The IPL newsletter: Volume 24, Issue 495

November 15, 2023

News from the IPL

NEWS

2023 Desmond Morton Research Excellence Lecture

Thursday, November 30, 2023, 1-3 pm (Lecture: 1-2 pm | Reception: 2-3 pm), Maanjiwe nendamowinan MN-3230, UTM
Register for the 2023 Desmond Morton Research Excellence Lecture! The Annual Desmond Morton Research Excellence Award recognizes outstanding achievement in research and scholarly activity by faculty members of the University of Toronto Mississauga. This year's recipient is Professor David Wolfe. A professor in the Department of Political Science at UTM and co-director of the Innovation Policy Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, Professor Wolfe is also the founder and inaugural Director of the Master of Urban Innovation Program in IMI. His research interests include the impact of digital technologies, innovation policy in Canada, and the role of governance institutions in local and regional economic development. This event will be held-in person and will include a lecture, Q&A period, and reception. All are welcome to attend in the Collaborative Digital Research Space for Professor Wolfe’s lecture, in which he’ll discuss the return of industrial policy, Canada’s failed innovation strategy and the role of governance relations in place-based development policy. Registration is now open

2023 Kauffman Best Paper Award winners:

A paper co-authored by IPL Affiliated faculty member Tara Vinodrai has been selected as the 2023 Kauffman Best Paper Award. The article 𝘔𝘢𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘴𝘱𝘢𝘤𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘮𝘢𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨: 𝘌𝘷𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘊𝘢𝘯𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘢𝘯 𝘮𝘶𝘯𝘪𝘤𝘪𝘱𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘦𝘴 was co-authored by Brenton Nader, University of Waterloo and Patrick Casey, GSP Group. The purpose of this award program is to encourage innovative, insightful and timely research in city, community, urban or regional planning that is relevant to questions related to entrepreneurs and their firms as well as relevant to practitioners and policymakers who want to promote entrepreneurship.

IPL SPEAKER SERIES

Evolutionary Economic Geography – Realising Potential and Learning Opportunities in Regional Innovation Systems

November 16, 2023 | 4:00PM - 6:00PM Boardroom at the Observatory, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, 315 Bloor Street W., Toronto, ON
Dieter F. Kogler is an Associate Prof. in Economic Geography at University College Dublin. His research focus is on the geography of innovation and evolutionary economic geography, with particular emphasis on knowledge production and diffusion, and processes related to technological change, innovation, and economic growth. The Evolutionary Economic Geography (EEG) paradigm is quickly gaining momentum and recent contributions highlight several potential avenues for reimagining traditional approaches to regional innovation policymaking. Moving away from simple benchmarking exercises, which only continue to re-establishing already known static rankings with increasingly complex indicators, the aim of advanced EEG-based concepts and analysis should be to: a) establish development alternatives that rest on regional potential as indicated in the configuration of present capabilities, and b) to link those alternatives to forward-thinking strategies that consider regional innovation systems in the context of the global framework of knowledge production and diffusion. Here particular attention needs to be given to regional branching opportunities that derive from knowledge diversification processes driven by the collaboration patterns and location choices of individuals and firms.

The Silk Road of Science

November 30, 2023 | 4:30PM - 6:30PM, Boardroom at the Observatory, Munk School, 315 Bloor Street W. Toronto, ON
Christopher Esposito, Postdoctoral Fellow, Anderson School of Management, UCLA
Dr. Esposito develops a new framework to study the development and autonomy of national scientific enterprises. The method applies machine learning models to author information on 4.4 million scientific articles involving international collaboration to identify the project leaders (as opposed to the supporting actors) of each article. Aggregating leaders to their countries-of-residence allows the authors to determine the hierarchical position of power of each country in the global collaboration network. They use their framework to analyze recent changes in the hierarchical position of Chinese science. They conclude that the narrowing of the China-U.S. leadership gap and the strong leadership position China has established in much of Asia and Africa indicate that China’s scientific enterprise is sophisticated and territorially distributed. As a consequence, policymakers in the U.S. and other Western countries have less leverage in affecting China’s scientific development than is commonly believed.

