News from the IPL
EVENTS
An Evolutionary Approach to Regional Development Traps: An Empirical Analysis of European Regions
This is a recording of the recent IPL talk by Ron Boschma. Recently, the development trap concept has been introduced to identify regions that get caught in persistent patterns of low economic growth and stagnation (Iammarino et al. 2020). A novel concept of regional traps is proposed that is embedded in evolutionary thinking, and that accounts for the persistent weak ability of many regions to develop new activities and upgrade their economies into more complex activities. We build on the relatedness/complexity framework (Balland et al. 2019) to measure and identify regional traps and to develop a new typology of regional traps. We aim to shed light on the possible links between regional ‘development traps’ (low growth/stagnation traps) as defined by Iammarino et al. (2020) and our new typology of “regional traps”, following an evolutionary approach (Balland et al. 2019).
Dr. Boschma discuss the policy implications, like what to do about regional traps, how to successfully escape them, and how to avoid them in the future. This is crucial for regional innovation policy in places that find themselves trapped or run the risk of falling into a trap.
About the Speaker: Ron Boschma is full professor in Regional Economics at Utrecht University, and Professor in Innovation Studies at UiS Business School of Stavanger University. Boschma has been full professor at Lund University where he was director of the Centre for Innovation, Research and Competence in the Learning Economy (CIRCLE).
RESEARCH
Mapping Tariffs
Since May 2025, IPL Affiliated Faculty member Tara Vinodrai and Karen Chapple have led a team of researchers at the School of Cities to develop interactive mapping and visualization tools that measure and explore the potential impacts of tariffs on jobs and businesses across Canadian cities and communities at the neighbourhood and city level. The tools illustrate the highly localized and uneven potential impacts of U.S. tariffs reflecting Canada’s underlying urban, regional and sectoral specializations. Also see recent coverage of the project in the Toronto Star.
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Examine maps of the potential direct exposure to U.S. tariffs related to specific goods (e.g. automotive, steel, copper, lumber, energy & natural resources) across Canada at the neighbourhood level, measured by 1) businesses 2) employment (based on place of work) and 3) employment (based on place of residence).
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Review these same impacts in aggregate across Canadian cities.
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Read the backgrounder and blog on Canada-U.S. trade and mapping direct exposure to tariffs.
Editor's Pick
Steering the future of advanced materials: Strategic intelligence in action
OECD
Policymakers aiming to foster and govern emerging technologies may wish to develop anticipatory capacities and strategic intelligence to inform and future-proof their efforts. This report delves into how these approaches are being mobilised, using advanced materials as a policy-relevant case given their regular inclusion in critical emerging technology lists and the rise of national strategies to promote their research to meet strategic goals. A series of case studies from across the globe are brought together to illustrate practical applications in this field of anticipatory coordination efforts, upstream governance and “by-design” approaches, and strategic intelligence tools. Insights from this report aim to support policymakers and technology assessment practitioners seeking to develop or update national strategies for emerging technologies like advanced materials to accelerate innovation and further develop national ecosystems.
Cities & Regions
Forging a sustainable future together: Cohesion Policy at its defining moment
Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, Regional Studies
This policy debate outlines a renewed vision for the EU’s Cohesion Policy amid the growing political uncertainty threatening its very viability. Drawing on the High-Level Group on the Future of Cohesion Policy’s findings, it advocates for a more dynamic, systemic approach emphasising institutional capacity, territorial sensitivity, global links, and performance-based delivery. These are areas where past reforms have underdelivered. It warns against marginalising cohesion in favour of top-down, centralised strategies, arguing it is more than a funding tool. Cohesion Policy is the EU’s most democratic mechanism, fostering trust, participation and unity. Revitalising it is essential for competitiveness, resilience and the very future of Europe.
Statistics
Useful Stats: Growth in real business R&D expenditures comes to a halt in 2023
Connor Gowder, SSTI
From 2022 to 2023, US domestic R&D expenditures increased 4%, or $29 billion, but remained nearly unchanged when adjusted for inflation. This apparent slowdown follows a streak averaging nearly 12% ($59 billion) year-over-year growth from 2018 to 2022, and 8% over the past decade from 2014 to 2023. Adjusting for inflation paints a different picture of the growth trends, with a more modest annual average of 8% from 2018 to 2022 and 6% over the past decade. In this edition of Useful Stats, SSTI uses new Business Enterprise R&D (BERD) survey data to explore business R&D expenditures since 2009. Then, the author presents the data by sector and industry, allowing for closer analysis of which business R&D see the most investment in the U.S.
