News from the IPL
RESEARCH
Firm Size and Payroll Adjustments: Exploring the Behaviour of Technology Firms During COVID-19
Steven Denney – Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Innovation Policy Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto
Using a recent Council of Canadian Innovators (CCI) survey of CEOs from Canadian headquartered technology firms, this policy brief determines whether payroll decisions differ by size of firm, with a special focus on scale-up firms (firms with 50+ employees). This brief provides evidence that firms who have grown past the threshold of 49 employees respond differently to the economic challenges posed by COVID-19 and may continue to do so. The differences in opinion by firm type/size underscores the point that not all technology firms will behave and react the same to the crisis or policy supports. Among those sampled, the analysis finds medium-size firms are those most vulnerable to making payroll adjustments. However, scale-ups are not similarly exposed. Large scale-ups,in particular,are more likely to keep people on payroll going forward, and both small and large scale-ups are less likely than medium-size firms to have already made payroll adjustments and expect further employment cuts.
The Problem of Innovation in Technoscientific Capitalism: Data Rentiership and the Policy Implications of Turning Personal Digital Data Into a Private Asset
Kean Birch, Margaret Chiappetta & Anna Artyushina, Policy Studies
This article is co-authored by IPL Associate Kean Birch. ABSTRACT: A spate of recent scandals concerning personal digital data illustrates the extent to which innovation and finance are thoroughly entangled with one another. The innovation-finance nexus is an example of an emerging dynamic in technoscientific capitalism in which innovation is increasingly driven by the pursuit of “economic rents”. Unlike innovation that delivers new products, services, and markets, innovation as rentiership is defined by the extraction and capture of value through different modes of ownership and control over resources and assets. This shift towards rentiership is evident in the transformation of personal digital data into a private asset. In light of this assetization, it is necessary to unpack how innovation itself might be a problem, rather than a solution to a range of global challenges. Our aim in this paper is to conceptualize this relationship between innovation, finance, and data rentiership, and examine the policy implications of this pursuit of economic rents as a deliberate research and innovation strategy in data-driven technology sectors.
INTERVIEW
Dr. Diana Hicks is a Professor in the School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology specializing in metrics for science and technology policy. Dr. Hicks delivered a presentation, “What does open science entail?”, to the IPL in February. Interview performed by Travis Southin on February 20, 2020. Transcribed by Zissis Hadjis.
In a sentence or two, describe your area of research. Why is it important and interesting to you? Why did you decide to pursue it?
I have always worked in science policy, often in bibliometrics, looking at science systems and how they work. One of the biggest results of that was the Leiden Manifesto on using metrics in research evaluation.
Are there any updates from your work or current projects that you can share?
At the moment, I’m looking at the question of who uses open access resources. What does the public actually do with science, and in particular, National Academy reports? Many people who use these reports are outside universities, using it for various professional reasons or for local municipal governance.
What impact do you hope your research can have?
I hope my research helps people value and foster a functioning, high quality information ecosystem that leads to better governance in Washington DC, but also throughout the country.
What are the biggest opportunities and challenges facing your area of research?
In terms of opportunities, there are always new data sources available in which to gather information. However, the challenges with that is having to be reskilled in order to use the new tools and techniques to be able to deal with these large datasets.
What do you think the innovation landscape will look like in 5 or 10 years?
Actually, I suspect not that much different. There’s a lot of stability, and the whole point of the innovation system is to be able to generate change and adapt to change. I suspect that the vehicles that we have for doing so will continue to serve us well.
What was the best book (or article) you’ve read recently? Why?
For fiction, I would say “The Overstory”, by Richard Powers. He’s a really good writer. Secondly, I also would like to highlight “Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology” by Kentaro Toyama because I’m very drawn to the “anti-Silicon Valley” writing at the moment. Some engineers think gadgets are going to solve the world’s problems, but the book goes into what kind of programs really work to affect change.
What advice would you give a new graduate student studying innovation?
Don’t just focus on learning new quantitative techniques! You can do good things with them, but you also have to understand the theory and the human side of the data. To be able to do something sensible with them (ie. Python, R, etc), you have to be able to ask interesting questions and draw correct conclusions from all those techniques.
Editor's Pick
Patterns of Innovation, Advanced Technology Use and Business Practices in Canadian Firms
Fernando Galindo-Ruedai, Fabien Vergeri, and Sylvain Ouelletii, OECD
This paper uses a distributed microdata analysis approach to map patterns of technology adoption in Canadian firms, exploring the relationship between technology adoption, business practices and innovation. Prepared by the OECD NESTI secretariat in collaboration with Statistics Canada, the paper leverages a unique enterprise database combining information on innovation, technology adoption and the use of selected business practices. This work suggests a number of possible pathways for selecting and defining priority technology and business practices for data collection and reporting, implementing recommendations in the 2018 Oslo Manual on enablers and objectives of business innovation, and identifying potential synergies between business innovation, management and ICT, and other surveys focused on various aspects of technology adoption.
