The IPL newsletter: Volume 25, Issue 522

March 3, 2025

News from the IPL

EVENTS

US Politics and Big Tech Power: Past, Present, and Future

How did the US tech sector and its leaders become so extraordinarily wealthy, market-dominant, and politically consequential in the US and around the world? This talk places the prominent role that US tech leaders and companies are playing in the second Trump era in historical perspective, tracing the evolution of the decades-long relationship between Silicon Valley and Washington DC and the political and economic transformations this relationship has wrought.

About the speaker - Margaret O’Mara is a historian of the modern United States. She writes and teaches about the growth of the high-tech economy, the history of American politics, and the connections between the two.

Prof. O'Mara is the author of two acclaimed books on the history of the modern technology industry: The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America (Penguin Press, 2019) and Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search For The Next Silicon Valley(Princeton, 2005). She also is a historian of the American presidency and author of Pivotal Tuesdays: Four Elections that Shaped the Twentieth Century (Penn Press, 2015). She is a coauthor of the widely used United States history textbook, The American Pageant (Cengage) and is an editor of the Politics and Society in Modern America series at Princeton University Press. Her byline has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, WIRED, MIT Technology Review, The American Prospect, and other national and international publications.

Date: Tuesday, March 18, 2025

Time: 4:30pm – 6:00pm ET

Location: In-person: Campbell Conference Facility, Munk School, 1 Devonshire Place, Toronto & Online via Zoom

RESEARCH

The Uneven Heartland: A Look at Household Wealth in the Midwest and Southeast

Ana Hernández Kent, Tom Kemeny, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
This paper is co-authored by IPL Affiliated Faculty member Tom Kemeny. Understanding household wealth trends is important for getting a pulse on the economic health and stability of a community. Wealth can be used to invest in oneself and one’s family, meet future needs, provide access to opportunities, and cushion the impact of unexpected financial shocks. Wealth provides a more complete picture of financial well-being than income alone, but until recently, household wealth estimates have been available at only a national level. Having estimates of local wealth enables communities and organizations to place resources to build financial stability where they are most needed.The authors used the publicly available files from the Geographic Wealth Inequality Database, or GEOWEALTH-US, to look at local wealth estimates. Using those estimates, they found that there are pockets of both prosperity and financial insecurity within communities. High- and low-wealth areas can exist within a few miles. Further, significant and rising wealth inequality exists. This blog post focuses on seven states: Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee. All of Arkansas and portions of the other states make up the Eighth Federal Reserve District.

Editor's Pick

Policy capacities for mission-oriented innovation policy: A case study of UKRI and the industrial strategy challenge fund

Julie McLaren & Rainer Kattel, Technological Forecasting and Social Change
A new generation of transformative innovation policies, including a reimagined ‘mission’ approach, centre around tackling societal challenges. Their emphasis on directionality, coordination of different actors and policy mixes goes beyond standard science, technology, and innovation (STI), engaging wider policy and other domains. Whilst missions have become steadily popular and there is growing research on their design, there is much to understand about how such models are implemented in practice. A relative gap in the literature is how science, technology and innovation (STI) organisations develop the policy capacities and capabilities to deliver missions in context. This article provides a case study on how UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) fared whilst implementing the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund (ISCF). It finds that the policy capacities for missions were not fully present within UKRI and notes several tensions as the organisation worked to develop its capabilities for implementing missions. The paper makes recommendations for how funders can enhance those policy capacities and suggestions for how mission-oriented innovation policy analysis might be developed.

Cities & Regions

From strugglers to superstars: assessing the roles of European regions in knowledge flows

Rodrigo Viseu Cardoso, Constance Uyttebrouck & Marcin Dąbrowski, Regional Studies
This paper develops a typology of European regions according to their role in knowledge exchange networks. Knowledge flows are critical economic assets, but it is essential to qualify as well as to quantify them to understand how they reflect regional inequalities and regional roles in networks. Using Horizon 2020 partnership data, we perform a cluster analysis of European NUTS-2 regions using multiple flow indicators and derive five types of engagement in knowledge flows. We then explore the resulting regional ‘flow profiles’ and clarify the drivers and barriers to becoming a high-performing knowledge region, providing valuable insights for regional policymakers and planners.

Statistics

More eggs, more baskets: Reducing Canada’s vulnerability to U.S. tariffs should start in the communities most affected

Rachel Samson, Ricardo Chejfec, IRPP
This report situates Canada's response to the US tariffs within the context of data on its current dependency on exports to the United States. The authors note that "Canada may not be able to control what the U.S. does, but we can start to do the work needed to reduce the economic leverage the U.S. has over us. While buying Canadian can help, our internal market is not big enough to support our economy. Diversifying the countries we export to and the products we export will be critical."

