to efforts to make the output of publicly funded research more widely accessible in digital format to the scientific community, the business sector, or society more generally. Open science is the encounter between the age-old tradition of openness in science and the tools of information and communications technologies (ICTs) that have reshaped the scientific enterprise and require the critical attention of policy makers seeking to promote long-term research as well as innovation.
Cities, Clusters & Regions
Canada’s Urban Competitiveness Agenda: Completing the Transition from a Resource to a Knowledge Economy
Richard Florida and Greg Spencer, Martin Prosperity Institute
This report provides a data-driven examination of the key pillars of Canada’s current and future economic competitiveness. It identifies how the nation’s city-regions stack up in terms of its two growth models and evaluates their relative economic performance. It begins by outlining how Canada’s 147 city-regions stack up on the 3Ts of economic development. To do so, the authors introduce several new indexes of the competitiveness of Canada’s city-regions: the Canadian Talent Index, the Canadian Technology Index, and the Canadian Tolerance Index. They then introduce an overall composite measure of competitiveness in the knowledge and creative economy: the Canadian Creativity Index. The report continues with a comparative assessment of the economic performance of Canada’s knowledge- and resource-based economic models followed by a summary of key findings and their implications for the future competitiveness of Canada and its city-regions.
Building and Advancing Digital Skills to Support Seattle’s Economic Future
Jessica A. Lee and Adie Tomer, The Brookings Institution
In an advanced economy, all residents deserve an opportunity to obtain digital skills. It is up to leaders in each U.S. metropolitan area to determine how best to meet this need. As with any social challenge of this scale, meeting it will require pragmatic problem-solving and deep collaboration across the public, private, and civic sectors. This brief summarizes the results of a workshop held in Seattle to explore these issues. While the findings from the workshop discussions are unique to the Seattle region—making its leaders and residents the primary audience for this brief—the workshop approach can be replicated in any metropolitan area interested in addressing digital skills shortfalls and developing solutions tailored to residents’ needs.
Regional Innovation Systems: Past – Presence – Future
Bjorn Asheim, Marcus Grillistch, and Micheala Trippl, CIRCLE
Since its development in the 1990s, the Regional Innovation Systems (RIS) approach has attracted considerable attention from economic geographers, innovation scholars and policy makers. The RIS approach figures prominently in the scientific discourse about the uneven geography of innovation and the factors that shape the knowledge generation and innovation capacities of regions. The aim of this paper is to reflect about the emergence of the RIS approach, the current debate as well as future challenges. This reflection paper is guided by four overarching research questions: What are the origins and theoretical foundations of this approach? What has the RIS approach contributed to innovation studies and economic geography? What are the implications for innovation policy? And what are the recent lines of research and key research challenges in the future? We argue that the contributions of the RIS approach have been substantial. Still the approach has often been applied in a rather static way, more as a heuristic than a coherent theory. The key challenges for current and future research therefore are to move towards a more theory-based, dynamic perspective on RIS, dealing with new path development and the transformation of RIS.
Statistics & Indicators
Using Earnings Data to Rank Colleges: A Value-Added Approach Updated with College Scorecard Data
Jonathan Rothwell, The Brookings Institution
Following up on previous Brookings research measuring the value colleges add to student outcomes irrespective of student characteristics, this study analyzes the Obama administration’s new College Scorecard database to produce value-added rankings for 3,173 colleges (1,507 two-year colleges and 1,666 four-year colleges), based on the earnings of alumni. Value-added measures attempt to isolate the contribution of the college to student outcomes, as distinct from what one might predict based on student characteristics or the level of degree offered. It is not a measure of return on investment, but rather a way to compare colleges on a more equal footing, by adjusting for the relative advantages or disadvantages faced by diverse students pursuing different levels of study across different local economies.
OECD Science, Technology and Industry Scoreboard 2015
OECD
Science, technology and innovation foster competitiveness, productivity and growth. Over 200 indicators in the OECD Science, Technology and Industry (STI) Scoreboard show how OECD and major non-OECD economies are starting to move beyond the crisis, increasingly investing in the future. The charts and underlying data in the OECD STI Scoreboard 2015 are available for download and selected indicators contain additional data expanding the time and country coverage of the print edition.
Policy Digest
The Innovation Imperative: Contributing to Productivity, Growth and Well-Being
OECD
Well-timed and targeted innovation boosts productivity, increases economic growth and helps solve societal problems. But how can governments encourage more people to innovate more of the time? And how can government itself be more innovative? The OECD Innovation Strategy provides a set of principles to spur innovation in people, firms and government. It takes an in-depth look at the scope of innovation and how it is changing, as well as where and how it is occurring, based on updated research and data.
OECD analysis suggests that innovation thrives in an environment characterized by the following features:
- A skilled workforce that can generate new ideas and technologies, bring them to the market, and implement them in the workplace, and that is able to adapt to technological and structural changes across society;
- A sound business environment that encourages investment in technology and in knowledge-based capital, that enables innovative firms to experiment with new ideas, technologies and business models, and that helps them grow, increase their market share and reach scale;
- A strong and efficient system for knowledge creation and diffusion that invests in the systematic pursuit of fundamental knowledge, and that diffuses this knowledge throughout society through a range of mechanisms, including human resources, technology transfer and the establishment of knowledge markets;
- Policies that encourage innovation and entrepreneurial activity. More specific innovation policies are often needed to tackle a range of barriers to innovation. Many of these actions include policies at the regional or local level. Moreover, well-informed, engaged and skilled consumers are increasingly important for innovation;
- A strong focus on governance and implementation. The impact of policies for innovation depends heavily on their governance and implementation, including the trust in government action and commitment to learn from experience. Evaluation of policies needs to be embedded into the process and should not be an afterthought.
