Volume Nineteen
Issue #397 (March 1, 2019)
- Introduction
- Announcements
- Editor’s Pick
- Innovation Policy
- Cities, Clusters & Regions
- Statistics & Indicators
- Policy Digest
- Events
Introduction
This newsletter is published by The Innovation Policy Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto.
Announcements
Special Task Force to Lead a New European Innovation Council
Richard Hudson, Science | Business
In creating a new innovation council, the European Commission is experimenting not just in policy but also in management – running it with a special task force to involve staff members from two agencies dealing with research and SME affairs, according to Science|Business sources. The European Innovation Council, to launch soon as a pilot programme, is an initiative to scale up little tech companies into world-class “unicorns,” or start-ups valued at more than $1 billion each. It is a signature project of EU Research Commissioner Carlos Moedas, and will use a novel mix of grants, loans and equity.
Editor’s Pick
A Digital Strategy for Canada Podcast
David Wolfe, IRPP/Policy Options
As more aspects of the economy go digital, Canadian businesses face new challenges along with new opportunities. It’s clear that Canada’s economic growth depends on how we seize these opportunities. Our past few federal budgets have addressed this: they have pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to grow innovation networks and streamline innovation programs. But as the pace of innovation increases worldwide, Canada must lead or be left behind. David Wolfe joins the podcast to discuss the obstacles facing Canadian businesses and the path to a successful digital policy strategy. Wolfe is a professor of political science at the University of Toronto (Mississauga campus) and co-director of the Innovation Policy Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. He is currently leading a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Partnership Grant for the project Creating Digital Opportunity for Canada. To learn more, you can read his report, “A Digital Strategy for Canada: The Current Challenge.”
Innovation Policy
The Future of the Canadian Auto Industry
John Holmes
This study finds that to maintain the competitiveness of Canada’s important automotive sector in a rapidly changing industry requires decisive action and collaboration by provincial and federal governments, targeted investment and new policies designed for the new automobility. The report, by two researchers affiliated with the Automotive Policy Research Centre (APRC), assesses the sector’s current landscape and outlines a multi-pronged policy plan to boost competitiveness and avoid plant closures within the Great Lakes Region.
Mobility’s Second Big Inflection Point
McKinsey Quarterly
The characteristics of mobility at the second great inflection point will be significantly, not just marginally, better than the first inflection point which saw the shift to cars. Electric and autonomous vehicles, more interconnected and intelligent road networks, new customer interfaces and services, and a dramatically different competitive landscape in which tech giants, start-ups, and OEMs mix and mingle are just a few of the shifts in store. Radical improvements in cost-effectiveness, convenience, experience, safety, and environmental impact will, taken together, disrupt myriad business models on an almost inconceivable scale. As with many great changes, the picture is compelling both at a distance and in close-up. More than two dozen of our McKinsey colleagues, plus some of the executives leading the charge toward the future, provide the latter—snapshots of the technology shifts that leaders should have on their radar screen, the variations on this story in different geographies, and the ways in which cities as we know them are likely to change. Neither we nor anyone else knows exactly how or when these shifts will play out. What’s become increasingly clear, though, is that the change is coming much faster than most of us thought possible just a few years ago.
Global Review of Diversity and Inclusion in Business Innovation
Robyn Klinger-Vindra, LSE Consulting
There is a groundswell of efforts aimed at increasing the inclusive and diverse character of innovation. This comes as technology and automation advance, and the returns to technologically enabled activities grow at an exceptional rate relative to traditional sectors. Non-profits, thought-leading businesses and governments are working to bring more of society into these activities in an effort to promote inclusive, equitable growth. What’s more, research is emerging that demonstrates an economic case for diversity in the workplace, including the highly-cited McKinsey 2015 study, Why Diversity Matters, which revealed that diverse firms are also financial outperformers. There is increasing convergence on the aim – greater diversity and inclusion (D&I) in innovation – but there remains incomplete evidence of knowledge of best practices in government efforts to promote D&I. Filling this gap is the precise aim of this report. Commissioned by Innovate UK, this LSE Consulting report provides a novel review of policy initiatives aimed at driving D&I in business innovation. The review develops a broad but precise understanding of what practices and strategies have worked, and which have not across the eight mandatory national case studies identified by Innovate UK (Finland, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Sweden, the UK and the USA) and the two additional case studies of Israel and Estonia. The report highlights what inclusive innovation means across these ten countries, identify flagship programmes, present a new analysis of evidence of D&I in these countries, map synergies, differences and gaps in inclusive innovation policy, distil best practices in policy design, implementation and evaluation, and finally, offer recommendations for future collaboration across countries and stakeholders.