Useful Stats: Higher education R&D steadily increased in the last decade, but not all fields shared the wealth

Conor Gowder, SSTI
Higher education R&D (HERD) expenditures in the United States have steadily increased over time. They’ve soared past $100 billion in the most recent data year, fiscal year (FY) 2023, growing in every state. However, the gains are not shared equally in all fields of research. SSTI analyzed HERD Survey data, finding that in the 10 FYs since 2013, science R&D fields, led by the life sciences, were responsible for the largest dollar growths. In contrast, non-S&E fields, led by education, experienced the largest relative growth. SSTI has examined these shifts over the past decade at the national level and broken down expenditures by R&D field at the state and institutional level for FY 2023. This edition of Useful Stats provides the resulting comprehensive picture of HERD expenditures by R&D field.

How effective are R&D tax incentives? Reconciling micro and macro evidence

Silvia Appelt, Matej Bajgar, Chiara Criscuolo and Fernando Galindo-Rueda, Centre for Economic Performance
Recent firm-level studies find R&D tax incentives to be much more effective at stimulating firms' R&D investment than what aggregate analyses indicate. Based on a distributed analysis of official R&D survey and administrative tax relief micro-data for 19 OECD countries, we show that two factors can reconcile these contrasting results. Firstly, a limited uptake of R&D tax incentives in most countries makes aggregate studies underestimate the effectiveness of R&D tax incentives. Secondly, R&D tax incentives are (much) less effective for large and R&D-intensive firms, which account for a small share of R&D-performing firms but most aggregate R&D tax relief, making firm-level studies overstate the aggregate effectiveness of R&D tax incentives.

Innovation Policy

A Clean Industrial Deal for competitiveness and decarbonisation in the EU

The European Commission
The Commission recently unveiled the Clean Industrial Deal, "a bold business plan to support the competitiveness and resilience of our industry. The Deal will accelerate decarbonisation, while securing the future of manufacturing in Europe." The Deal focuses mainly on two closely linked sectors: i) Energy-intensive industries as they require urgent support to decarbonise and electrify. The sector faces high energy costs, unfair global competition and complex regulations, harming its competitiveness. ii) Clean Tech is at the heart of future competitiveness and growth as well as crucial for industrial transformation. Circularity is also a central element of the Deal, reflecting the need to maximise EU's limited resources and reduce overdependencies on third country suppliers for raw materials. The Deal includes measures strengthening the entire value chain. It serves as a framework to tailor action in specific sectors. The Commission will present an Action Plan for the automotive industry in March and an Action Plan on steel and metals in Spring. Other tailored actions are planned for the chemical and clean tech industry.

The politics of missions: a gloomy perspective

Francesco Molica, Science and Public Policy
This article discusses the so far understudied role of politics in the development of transformative innovation policies (TIPs) and mission-oriented innovation policies (MOIPs). The topic is explored through four dimensions foreshadowing critical bottlenecks and obstacles which are somewhat neglected by the current scholarly discussion around TIPs and MOIPs. The first dimension concerns the relationship to the historical time of different political visions, affecting their inclination towards the transformative ambition of TIPs and MOIPs. The second pertains to the exercise of power and its relation to TIPs and MOIPs’ emphasis on distributed agency and participation. The third addresses the capacity to deliver policy changes, a key precondition for TIPs and MOIPs. Finally, the fourth dimension relates to how political systems deal with diverse values and beliefs, essential for the experimental nature of TIPs and MOIPs. The article concludes that the current trend towards conservatism, centralization, and political polarization in many advanced economies challenges the effective adoption and deployment of TIPs and MOIPs.

Policy Digest

2025 annual report on research, innovation and technological performance in Germany

The Commission of Experts for Research and Innovation
The Commission of Experts for Research and Innovation (Expertenkommission Forschung und Innovation - EFI) advises the German Federal Government and presents an annual report on research, innovation and technological performance in Germany.

The EFI's R&I Dashboard can be viewed under the R&I Dashboard item in the main menu and download indicators on Germany's technological performance. This enables access to the core indicators updated for the 2025 reporting year and the new R&I monitoring on Germany's competitive position in selected technology areas such as artificial intelligence, microelectronics and biotechnology

The 2025 report provides advice on the following general themes:

Where We Stand: Economic Development Weak and R&I System Under Pressure
Germany’s economic development is worrying. In terms of growth momentum and research and innovation (R&I), Germany is in most cases lagging far behind the leading major industrialized nations of China, Japan, South Korea and the USA and below the EU average.

20th Legislative Period: R&I Policy Nowhere Near the Proclaimed ‘German Pace’
In view of the grand societal challenges, the Federal Government of the 20th legislative period has committed itself to the goal of driving forward economic and social transformation through digitalization and decarbonization. In doing so, it left no doubt that research and innovation (R&I) and, specifically, a reorientation of German R&I policy are of vital importance for achieving this goal. However, the implementation of such a reorganized R&I policy was hampered by a fundamental deficit: slowness.