Measuring Science and Innovation for Sustainable Growth
OECD
Science and innovation are essential to addressing pressing environmental challenges such as climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss. This publication is a unique reference guide providing comprehensive evidence for policymakers, statisticians and researchers on how STI contributes to energy and green transitions and sustainable growth. Drawing on a wide range of existing and original, newly developed indicators and data sources, it maps key concepts, highlights measurement gaps, and explores the role of science and innovation in enabling the emergence and widespread adoption of environmentally sound technologies, informing public policy and societal engagement. The report also offers recommendations for improving the systematic measurement of STI’s contribution to sustainability across OECD countries.
Innovation Policy
IEA
Since its launch at COP 26, world leaders tasked the IEA and the Climate High-Level Champions to develop an annual Breakthrough Agenda report to provide an independent evidence base and expert recommendations on how to make clean technologies and sustainable practices more affordable, accessible and attractive than their alternatives by 2030 in the power, road transport, hydrogen, steel, cement and buildings sectors. From 2022-2024, the reports contained a detailed assessment on the state of international collaboration across these sectors in areas such as definitions, standards and certification, demand creation and management, research and innovation, finance and investment, infrastructure, and trade conditions, among others. The Breakthrough Agenda Report 2025 – the fourth in the annual series – takes a different approach to previous reports, in that it does not contain the same detailed sector-by-sector assessment. Instead, this year’s report focuses on enhancing the methodology behind the detailed progress assessments, provides practical examples of collaboration through deep dives, and introduces a new focus chapter on fertilisers.
Policies Explain the Secular Decline in Canada’s Productivity Growth?
Andrew Sharpe, Stephen Tapp, The Productivity Institute
Over the past half century, Canada’s labour productivity growth has slowed dramatically, falling from 3.7 per cent annually in 1947–73 to less than 1 percent since 2000. This paper asks whether weak public policy explains that decline and whether new pro-productivity policies could reverse it. Using long-run data and the policy typology of Van Ark et al. (2023), it examines Canada’s record on factor accumulation, technological and structural change, market functioning and resource allocation, and international integration. The analysis suggests that successive Canadian governments have generally pursued relatively market-oriented, pro-productivity reforms — such as liberalizing trade, delivering a stable, predictable inflation environment, modernizing and cutting taxes, and investing in human capital — yet productivity growth continued to falter. The main drivers appear to be declining technological progress and inadequate business investment, not an absence of policy effort. They conclude that, while new policy reforms are desirable and worthwhile (such as easing interprovincial barriers and sharpening competition), they are unlikely to deliver a major revival of Canada’s long -term productivity growth.
Building At Scale: A CCI Policy Report on Innovation & Canada’s Housing Crisis
Council of Canadian Innovators
Housing costs are too high, and according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, Canada would need to build about 5.8 million homes by 2030 to bring affordability back to 2004 levels. As the voice of 175 of Canada’s most innovative scale-up companies across the country and across every sector of the economy, the Council of Canadian Innovators has consulted with experts and studied the issue, to examine the role that technology can play in solving our national housing crisis. The report puts forward five solutions that will make Canadian homebuilding more innovative and efficient: Unlock the power of scale and modularity: Work across all levels of government to harmonize and simplify land use policy, including through pre-approved building designs. Integrate new technologies into building: Work to certify outcome- or performance-based codes and standards for safety. Incentivize innovation: Financially de-risk modular construction, investment in robotics, digital building information models (BIMs), and other labour-saving technologies that create higher upfront costs for builders but result in significant savings at scale and over the lifetime of a building. Address looming talent and workforce constraints: Investing in education on cutting-edge tech skills and industrialized processes. Build on Canada’s resource strengths: Focus on scaling of novel materials like mass timber, which provide an opportunity to move up resource value chains. Download a full PDF of the report HERE.