Cities, Clusters & Regions
A Digital Future for Alberta: An Analysis of Digital Occupations in Alberta’s High-Growth Sectors
The Information and Communications Technology Council
In 2017, Alberta began a plan for diversification among many economic sectors in an attempt to ensure more sustainable, reliable and robust opportunities for growth. At the heart of these investments was a central focus on technology and its ability to propel both revenues and employment for the province. Anchored in primary evidence gathered from consultations with Albertan employers, and complemented by overall trend and data analysis, this study is an attempt to offer insight into the impact of technology and digital transformation on the Alberta labour force. With core digital occupations driving employment demand, this study forecasts critical employment trends for the top four high-growth sectors in the province until 2023.
UK Growth Centres Report Launched By Connected Places Catapult
Connected Places Catapult
This report by the UK Connected Places Catapult is authored by Centre for Cities, a non-partisan think tank. The report examines how proposed investments in research and development might be best directed to realize the government’s levelling up ambitions. The report begins by highlighting the characteristics which define the UK’s highest performing innovation economies, grouping the UK’s cities and largest towns into different ‘types’ – including all-rounders, university-led innovators, commercialisers and applied innovators. It then turns its attention to which places have the most potential to join the likes of London and Cambridge as innovation engines.
Innovation Policy
A Guide to Healthy Skepticism of Artificial Intelligence and Coronavirus
Alex Engler, The Brookings Institution
This report from The Brookings Institution’s Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology (AIET) Initiative is part of “AI Governance,” a series that identifies key governance and norm issues related to AI and proposes policy remedies to address the complex challenges associated with emerging technologies. The report notes that much of the “considerable news coverage about the ways artificial intelligence (AI) can combat the pandemic’s spread…has failed to be appropriately skeptical about the claims of AI’s value.” The report explores eight considerations for a skeptic’s approach to AI claims.
Statistics and Indicators
Kauffman Foundation Releases Second Report on New Indicators of Entrepreneurship
SSTI
The Kauffman Foundation recently released the second part of its new Indicators of Entrepreneurship series. This report utilizes new data from the Census Bureau to generate its New Employer Business indicators, which track trends in the emergence of new businesses with employees and the time it takes for these companies to make their first payroll. The series replaces the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurship series.
Policy Digest
Innovation Ecosystems: A Conceptual Review and a New Definition
Ove Granstrand & Marcus Holgersson, Techovation
This article reviews the received definitions of the innovation ecosystem concept, identifies key components of the concept, provides a new synthesized definition, and validates it with reference to three empirical examples.
The authors perform a systematic review of 120 publications on innovation ecosystems to identify 21 more or less unique definitions. The authors identified the following themes: actors, activities, artifacts, coevolution/co-specialization, and collaboration. The authors note that “innovation ecosystem definitions often place emphasis on collaboration/complements and actors, while less commonly so on competition/substitutes and artifacts” (p. 2). This yields “an unbalanced focus on complementarities, collaboration, and actors in received definitions” (p. 2). The authors propose the additional inclusion of competition, substitutes, and artifacts in conceptualizations of innovation ecosystems.
The authors present the following synthesized definition of an innovation ecosystem:
“An innovation ecosystem is the evolving set of actors, activities, and artifacts, and the institutions and relations, including complementary and substitute relations, that are important for the innovative performance of an actor or a population of actors” (p. 3).
The authors expand upon the definition as follows: “In this definition artifacts include products and services, tangible and intangible resources, technological and non-technological resources, and other types of system inputs and outputs, including innovations. An innovation ecosystem could in other words include an actor system with collaborative (complementary) and competitive (substitute) relations with or without a focal firm, and an artifact system with complementary and substitute relations” (p. 3).
The authors proceed to illustrate the validity of this definition with three empirical examples of innovation ecosystems:
-
The innovation ecosystems in video cassette recorders (VCRs)
-
The innovation ecosystems in mobile telecommunications
-
Apple’s innovation ecosystem
The authors summarize that each of these cases “illustrate the presence of all the defining characteristics of an innovation ecosystem as proposed in this article, including the presence of complementary as well as substitute relations in the sub-systems of actors, activities and artifacts, together with relations between them involving rights allocation through market transactions, including licensing rights, and non-market relations in form of externalities, especially positive network externalities, all governed by institutions” (p. 8).