Cities, Clusters & Regions
Advancing Opportunity in California’s Inland Empire
Chad Shearer, Isha Shah, and Marek Gootman, Brookings
This report considers ways in which the Inland Empire can advance economic opportunity by focusing regional growth strategies on “Opportunity Industries”—the industries that concentrate the region’s good jobs and promising jobs. Good jobs provide middle-class wages and benefits. Promising jobs are entry-level jobs that provide career pathways to good jobs. Although promising jobs do not provide the pay or benefits of a good job, they enable an incumbent worker to reach a good job within 10 years. Overall, the report finds that in order to advance opportunity, the Inland Empire must increase the competitiveness and diversity of those industries that tend to concentrate good jobs.
The Biggest Economic Divides aren’t Regional. They’re Local.
Jonathan Rothwell, The Upshot
Regional inequality is often cited to explain just about every challenge the United States faces: political conflict, joblessness, drug overdoses, even the decline of marriage. Conventional wisdom holds that regions are diverging economically in drastic fashion, and many are raising alarms that fewer people are moving from small towns to prosperous cities. Research confirms that workers are in fact more productive in densely populated metropolitan areas. But it’s a mistake to think that regional divides are the source of the nation’s core economic problems. In important ways, states are more alike now than they have been historically. In places other than big metropolitan areas, research shows it’s easier for parents to give children opportunities to become higher-earning adults because the cost of living in a high-quality neighborhood is usually lower. Moreover, people living in smaller towns or cities tend to rate the quality of their communities higher than residents of large metropolitan areas do.
Statistics & Indicators
Productivity Measurement: Racing to Keep Up
Daniel E. Sichel, NBER
This paper provides a non-technical review of the literature and issues related to the measurement of aggregate productivity. It begins with a discussion of productivity measures, their performance in recent decades, and key measurement puzzles that emerge from the data. The remainder of the review focuses on two important questions. First, how do we make more accurate the measures of prices used to deflate nominal output so as to win (or at least not lose) the race for economic measurement to keep up with a changing economy? This section frames the issues and points to the most important and promising areas for further research. Second, what does or should GDP measure? The paper defends GDP as a valuable measure of production and offer suggestions for improving it. At the same time, it emphasizes the importance of measuring economic welfare (well being) and highlights the value of supplementing GDP with a satellite account that measures economic welfare.
The Global Talent Competitiveness Index: Entrepreneurial Talent and Global Competitiveness
Bruno Lanvin and Felipe Montiero, INSEAD
This sixth edition of the Global Talent Competitiveness Index Report (GTCI) aims to advance the current debate around entrepreneurial talent, providing practical tools and approaches to leverage the full potential of individuals and teams as an engine and a basis for innovation, growth, and ultimately competitiveness. One of the key working assumptions on which this report is based is that entrepreneurial talent cannot be reduced to some innate quality found in successful business founders and leaders. On the contrary, it can be regarded as an input to growth, innovation, and employment creation that can be measured and nurtured. There are conditions under which entrepreneurial talent can thrive and be stimulated. There are others under which it will be stifled, to remain an untapped or wasted resource. The various chapters in this report cast different lights on this complex set of issues from the point of view of business (including, but certainly not limited to, small- and medium-size enterprises, start-ups, and unicorns), governments, or analysts.
Policy Digest
Clean-Energy-Based Economic Development: Parallel Tracks for State and Local Policy
David M. Hart, ITIF
State and local policymakers are constantly on the lookout for opportunities to accelerate economic growth in their jurisdictions. Clean energy is a dynamic industry group that has stimulated more than $300 billion in investment globally in each of the past five years. It is not surprising clean energy is appearing with increasing frequency in state and local economic development strategies. Nearly half of the new governors elected in 2018, for instance, mentioned it in their plans.