Out of this broad toolbox for innovation policy, five priorities are particularly important and together provide the basis for a comprehensive and action-oriented approach to innovation:
- 1. Strengthen investment in innovation and foster business dynamism: Governments need to develop better policies to support investment in knowledge-based capital. They should also foster the growth of young and innovative small and medium-sized enterprises that remain constrained in their impact on growth and jobs, partly because some of our policies still focus on incumbents.
2. Invest in, and shape, an efficient system of knowledge creation and diffusion: Investment in basic research remains a key priority; most of the key technologies in use today have their roots in public research. There is a risk that public investments in this area become too focused on the short term, rather than the long-term benefits. More efficient innovation policies, based on international good practice, can help strengthen the impact of government action.
3. Seize the benefits of the digital economy: Digital technologies continue to offer a large potential for innovation and growth. However, policy needs to preserve the open Internet, address privacy concerns, and ensure access to competition. Digitally enabled innovation also requires new infrastructure such as broadband, spectrum, and new Internet addresses.
4. Foster talent and skills and optimize their use: Skills are a key challenge for innovation, with two out of three workers not having the skills to succeed in a technology-rich economy. A broad and inclusive skills strategy is therefore essential for innovation.
5. Improve the governance and implementation of policies for innovation: Finally, the impact of good innovation strategies depends on their governance and implementation, including the trust in government action and the commitment to learn from experience.
Events
RSA Winter Conference: Great Transformations – Recasting Regional Policy
London, UK, 19-20 November, 2015
This conference provides a platform for scholars across the globe to address great transformations taking place across our economic, political, and social spheres amidst heightened uneven development and inequality in a post-crisis era of ongoing market liberalisation, financialisation, global competition and changing patterns of regulation and governance. The world has continued to witness highly differentiated shifts in socio-economic relations in the recovery from the global financial crisis (GFC), with some places benefiting, while others have seen a worsening of problems. The inter-related processes of industrialization, urbanization, and regional and local development are now becoming increasingly complex and pose a major challenge, firstly for our conceptualization’s of regional and urban development and, secondly, for specifying appropriate policy-fixes to ‘hold down’ the global and provide the atmosphere for sustained economic growth.
DRUID Academy Conference 2016
Bordeaux, France, 13-15 January, 2016
The conference is open for all PhD students working within the broad field of economics and management of innovation, entrepreneurship and organizations. We invite papers aiming at enhancing our understanding of the dynamics of technological, structural and institutional change at the level of firms, industries, regions and nations. DRUID is the node for an open international network – new partners are most welcome. We encourage all PhD students to submit their research to the conference. Do not hesitate to apply even if you have not been in contact with DRUID previously.
Regional Studies Association Annual Conference 2016 – Building Bridges: Cities and Regions in a Transnational World
Graz, Austria, 3-6 April, 2016
Throughout history, cities and regions have been cornerstones of economic, social and cultural institution building and centres of communication and trade across borders of empires and nations. In a globalized world dominated by multi-level governance and declining economic and political significance of the nation-state, cities and regions are becoming ever more so important in building bridges across nations, supra-national unions, and even continents. These challenges surpass the usual aspects of integration: it is not sufficient to reduce barriers for the mobility of labour, goods, services and capital, to create a homogenous competitive environment, and a solid monetary system. What is needed in addition are more elements of a new regionalism, which is based on non-hierarchical relationships, on self-government, and on the creation of flexible alliances leading to interregional transnational cooperation. The development of a region is affected by its competitive and complementary relationships with other increasingly distant regions. These relationships have to be embedded in an overall structure of relations which encompass the purely economic ones and have strong social, cultural, legal and political dimensions. The objective of the conference is to initiate an interdisciplinary dialogue about the future of a transnational world of urban and regional cooperation. We welcome submissions from researchers, policy makers and practitioners working in all areas of regional analysis.
The Organization, Economics and Policy of Scientific Research
Torino, Italy, 9-10 May, 2016
The aim of the workshop is to bring together a small group of scholars interested in the analysis of the production and diffusion of scientific research from an economics, historical, organizational, and policy perspective. As in previous years, we aim to attract contributions from both junior and senior scholars; a minimum number of slots are reserved for junior researchers (PhD students or postdoc scholars who obtained their PhD in 2013 or later). Up to 18 papers will be selected from open submissions on the basis of peer review. The workshop aims at including papers form various streams of research developed in recent years in and around the area of public and private scientific research.
Regional Studies Association 2nd North American Conference: Cities and Regions: Managing Growth and Change
Atlanta, Georgia, 16-17 June, 2016
In the wake of the global financial crisis, cities have searched for new policies and practices capable of addressing major shifts in socio-economic relations at the urban and regional scale. These divergent and differentiated efforts have led to the intensification of underlying problems in some cities and a return to growth in others. Regional policies, particularly in the North American context, responded to economic challenges by adopting new technologies and new institutional and organizational forms to manage growth and change at the city scale. The result is a complex and uneven landscape of public and private actors delivering financial services, scaling-up supply chains, coordinating firm networks, diffusing process and material innovations, and organizing new forms of civic representation and participation. This conference provides a platform for researchers to address the effects of these policy, organizational, and institutional innovations and their impact on work, identity, governance, production networks, infrastructure investments, technology diffusion, and ultimately place. The conference will focus on the policy implications of emerging forms of governance and policy delivery relative to uneven development and inequality in a post-crisis era of ongoing market liberalization, financialization, and global competition.
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This newsletter is prepared by Jen Nelles.
Project manager is David A. Wolfe.