Issue #182
December 1, 2008
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This newsletter is published by ONRIS at the Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto, and sponsored by the Ministry of Research and Innovation. The views and ideas expressed in this newsletter do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Ontario Government.
ANNOUNCEMENTS [Table of Contents]
Canada's national biotechnology association, BIOTECanada, welcomed the support for science and innovation as key to building economic competitiveness in today's Speech from the Throne. The focus in the Throne Speech on finding new solutions for established industries, the recommitment of the government to science and technology, and the recognized importance of continuing to promote alternative energy sources are all crucial to meet the challenges of today, and to building a dynamic economy that will create opportunities and better jobs for Canadians in the future. Canada's biotechnology industry is composed of over 550 companies engaged in research and development of products and processes in the healthcare, agricultural and industrial sectors. From biofuels to enzymes to bio-plastics, the products and processes of biotechnology companies are the building blocks of a new broader bio-based economy worth 6.4 per cent of Canada's GDP ($ 78.3 billion) and responsible for, directly and indirectly, 1 million Canadian jobs.
Obama Names Team to Create "Innovation" Agenda
President-elect Barack Obama recently unveiled who will oversee his "Innovation Agenda," a set of policy proposals that aim to make government operations more transparent, use high-technology to create jobs and get average citizens more involved in government. Lead members of the group, Blair Levin, Sonal Shah and Julius Genachowski, will divide the group into four sub-teams: 1) Innovation and Government 2) Innovation and National Priorities 3) Innovation and Science 4) Innovation and Civil Society. The agenda "includes a range of proposals to create a 21st century government that is more open and effective; leverages technology to grow the economy, create jobs, and solve our country's most pressing problems; respects the integrity of and renews our commitment to science; and catalyzes active citizenship and partnerships in shared governance with civil society institutions," according to the president-elect's website.
Neo-Regionalism and Spatial Analysis: Complementary Approaches to the Geography of Innovation
Richard Shearmur, INRS-Urbanisation, Culture et Société
This paper focuses upon the connection between geography and innovation, and seeks to answer a simple question: are firms more innovative in some places than in others? The structure of this paper is as follows. The first section briefly summarizes the various ways in which firms draw upon their external environment in order to further their innovative activities. The second section focuses on the reasons why spatial proximity may matter and, more importantly, on the way in which space has usually been conceptualized in innovation studies. The empirical part of the paper rests on an innovation census of manufacturing establishments of over 20 employees conducted in Quebec broadly following Oslo Manual standards.
INNOVATION & RELATED POLICY [Table of Contents]
Innovating to Learn, Learning to Innovate
OECD
OECD economies have experienced the transformation from their traditional industrial base to the knowledge era, in which learning and innovation are central. Yet, many of today’s schools have not caught up: they continue to operate as they did in the earlier decades of the 20 century. This book summarizes and discusses key findings from the learning sciences, shedding light on the cognitive and social processes that can be used to redesign classrooms to make them highly effective learning environments. It explores concrete examples in OECD countries, from alternative schools to specific cases in Mexico, in which the actors are seeking to break the mould and realise the principles emerging from learning science research. The book also asks how these insights can inspire educational reform for the knowledge era, in which optimising learning is the driving aim and in which innovation is both the widespread catalyst of change and the defining result.
Entrepreneurship and Higher Education
OECD
Stimulating innovative and growth-oriented entrepreneurship is a key economic and societal challenge to which universities and colleges have much to contribute. This book examines the role that higher education institutions are currently playing through teaching entrepreneurship and transferring knowledge and innovation to enterprises and discusses how they should develop this role in the future. The key issues, approaches and trends are analysed and compared across a range of countries, from the experiences of the most entrepreneurial universities in North America to advanced European models and emerging practices in Central and Eastern Europe. It is clear that entrepreneurship engagement is a rapidly expanding and evolving aspect of higher education that requires proper support and development. The book stresses the need to expand existing entrepreneurship efforts and introduce more creative and effective approaches, building on the best practices highlighted from around the world. It will provide inspiration for those in higher education seeking to expand and improve their entrepreneurship teaching and knowledge-transfer activities, and for policy makers who wish to provide appropriate support initiatives and frameworks.
How Academia and Government Can Work Together
Council for Science and Technology, CST
A healthy engagement between academics and policy makers is essential to the provision of informed, evidence based, world-class policy making. Academics already play a key part throughout the policy making process, providing advice on a huge number of topics to recipients at all levels of Government. The diversity of the UK’s world-class academic expertise means that it is a formidable
resource for policy-makers in the UK. By engaging with policy makers academics become involved in answering some of the most challenging questions faced by the UK, and their ideas contribute to national policy. This investigation shows that the engagement between academics and policy makers in the UK is not as strong as it might be. A great deal of goodwill exists on both sides and strides have been taken in recent years to strengthen engagement: in particular through the introduction of Departmental Chief Scientific Advisers and Scientific Advisory Councils, and clear commitments by Government to evidence-based policy. Despite this CST has identified areas on both sides where improvements clearly can and should be made.
CITIES, CLUSTERS & REGIONS [Table of Contents]
Clusters as Vehicles of Entrepreneurial Innovation and New Idea Generation - A Critical Assessment
Marc Bahlmann et al.
Recent theorizing in cluster literature emphasizes the importance of inter-cluster knowledge linkages in addition to local knowledge dynamics, enabling new and innovative ideas to flow from one cluster to the other. This paper contributes to this topic by studying inter-cluster knowledge linkages at an individual level of analysis, making use of qualitative social network measures. Central to this case is the Amsterdam New Media-cluster, with a special focus on entrepreneurs engaging in lively inter-cluster exchange of knowledge and debate, resulting in the exchange of new visions and ideas across cluster boundaries.