This report describes five tracks that state and local policymakers may follow as they pursue such strategies:
- Offering incentives to manufacturers and other investors
The most widely-used ED policy tools in the United States are locational incentives. State and local governments cut taxes and make expenditures to induce external investment in new economic assets. Manufacturing plants are the most common targets of incentives, but R&D laboratories and other economic assets may also be targeted. - Nurturing technology-based start-up companies
“Entrepreneurial” ED strategies are often contrasted with incentive-based strategies. Rather than trying to recruit one-time, large-scale investments from outside the region, these strategies seek to grow export-generating assets organically from within. Start-up firms that capitalize on ideas generated at universities and government laboratories are the key agents of development in this approach. Entrepreneurial strategies usually rely on outside investment in the form of federal R&D spending, accruing over a period of years. This spending provides an important part of the seed capital for asset creation (as well as having a fiscal impact). - Deepening existing clusters of related industries
The third track that may lead to clean-energy-based ED involves deepening existing state and local strengths, rather than recruiting assets from the outside or growing new ones. Geographical clusters of related industries have been observed since the days of Alfred Marshall in the late 19th century. The natural spillovers into adjacent growth sectors of skills, knowledge, reputation, and capital that have accumulated through prior clustering may be accelerated by state and local ED policies. - Substituting indigenous for imported energy resources
Although it is commonly discussed at the national level, the possibility of improving the balance of trade by substituting domestic resources for imported energy is typically overlooked at the state and local levels. Many states have actually pursued this track, albeit not usually within the frame of ED policy. Wind, solar, and other renewable resources that are intrinsically indigenous, for instance, may displace imported fossil fuels. More than half of the states have adopted renewable portfolio standards that aim to hasten such displacement. - Stimulating market demand for clean-energy products and services
The final track for clean-energy-based ED strategies aims to use demand from within the region to build an export platform. In Michael Porter’s “diamond model” of regional competitiveness, for instance, forward-leaning local customers are sought to purchase cutting-edge products. Such customers provide rapid and sophisticated feedback to producers, supporting continuous innovation and enabling them to be competitive in other markets as a result.
This brief review suggests several recommendations.
State and local policymakers pursuing clean-energy-based ED strategies should consider:
- Refraining from offering economically irrational incentive packages,
- Taking a long-term, asset-building perspective that leverages each region’s existing strengths and sets realistic expectations over time,
- Making investments that fill gaps in the innovation chain between federally funded basic and applied research and full commercialization,
- Identifying and strengthening potential clean-energy clusters, including through targeted university and federal laboratory R&D and commercialization strategies,
- Conducting careful analyses of import-substituting clean energy strategies to determine their effectiveness, and implementing them when appropriate, and
- Treating local demand as a complementary component, rather than core element, of clean-energy-based ED strategy.
Federal policymakers should seek to complement state and local clean-energy ED strategies by:
- Supporting a steady and predictable national energy transition,
- Providing timely information and analysis about national and global energy markets,
- Catalyzing regional ED strategic planning with financial and technical assistance,
- Encouraging federal laboratories and regional offices to participate in such planning,
- Developing easy-to-use, web-based data and models for state and local ED policy development,
- Improving technology transfer mechanisms at federal laboratories, and
- Expanding investment in use-inspired R&D and cluster-deepening programs, such as ARPA-E and Manufacturing USA.
Events
Changing the Tone of the Debate: Productivity Insights Network Conference 2019
Sheffield, England, 13 March, 2019
Raising productivity is a central economic challenge in the UK. The Productivity Insights Network (PIN) conference will bring together researchers, policymakers, intermediaries and businesses working to identify, advance and implement new insights to address the productivity puzzle in the UK. Join us for an engaging day of talks and panel discussions.
Workshop Series on Migration, Globalization and the Knowledge Economy
Utrecht, Netherlands, 16-17 May, 2019
The workshop will consist of a 2-day plenary session with presentations and discussions, and two keynote speakers. The keynote speakers of the Utrecht workshop will be Ina Ganguli, from University of Massachusetts, and Ufuk Akcigit, from the University of Chicago. We aim to attract both senior and junior scholars dealing with research topics such as the role of high-skilled migration in fostering innovation in receiving countries, the relationship between diversity and innovation, the role of skilled diasporas and return migrants in diffusing knowledge back to their home countries, the emerging role of MNC in shaping scientists’ and engineers’ migration flows as well as temporary migration and knowledge sharing, migration and innovation-based start-ups formation, regions and mobility, and so forth.