RESEARCH

Who gets left behind by left behind places?

Dylan Connor, Aleksander Berg, Tom Kemeny, Peter J Kedron, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society
This article documents that children growing up in places left behind by today’s economy experience lower levels of social mobility as adults. Using a longitudinal database that tracks over 20,000 places in the USA from 1980 to 2018, the authors identify two kinds of left behind places: the ‘long-term left behind’ that have struggled over long periods of history; and ‘recently left-behind’ places where conditions have deteriorated. Compared to children of similar baseline household income levels, the article finds that exposure to left behind places is associated with a 4-percentile reduction in adult income rank. Children fare considerably better when exposed to places where conditions are improving. These outcomes vary across prominent social and spatial categories and are compounded when nearby places are also experiencing hardship. Based on these findings, the authors argue that left behind places are having ‘scarring effects’ on children that could manifest long into the future, exacerbating the intergenerational challenges faced by low-income households and communities. Improvements in local economic conditions and outmigration to more prosperous places are, therefore, unlikely to be full remedies for the problems created by left behind places.

Recognizing students’ contributions to regional economies and innovation ecosystems

Mark Lowey, Research Money
IPL Affiliated Faculty Member Shiri Breznitz recently contributed to this article discussing research on the contribution of universities to regional economies and innovation ecosystems. The article discusses recent IPL research by Shiri Breznitz and IPL Associate Dr. Qiantao Zhang (now at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in China) of entrepreneurship at nine accelerators at the University of Toronto.

Editor's Pick

Industrial Policy with Conditionalities: A Taxonomy and Sample Cases

Mariana Mazzucato and Dani Rodrik, UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose
In the context of a shift towards longer-term, public-value-oriented economic thinking, there is a real opportunity to reimagine the contracts that structure public-private relationships. Similar reasoning could also be relevant to the relationship between different public entities, such as the relationship between a country’s state-owned enterprise and the Treasury: benefits to the SOE can be structured with conditions to make sure the SOE directs its investments in particular ways, shares knowledge, makes products/services accessible, etc. Redesigning these contracts means redesigning the direction of the economy from the ground up. To succeed, modern industrial policies must be deliberately sustainable, welfare-oriented, and innovation-led; coordinated as a holistic package; and implemented cooperatively across government agencies and with the private and third sectors. The conditionalities written into contracts are a key site for realizing these aims.

Cities & Regions

NSF launches pilot to assess the impact of strategic investments on regional jobs

NSF
The U.S. National Science Foundation announced a new three-year, $4.5 million pilot designed to develop novel approaches to assess the impact of investments made by the agency's Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (TIP) on regional firms and jobs in key technology areas. The pilot will initially focus on artificial intelligence and electric vehicles in Ohio to demonstrate the feasibility and value of the approach. The project, Industries of Ideas: A prototype system for measuring the effects of TIP investments on firms and jobs, led by research teams at the University of Michigan, The Ohio State University and the Social Science Research Council, will develop people-centric methods for following the movement of ideas from federally funded research to the marketplace by identifying businesses that employ people trained in deep technology skills through these investments along with early workforce indicators.

EDA awards $53 million in Build to Scale awards to strengthen regional innovation economies

Jason Rittenberg, SSTI
The Economic Development Administration (EDA) announced 60 organizations receiving $53 million from the Build to Scale program today. This is the program’s 10th and largest award cycle, following years of consistent appropriations growth from Congress. The Build to Scale program, which includes the Venture Challenge and Capital Challenge, funds the launch or expansion of programs that address regional needs to achieve a more robust innovation economy.

