News from the IPL
ANNOUNCEMENTS
White House Announces Four Big Data Regional Innovation Hubs
SSTI Weekly Digest
As a part of the Obama administration’s Big Data Research and Development Initiative, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced four awards this week, totaling more than $5 million, to establish four Big Data Regional Innovation Hubs (BD Hubs). The four BD Hubs divide the U.S. into regional collaborations, each focused on different Big Data challenges. In addition to the BD Hubs, NSF also announced this week the release of a new solicitation (due February 25, 2016) for projects that will leverage the BD Hubs’ data – the BD Spokes initiative.
GM Announces a New Automotive Innovation Outpost at Communitech
entrevestor.com
GM Canada announced on Tuesday that it has formed an innovation research outpost at Communitech among other research initiatives in the Kitchener-Waterloo area. In a speech at the Canadian Club in Toronto, GM Canada president and managing director Steve Carlisle also said the Canadian subsidiary of General Motors Corp. will support the University of Waterloo’s Engineering Faculty by providing $1 million to fund a Research Chair in advanced materials. The company will also sponsor engineering student Capstone design projects involving software development, which Carlisle said is key to GM Canada’s work on “the connected car.” The move reflects a growing trend in automotive innovation. As software plays a greater role in modern automobiles, corporations are searching for more new innovation from startups and university researchers. In fact, Carlisle called on Canada to play a greater role in researching the car of the future.
Editor's Pick
National Research and Innovation Councils as an Instrument of Innovation Governance: Characteristics and Challenges
Sylvia Schawaag Serger, Emily Wise and Erik Arnold, VINNOVA
In response to a growing need for strengthening the coordination, inclusiveness and, ultimately, the effectiveness of innovation policy governance, numerous countries have established research and innovation policy councils. However, their structural characteristics (e.g. mandate, composition, resources, etc.) differ significantly between countries. There is a general lack of research and comparative analysis of innovation councils – and, in particular, on their role and impact as an instrument of innovation governance. This paper provides an overview of 14 national research and innovation councils from Europe, North America and Asia. It describes and compares them and explores how countries are trying to address the evolving demands on innovation governance in designing or redesigning their innovation councils. The international comparison shows that a national council’s influence or impact is not only determined by its mandate or its composition– i.e. the extent to which the council is composed of high-level decision makers as opposed to ‘merely’ experts in their own right. Rather, there are many factors – acting in combination with one another – that contribute to councils’ impact on innovation policy.
Innovation Policy
Building Resilience: Innovation Ecosystems as the Foundation for Growth in the 21st Century
Waterloo Innovation Summit
In September the Waterloo Innovation Summit (WIS) brought together over 280 senior public- and private-sector decision-makers and leaders to discuss the development of effective innovation ecosystems. Over the course of three days, policymakers, investors, startup support organizations, anchor companies and entrepreneurs shared best practice and visions for the future. This report highlights three key themes that emerged as central during the summit. These are Foundations for Growth, Scaling Up, and Embracing Risk and Disruption. This report provides a brief overview of each theme as well as links to supporting reading material and related WIS insights.
Twenty Challenges for Innovation Studies
Ben Martin, SPRU
With the field of innovation studies now half a century old, the occasion has been marked by several studies looking back to identify the main advances made over its lifetime. Starting from a list of 20 advances over the field’s history, this discussion paper sets out 20 challenges for coming decades. The intention is to prompt a debate within the innovation studies community on what are, or should be, the key challenges for us to take up, and more generally on what sort of field we aspire to be. It is argued that the empirical focus of our studies has failed to keep pace with the fast changing world and economy, especially the shift from manufacturing to services and the increasingly urgent need for sustainability. Moreover, the very way we conceptualize, define, operationalize and analyse ‘innovation’ seems somewhat rooted in the past, leaving us less able to grapple with other less visible or ‘dark’ forms of innovation.
Comparative Study on Research Policy: Final Report
Parimal Patel, Nicholas Jagger and Rie Nemoto, SPRU
In most OECD countries governments spend large amounts of resources on science, technology and innovation. They do this either by direct funding of research or through supporting R&D and innovation within firms. An important component of government expenditures on research is directed at science and technology to address social needs and goals. The underlying rationale is that addressing such goals is the key to realizing future economic growth. This requires advances in basic research and technological developments that companies left to themselves may not be willing to fund. In recent years this function of research policy has been articulated under the notion of grand societal challenges. One of the aims of this report is to examine the extent to which research policies in different countries are based on this vision of addressing such challenges. Additionally the report examines the extent to which this has resulted in specific policies and funding priorities.
International Data Flows: Promoting Digital Trade in the 21st Century
Robert D. Atkinson, ITIF
Global free trade in data is under “serious threat” from protectionist policies that are balkanizing the 21st century economy by limiting cross-border data flows, ITIF President Robert Atkinson argued in testimony last week before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet. Atkinson urged U.S. policymakers to protect and promote free trade in data by building on the progress of the Trans-Pacific Partnership while alleviating international tensions around legitimate law enforcement and national security concerns.