21st Legislative Period: Making R&I Policy More Impactful
An efficient R&I system is a key factor for the development of internationally competitive companies, for the transformation towards an environmentally friendly economy, for sovereignty in key enabling and future technologies and for the digital transformation. The German R&I system currently does not adequately fulfil these demands. R&I policy in the coming legislative period is therefore required to take measures to strengthen this system. Although R&I policy has already taken on this task in recent years, it lacks impact in many areas. The Commission of Experts considers it necessary to further develop the policy approach of the New Mission Orientation, to establish adequate governance structures for R&I policy, to take a closer look at the effectiveness and efficiency of policy measures and to create general conditions that are more conducive to innovation.

Industrial Policy
If vertical industrial policy measures are used in addition to horizontal measures, they should be primarily focused on potentially high-growth and research-intensive sectors to ensure long-term success and generate spillover effects. Vertical industrial policy measures should only fulfil a catalytic function and not provide companies with long-term support. As with the New Mission Orientation, the aim is to create a stimulus and then to discontinue support. Good industrial policy is characterized by the fact that it promotes entrepreneurial activity. It should primarily facilitate the creation and growth of new companies and largely hold back on supporting established companies

The report also focuses on the following technology areas:

- Transformative Structural Change through Digitalization
and Decarbonization
- Quantum Technologies
- Innovation in the Water Industry

Events

OPPORTUNITIES

Derrick Rossi Innovation Fund

The University of Toronto (U of T) Innovations & Partnerships Office (IPO) is hosting a call for applications for the Derrick Rossi Innovation Fund, which supports proof-of-concept research projects focused on accelerating the implementation and/or commercialization of high potential, cutting-edge research, with the promise of significant socio-economic impacts. The fund provides up to $300,000 over two years. A Notice of Intent (NOI) is due on February 10, 2025 and the application deadline is March 17, 2025.

Call for application for a fellowship for the project “Science technology relationships in the development of AI in the health sector”

The application for this University of Torino position must be submitted exclusively online, using the form available here: https://forms.gle/NHKw4Nnhta7Mew4BA .Applicants are advised that once they receive the application registration form via email, they must complete the transmission by printing the said email, signing it and transmitting the scan to the following address: incarichi.cle@unito.it.

Duration: 18 months. The total amount of the grant is € 34,200.00 and is paid in monthly installments (€ 1,900.00 per month after tax). The research activity consists of:
- Research on the diffusion of AI and robotics technologies within hospitals.
- Creation and analysis of comparative data at regional and national levels.
- Production of two articles to be submitted to international scientific journals.

EVENTS

The 10th Atlanta Conference on Science and Innovation Policy

May 14-16, 2025, Georgia Institute of Technology
Hosted by Georgia Tech, the Atlanta Conference provides a forum to present and discuss high quality empirical research by about 300 scholars representing more than 30 countries that focus on the challenges and trends associated with science and innovation policy and processes. Abstracts Due: Nov. 17, 2024.

7th Global Conference on Economic Geography

June 4-8, 2025, Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts
The GCEG is the largest international conference dedicated to Economic Geography. Cutting-edge research concerning the sources and drivers of socio-economic change, and an assessment of the economic geography of places in a multi-scalar and multi-dimensional context.

DRUID25

Toronto, June 25-27, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto
Since 1996, DRUID has become 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 DRUID25, hosted by Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Presenting distinguished plenary speakers, a range of parallel paper sessions, and an attractive social program, 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. Submission deadline: March 1

SASE 2025 Annual Conference

9-12 July 2025, Palais des Congrès, Montréal, Québec

The conference's theme is 'Inclusive Solidarities: Reimagining Boundaries in Divided Times.'

6^th International ZEW Conference on the Dynamics of Entrepreneurship (CoDE)

October 9-10, 2025, Mannheim
The aim of this conference is to discuss recent contributions to entrepreneurial research. It focusses on the formation, growth and exit of young firms linked to innovation, environmental sustainability, or entrepreneurial finance. The conference also addresses the challenges and opportunities of entrepreneurship policies. You are welcome to participate in the conference and contribute theoretical, empirical and/or policy-oriented papers on all areas of entrepreneurship research. Interested researchers are invited to submit a paper (or extended abstracts of at least 4,000 words are also welcome) to entrepreneurship2025@zew.de. Submission deadline: 31 May 2025

Twin Transition, Ecosystems, and Disruptive Innovation

October 23rd-24th 2025, Venice School of Management - Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, San Giobbe - Economic Campus.
The 19th edition of Regional Innovation Policies Conference will take place in Venice, Italy.

Subscriptions & 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