Statistics

Business innovation and growth support, 2021

Statistics Canada
In 2021, as Canada recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government provided over 33,000 businesses with innovation and growth support valued at $4.5 billion through 134 federal programs. In partnership with the Treasury Board Secretariat, Statistics Canada produces information about these programs via the Business Innovation and Growth Support (BIGS) database, which is now available for the 2021 reference year. Across Canada, BIGS mainly went to small- and medium-sized enterprises, which accounted for 96% of all recipients in 2021. The BIGS database defines small and medium enterprises as those with fewer than 500 employees. These enterprises received over three-quarters (77%) of the total support value.

Chart: Which clean energy sector is creating the most new jobs?

Maria Virginia Olano, Canary Media
This post illustrates the technological distribution of the more than 200,000 jobs that have been announced since the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). More than half of these jobs — over 100,000 — are expected to be in battery manufacturing, mostly for electric vehicles. The battery jobs will be spread across 31 states, with the highest concentration in the emerging Battery Belt.

Innovation Policy

Tax Court disqualifies government loan spending from SR&ED, with potentially devastating implications for Canadian tech

Jared Lindzon, BetaKit
This article summarizes the impact of a recent ruling by the Tax Court of Canada on eligible expenses vis-a-vis Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED) incentives. In late May the Supreme Court of Canada dismissed an appeal application seeking to overturn an earlier decision by the Tax Court, which deemed below-market federal loans a form of government assistance, excluding them from being used in conjunction with SR&ED. As such, Canadian organizations may see some of what previously qualified for SR&ED benefits no longer eligible for the widely used tax incentive program if those expenses were paid for via a low or no-interest loan from a federal institution.

U.S.-China EV Race Heats Up with Forthcoming Guidance on 'Foreign Entity of Concern' Rules

Jane Nakano and Quill Robinson, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)
This article discusses potential impacts of forthcoming guidance from the U.S. Treasury Department on what constitutes a “Foreign Entity of Concern” (FEOC) in regards to eligibility for Inflation Reduction Act incentives. This will have significant implications for U.S. EV supply-chain development, EV deployment, and the U.S. auto industry’s ties with China. For example, the Ford Motor Company’s recent suspension of its planned EV battery manufacturing plant in Michigan, which entailed a battery licensing arrangement with the Chinese company Contemporary Ampler Technology Limited (CATL), exemplifies this challenge.

Ready for Removal: A Decisive Decade for Canadian Leadership in Carbon Dioxide Removal

Carbon Removal Canada
This report details the economic benefits and climate imperative of responsibly scaling up Canada’s nascent carbon dioxide removal (CDR) industry. CDR, the intentional process of removing CO₂ from the earth’s atmosphere and permanently storing it, is essential to reach Canada’s climate goals. Carbon Removal Canada’s inaugural report, which includes analysis from Navius Research Inc., estimates that scaling up this emerging industry could create more than 300,000 green jobs and add $143 billion to Canada’s GDP by 2050.

Policy Digest

New report identifies pathways to strengthen U.S. competitiveness in key technology areas

U.S. National Science Foundation
A network of universities funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation completed a yearlong, nearly $4 million pilot effort with the release of a report – Securing America’s Future: A Framework for Critical Technology Assessment– on how to enable timely situational awareness of global technology and production capabilities, rigorous methods to quantify the potential value of innovations, and tools for quantifying opportunities across national objectives. A recording of the report's launch event is available here.

Over the last year, the National Network for Critical Technology Assessment, sponsored by NSF, brought together leading scholars from across the country to pilot analytical approaches to assessing technology maturity, trajectories and impact that can drive development of data-driven options for future government investments. The findings of this initial work set the foundations for the Assessing and Predicting Technology Outcomes program launched this summer. Through this novel program, NSF seeks to forge a better understanding of and ability to predict advancements in a specific technology's capabilities, production and use. The program will use new data sources coupled with emerging technologies, such as machine learning and predictive modeling to forecast outcomes of technology investments. The network looked at four technologies at varying levels of maturity: artificial intelligence, semiconductors, biopharmaceuticals and energy and critical materials.