8th ZEW/MaCCI Conference on the Economics of Innovation and Patenting
Manheim, Germany, 16-17 May, 2019
The conference aims to stimulate discussion between international researchers conducting related empirical and theoretical analysis. In addition to keynote lectures by Professor Dietmar Harhoff and Professor Timothy Simcoe as well as parallel sessions, there will also be an invited session on innovative public procurement with Professor Dirk Czarnitzki and Professor Giancarlo Spagnolo. Theoretical and empirical contributions from all areas of the economics of innovation and patenting are welcome. Interested researchers are invited to submit a paper or an extended abstract (min. 3 pages) in PDF format to innopat2019@zew.de no later than 15 February 2019.
The 13th Workshop on THE ORGANISATION, ECONOMICS AND POLICY OF SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH
Bordeaux, France, 20-21 May, 2019
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 2016 or later). Up to 18 papers will be selected from open submissions on the basis of peer review. Contributions are invited on (but not limited to) one or more of the following topics:
- The evaluation of science policy
- Organising research activities in universities, PROs and private R&D labs
- Spillovers from scientific research
- Role of gender and family in scientific research
- Science research networks and collaboration
- Scientific careers and mobility
Deadline for the submission of papers or extended abstracts (min 3 pages) is January 31st 2019. Submissions should be previously unpublished works. All submissions are reviewed with respect to novelty, academic quality and relevance.
Torino, Italy, 27-28 May, 2019
RENIR and Despina are pleased to announce the RENIR Workshop on the impact of automation and artificial intelligence on regional economies, sponsored by Collegio Carlo Alberto and the University of Turin.We aim to attract contributions from both junior and senior scholars. Up to 18 papers will be selected from open submissions on the basis of peer review.
CFP: 2019 University-Industry Interaction Conference
Helsinki, Finland, 18-20 June, 2019
This key event for university leaders, practitioners from both business and university, policymakers and educators attracts more than 500 participants from over 60 countries to interact, share knowledge and establish new relationships. During this three-day event, you will encounter presentations from over 100 organisations, tour innovation spaces, have access to a wide variety of workshops and participate in numerous networking opportunities to gain new insights into the bigger picture of university-industry interaction.
Copenhagen, Denmark, 19-21 June, 2019
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 DRUID19, hosted by Copenhagen Business School. 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. Keynotes delivered by top scholars from innovation studies, management, economic geography, and numerous other research fields. Plenary speakers at DRUID19 include Stefano Brusoni, Dimo Dimov, Nijanlana Dutt, Annabel Gawer, Martine Haas, Adam B. Jaffe, Michael G. Jacobides, Sarah Kaplan and Dan Levinthal.
The 2019 Technology Transfer Society Annual Conference
Toronto, 26-28 September, 2019
The Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and the Technology Transfer Society would like to invite you to submit a paper* to the 2019 Technology Transfer Conference. The main themes of the Conference will revolve around technology transfer and innovation policy, technology commercialization and entrepreneurship (with a focus on universities), and inclusive innovation. Submissions featuring longitudinal and historical studies, ideally using mixed-methods research are particularly encouraged. Submissions based on other methods are also welcome. For more information on how to submit an abstract, visit the Call for Papers page.
Atlanta Conference on Science and Innovation Policy
Atlanta, GA, 14-17 October, 2019
The Atlanta Conference on Science and Innovation Policy provides a showcase for the highest quality scholarship addressing the multidimensional challenges and interrelated characteristics of science and innovation policy and processes.
Florence, Italy, 7-8 November, 2019
The Conference will focus on the paths of regional transformation that emerge as a response to technological and social change. Sustainability issues require regions to face change by trying to balance economic growth with social innovation. We will discuss the role that regional policies can play within such scenarios, by supporting the creation of new assets and resources, as well as favouring multi-level alignments of visions and interests.
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This newsletter is prepared by Jen Nelles.
Project manager is David A. Wolfe