Shortchanging Small Business: How Big Businesses Dominate State Economic Development Incentives
Goodjobsfirst.org
Despite the important role that small- and medium-sized businesses play in job creation and economic growth, economic development incentives are consistently awarded to large companies, according to this report. In an analysis of more than 4,200 economic development incentive awards from 16 programs across 14 states, large companies received anywhere between 80 percent and 96 percent of total dollar values. Reallocating these types of tax-break deals would mean little for small businesses. As an alternative, states should reform their incentive rules by tightening eligibility to exclude large recipients, or at the very least, implementing safeguards such as dollar caps per deal, dollar caps per job and dollar caps per company, according to the report,. States could then use the resulting savings to better fund public goods (e.g., education, transportation, and job training) that benefit all employers and small businesses.
Cities, Clusters & Regions
A Roadmap for Economic Resilience: The Bay Area Regional Economic Strategy
Bay Area Council
The Bay Area is a global economic powerhouse. It is the model high-tech innovation hub, spawning generations of the world’s most iconic brands—companies like Intel, Apple, Tesla and Google—and innovative products and technologies. It hosts high concentrations of federal and private research labs driving radical breakthroughs in science and engineering; attracts nearly half of all venture capital invested in the United States; and has developed a diverse network of highly specialized business services that support the innovation economy. Its universities are among the best in the world. The region’s population of early adopters helps drive technological advance and new applications of technology that help improve communities and lives. And yet, for all its strengths, the Bay Area lacks any cohesive and comprehensive regional economic strategy for sustaining economic growth, weathering business cycles and supporting shared prosperity across the region. Given the regional nature of the economy, its labor pool, housing sheds, job centers and commute flows, viable solutions must reflect a regional perspective. This report highlights the importance of thinking regionally and proposes some areas for collaboration.
Statistics & Indicators
Gross Domestic Expenditures on Research and Development in Canada (GERD), the Provinces and Territories
Statistics Canada
Gross domestic expenditure on research and development (GERD) is a statistical series, constructed by adding together the intramural expenditures on R&D as reported by the performing sectors. As a term used by OECD Member countries, it is defined as total intramural expenditure on R&D performed on the national territory during a given period. GERD includes R&D performed within a country and funded from abroad but excludes payments for R&D performed abroad.
Policy Digest
Current State of the Financial Technology Ecosystem in the Toronto Region
Dan Breznitz, Shiri Breznitz and David A. Wolfe, Innovation Policy Lab
This report, commissioned by the Toronto Financial Services Alliance (TFSA), states that although there is great potential in the region, there is no true financial technology (Fintech) ecosystem and various factors are inhibiting its development – this comes at a cost to the region’s overall economic growth. The report’s findings led the authors to make recommendations on how to support Toronto’s financial services industry and the Fintech sector, and to establish the Toronto region as a global Fintech hub.
The key findings from the report include:
- Despite having the necessary components, the lack of strong connections between Fintech firms and financial institutions is undermining our ability to create an effective ecosystem to drive economic growth.
- While progress is being made, Canadian financial institutions do not act as true partners to Fintech start-ups to the same extent that other leading global centres do – where relationships do exist they tend to be located at the margins of the financial institutions’ main operations, in incubators or accelerators.
- The consequence of this disconnect is that the successful Fintech firms in the region become disruptors: they create products and strategies that do not require the banks as partners and customers, and instead become competitors of the banks.
- Canadian banks may be more vulnerable to unbundling and disintermediation than has been assumed; Canada’s regulatory environment provided an effective ‘moat’ around the banks to weather the financial storm in 2007-08, but this protection has made the banks slower to react to the emerging challenges posed by the Fintech start-ups than in other global centres.
- Also, current regulations make it very difficult to undertake the low-level-rapid-experimentation that is necessary to develop safe, useful Fintech products – even what are considered the most basic Fintech offerings such as crowd-sourcing and loans cannot be developed and offered in Canada without the participation of a licensed bank.
- A critical element that is missing in Toronto is the presence of large, inexpensive incubator centres within the financial district, offering basic services with high connectivity at highly discounted rates. While a number of incubators exist, they are either more expensive than their counterparts in London and New York, are located far away from the financial industry or are not yet working collaboratively as they need to.
- Although the federal and provincial governments have made efforts to increase the supply of seed and early venture capital to start-ups, there is still a shortage – a more direct approach through grants or conditionally repayable loans should be considered as policy reform by government.
The information gathered in this report provides the basis for the development of a strategic vision for the region and an experimental evolutionary growth strategy based on a series of interventions. The report defines a vision for how the Toronto Fintech ecosystem can use the experimental steps as a basis for determining what interventions work best and which are likely to prove most effective in taking the financial services cluster to the next stage of development.
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.