Crosscutting efforts also focused on building systematic mechanisms to assess U.S. global competitiveness in key technology areas. Specifically, the report put forward the following recommendations for bolstering crosscutting technology assessment capability:

Leveraging the best of the nation’s analytic capabilities to address the full portfolio of CTA challenges, opportunities, and needs will require integration of capabilities across a range of performers from academia, industry, and nonprofits such as FFRDCs.
To scale this year’s project and performer selection and orchestration activities, area-specific program managers should have deep contextual (technical and industrial) expertise in their topic area, experience in a diversity of institutions (academia, industry, and government), and an ability to understand leading analytic capabilities. There is a shortage of this type of human capital.
To ensure policy relevance and impact of selected projects, program managers should be charged with (i) scanning globally and domestically for US challenges and gaps and (ii) scanning the nation’s top talent for analytics to address those challenges, identifying multiple stakeholder agencies to partner with on specific analytic projects, and ensuring government transition partners for the outcomes.
To simultaneously maintain relevance to policy and develop buy-in from relevant government stakeholders in the legislative and executive branches, members of Congress, the executive branch, and government agencies should be allowed to cofund analytic undertakings.
The lack of a field of critical technology assessment means there is also a lack of human capital with the skills necessary both to perform the analytics needed for national technology strategy development and to serve as program managers of the work conducted across the country in each area. New education programs and professional fellowships are needed to invest in building this human capital

Events

EVENTS

Wick #11, PhD Workshop in Economics of Innovation, Complexity, and Knowledge

December 13-14, 2023, the Collegio Carlo Alberto, Turin, Italy.
This workshop is organized by students of the Vilfredo Pareto Doctoral Program in Economics - University of Turinjointly with Brick, Collegio Carlo Alberto and INET-YSI. The aim of the workshop is to bring together young researchers from different disciplines and provide them with an opportunity to discuss their works. The main topics of the workshop broadly fall on the Economics of Knowledge and Innovation, Science and Complexity. The event will feature keynote contributions from Prof. Tom Broekel (University of Stavanger Business School), Prof. Stan Metcalfe (University of Manchester) and Prof. Reinhilde Veugelers (KULeuven, Bruegel, PIIE). The application deadline is October 10th.

GeoInno 2024

January 10th – 12th, 2024, The University of Manchester, UK
The Manchester Institute of Innovation Research at the Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester, is organising the 7th Geography of Innovation Conference. The Geography of Innovation Conference provides a forum for discussion to scholars interested in scientific, policy and strategic issues concerning the spatial dimension of innovation activities. In line with the six previous editions of the conference, held in Saint Etienne (France) in 2012, Utrecht (Netherlands) in 2014, Toulouse (France) in 2016, in Barcelona (Spain) in 2018, in Stavanger (Norway) in 2020, and most recently in 2022 in Milan (Italy), the main objective of this event is to bring together some of the world’s leading scholars from a variety of disciplines ranging from economic geography and regional science, to economics and management science, sociology and network theory, and political and planning sciences. You can read more about the conference themes and scope on the Call for Papers page.

2024 Industry Studies Association Annual Conference

June 13-15, 2024, Sacramento, CA, USA
This year's ISA conference is titled Empowering Community Wellbeing: Clean Energy, Sustainability and Industrial Strategy and will be held at California State University, Sacramento. In the heart of the world’s largest subnational economy, California, the Industry Studies Association proudly presents its annual conference with a theme that resonates with the future of our planet and communities. The conference will explore the dynamic interplay between California's pioneering efforts in clean energy and sustainability and their profound impacts on industrial strategy and community wellbeing around the world. Call for Paper and Panel Submissions

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This newsletter is prepared by Travis Southin.
Project manager is David A. Wolfe