Events
The Organisation, Economics and Policy of Scientific Research
THIS CONFERENCE HAS BEEN CANCELLED DUE TO CONCERNS ABOUT COVID-19 AND RECENT TRAVEL ADVISORIES. IT WILL BE RESCHEDULED FOR A FUTURE DATE
Munich, Germany, 23–24 April, 2020
The Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, the Technical University of Munich and BRICK-Collegio Carlo Alberto are organising the annual workshop “The Organisation, Economics and Policy of Scientific Research” at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. Submissions are accepted until 15 January 2020, with particular focus on: Evaluation of science policy; Role of gender and family in scientific research; Organising research activities in universities, PROs and private R&D labs, Spillovers from scientific research, Collaboration and research networks, Scientific careers and mobility, and the Role of ethics, trust and replicability in science.
Policies, Processes and Practices for Performance of Innovation Ecosystems (P4IE)
THIS CONFERENCE HAS BEEN CANCELLED AS OF MARCH 13, 2020 DUE TO CONCERNS ABOUT COVID-19 AND RECENT TRAVEL ADVISORIES. IT WILL BE RESCHEDULED FOR A FUTURE DATE.
Ottawa, Ontario, 12-13 May 2020
The Partnership For the Organization of Innovation and New Technologies is organizing the first ever ‘‘Policies, Processes and Practices for Performance of Innovation Ecosystems” (P4IE) international conference on 12-13 May 2020 in Ottawa. Organized around eight highly relevant tracks, the conference offers participants the opportunity to discuss the impact of various technologies, practices, processes and policies, on innovation ecosystems, and the best means by which to design collaborative environments. The goal of the conference is to explore ways to strengthen Canada’s innovation through innovation ecosystems.
THIS CONFERENCE HAS BEEN CANCELLED AS OF MARCH 13, 2020 DUE TO THE STATE OF EMERGENCY IN SPAIN.
Valencia, Spain, 14-15 May, 2020
The Polytechnic University of Valencia and the University of Valencia, in collaboration with the University of Padova and the University of Firenze, organize the 3rd International Workshop on Cluster Research. As in the past editions, the event aims to to bring together some of the world’s leading scholars working on clusters, networks, ecosystems, platforms and regions. The conference gathers scholars from economic geography, innovation studies, regional science, as well as those working on economics and management, sociology or network theory.
DRUID20 Silver Anniversary Conference
Copenhagen, Denmark, 15-17 June, 2020
THIS CONFERENCE HAS BEEN CANCELLED DUE TO CONCERNS ABOUT COVID-19 AND RECENT TRAVEL ADVISORIES.
DRUID celebrates 25 years as one of the world’s premier academic conferences on innovation and the dynamics of structural, institutional and geographic change. DRUID is proud to invite senior and junior scholars to participate and contribute with a paper to the DRUID20 SILVER ANNIVERSARY CONFERENCE, hosted by Copenhagen Business School. Presenting distinguished plenary speakers, a range of parallel paper sessions, and an attractive social program that celebrates DRUID’s 25 years, the conference aims at mapping theoretical, empirical and methodological advances, contributing novel insights, and help identifying scholarly positions, divisions, and common grounds in current scientific controversies within the field.
Regional Innovation Policies Conference
Aalborg, Denmark, 25-26 March 2021
Due to the COVID-19 outbreak the conference has been postponed to March 25 and 26, 2021 in Aalborg, Denmark. The conference will focus on regions in transformation – as well as transformations in regional innovation policy and new developments in methods for defining and analyzing regions. Submission deadline: 30th November 2020.
Canadian Science Policy Conference
Ottawa, Canada, 23-25 November, 2020
The CSPC 2020 call for panel proposals is now open. The 12th Canadian Science Policy Conference (CSPC 2020), will be held in Gatineau Quebec on November 23-25, 2020 at Hilton Lac-Leamy. Presenters are invited to submit proposals in a variety of presentation formats that revolve around any of the conference themes. Due to the unprecedented impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on individuals and organizations across Canada and the world, and to accommodate the community, CSPC is extending the panel proposal deadline by an additional four weeks, to May 15th, 2020.
Subscriptions and Comments
Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think will find it of value. We look forward to collaborating with you on this initiative. If you would like to comment on, or contribute to, the content, subscribe or unsubscribe, please contact us at ipl.munkschool@utoronto.ca.
This newsletter is prepared by Travis Southin.
Project manager is David A. Wolfe