Policy Digest
OECD Science, Technology and Innovation Outlook 2025: Driving Change in a Shifting Landscape
OECD
The OECD's flagship STI report Science, Technology and Innovation Outlook 2025 analyses the shifting landscape and its implications for STI systems, providing recommendations across seven chapters that lay out STI policy reforms needed to drive ambitious change:
1) Mobilising science, technology and innovation policies for transformative change
Science, technology and innovation (STI) plays a prominent role in promoting greater economic competitiveness, resilience and security, and sustainability. To realise their potential, STI systems need to be reformed to generate and deploy relevant knowledge, technologies and innovation at an unprecedented pace and scale. This chapter proposes five key actions STI policymakers can take: promote a policy agenda that contributes to broad transformative change; balance direct and indirect support to research and development; strengthen co-ordination between STI policies and non-STI areas; mobilise public funding to crowd-in private finance; and promote transformative change that goes beyond “business-as-usual” outcomes. The chapter emphasises the need for governments to experiment with and adopt innovative policy mechanisms and tools, and to better appreciate and leverage innovation dynamics to accelerate transformative change.
2) Reconfiguring scientific co-operation in a changing geopolitical environment
Focusing on public research systems, this chapter describes how governments are aiming to enhance national research and technological capabilities as they seek greater strategic autonomy that promotes both their economic and national security. This includes a growing policy emphasis on dual-use STI, as well as research security measures to protect against unauthorised knowledge leakage and foreign coercion. Governments have also become more strategic in their international STI linkages, including in their science diplomacy measures, with a view to projecting their national interests.
3) Expanding the benefits of investments in science, technology and innovation
This chapter discusses the importance of broadening the benefits from and participation in innovation across different social groups, regions and industries. It discusses how the particular challenges facing science, technology and innovation (STI) policymakers in 2025 – accelerating frontier technology development, building resilience and improving sustainability – interact with the channels through which the benefits of innovation are distributed. It concludes by identifying key implications for STI policymakers.
4) How science systems need to adapt to support transformative change
Science has a critical role to play in supporting socio-economic transformation and sustainable prosperity. Achieving this at the necessary scale and speed will require changes to key aspects of the way that science systems and academic research currently operate. This chapter explores how policies relating to research careers, research infrastructures and science’s engagement with society can act as important levers to promote research that addresses the big questions around socio-economic transformation. Structural changes are required in each of these areas and the chapter discusses the critical role of research performance assessment in incentivising the necessary changes.
5) Technology convergence: Trends, prospects and policies
The convergence of technologies is driving forward innovation, new approaches, new production methods, new applications and new governance challenges. Four important technology areas – synthetic biology, neurotechnology, quantum technologies and earth observation from space – illustrate these processes. Policymakers around the world are enabling convergence by designing “convergence spaces”: institutions and programmes that integrate scientific approaches, technical infrastructure and interdisciplinary skill sets. The discussion of the four technology areas reveals the possibilities of convergence as a generative force in each domain and points to new challenges and opportunities for emerging technology policy.
6) An ecosystems approach to industrial policy
Industrial policies have regained importance in recent years and are now a crucial element of science, technology and innovation policy portfolios. Adopting an industrial ecosystem perspective – namely going beyond sectoral boundaries to consider both upstream and downstream industries, as well as the diverse set of stakeholders involved – can help design more effective industrial policies. This chapter distils the insights from three recent studies, offering practical examples of how to define the boundaries, stakeholders and challenges of the automotive, renewable energy and energy-intensive industrial ecosystems. It highlights the value of adopting an ecosystem perspective and the importance of relying on robust evidence coming from diverse data sources. The chapter provides insights on policies that foster growth and support thriving, resilient industrial ecosystems and economies.
7) Tools for agility: Actionable strategic intelligence and policy experimentation
Strategic intelligence and policy experimentation enable policymakers to “tool up” for agility. Strategic intelligence can provide timely insights through anticipatory and real-time evidence production, while policy experimentation enables testing new ideas and critically evaluating policy impacts. Together these approaches support
evidence based policymaking.
Events
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This newsletter is prepared by Travis Southin.
Project manager is David A. Wolfe