Towards Regional Knowledge Economies: Routes and Options
Franz Tödtling, Michaela Trippl, Lukas Lengauer
Using the regional innovation systems (RIS) approach the authors study which conditions, potentials and barriers exist in different types of RIS for developing knowledge based industries and activities, and which routes and policy options might be adequate in different regional settings.
STATISTICS & INDICATORS [Table of Contents]
2008 State New Economy Index: Benchmarking Economic Transformation in the States
ITIF
This report sponsored by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, employs 29 indicators to assess the extent to which the 50 state economies in the US are structured according to the tenets of the New Economy. The changing economic landscape requires state economies to be innovative, globally-linked, entrepreneurial and dynamic, with an educated workforce and all sectors embracing the use of information technology. The report, which updates and expands on the State New Economy Index reports from 2002 and 2007, ranks the states accordingly. The five states ranking the highest in 2008 are, in order of rank, Massachusetts, Washington, Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey. With these measures as a frame of reference, the report outlines the next generation of innovative state-level public policies needed to meet the challenges of the New Economy, improve state competitiveness and boost incomes of all Americans.
Breaking Ranks: Tools to Measure University Performance
OECD
University league tables are fashionable, but should not be taken as accurate measures of the quality of education.The OECD Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO) study aims at determining whether it is possible to make meaningful statements about the education provided in universities in different countries, taking into account different “strands” of competence: skill in a chosen discipline, and generic skills such as critical thinking or the ability to apply knowledge practically. If successful, AHELO will provide institutions with analysis to help them improve their own performance, and will provide data that will help students assess the suitability of the institution for their own needs.
Measuring Entrepreneurship: A Digest of Indicators
OECD
Over the past ten years, the OECD has addressed entrepreneurship issues in various analyses and reports. While these studies compiled relevant data to support specific research or policy tasks, no effort was made to establish an ongoing database of entrepreneurship across OECD countries. In 2004, the 2nd OECD Ministerial Conference on SMEs in Istanbul, “Promoting Entrepreneurship and Innovative SMEs in a Global Economy”, concluded that the statistical base for entrepreneurship research was weak and urged the OECD to develop “a robust and comparable statistical base on which SME policy can be developed”. In 2005, the Kauffman Foundation provided the OECD the financial support for a feasibility study to explore what could be done to improve entrepreneurship data. Encouraged by the feasibility study, the OECD launched the Entrepreneurship Indicators Programme (EIP) in 2006 in order to build internationally comparable statistics on entrepreneurship and its determinants. In 2007, Eurostat joined forces with the OECD to create a joint OECD-Eurostat EIP, and work began with the development of standard definitions and concepts as a basis for the collection of empirical data. This report presents the results of the first round of empirical data collected under the EIP.
POLICY DIGEST [Table of Contents]
Tibor Dory, JRC-IPTS
Over the past decade research policy has increasingly focused on regions (in the sense of sub-national geographical entities) and policy-makers generally have had high expectations of the contribution that regions can make to achieving national and European
research investment targets. The modes of coordination of policy actions are critically important in the context of multilevel, multi-actor governance. Ideally, this includes vertical coordination between different administrative levels (i.e. European, national, regional and even local levels) and horizontal coordination between regions to avoid unnecessary duplication of priorities and measures, and to ensure actions carried out by neighbouring regions can complement one another even if they are taking place in different countries.
In this policy note, seven regional types are analysed based on nineteen qualitative regional case study reports. Apart from looking at research investment trends and policy measures in the selected regions, the main objective behind this exercise was to identify similar and different research policy approaches and give some indications of their potential impact among regions of a particular type. As a result, the qualitative analysis of different research policy approaches in different types of European regions clearly confirms that there is no ideal model that is applicable to all regions. Therefore, one should be very careful with "one-size-fits-all" or uniform policy approaches that cannot deliver the expected results even in the longer term.
The report identifies different policy approaches as distinguised by type of region:
The types of regions investigated appear not only to be different in terms of their socioeconomic characteristics (i.e. the features that led to the constitution of the groups: level of income, human capital resources and knowledge creation capacities) but also in the way they conceive, organise and perform RTD policies, and the experiences gained over time and the underlying "regional philosophies". One of the main messages of this report is that policy makers should be clear about the potential impact of research investments and related measures under specific regional techno-economic circumstances and these long term investment decisions should be viewed from a multi-level, multi-actor and multi-sector perspective. This means that research investment in certain regions can have important contributions to national policy goals without making major contributions to regional economic development. Therefore, no uniform ("one-size-fit-all") approach, nor a static alignment of the research system toregional economic needs, is recommended here.
Based on the investigated qualitative regional reports discussed before, the main lessons identified are related to the following two issues: i) the extent of regional techno-economic characteristics reflected in RTD policy approaches and ii) similarity of the RTD policy mix.
i) The most crucial factor for success in terms of RTD policy's regional impact seems to be to concentrate on strengths. In other words, diffuse RTD efforts may not have a real influence on a region's innovation capacities. To concentrate on endogenous strengths concerning RTD activities appears to be much more difficult for some regions than for others, depending on the initial resources and capacities. Concentration of efforts seems to be a factor enabling RTD activities to have significant impacts on the regional economy.
ii) Regional techno-economic systems have a variety of strengths, weaknesses and deficiencies as well as differing levels of autonomy. It is therefore not surprising that the composition of the RTD policy mix varies greatly between different types of regions. Based on the analysis of the regional samples belonging to different types, it cannot be concluded that RTD policy approaches in particular types are similar. Often, regions with a similar techno-economic situation opt for different policy goals and implement corresponding measures, but this does not really explain why some regions perform better than the others with a similar mix of measures. This perhaps depends more on the local techno-economic situation, the available resources for RTD, and the national
and historical context. The analysis of the regional reports has shown the importance that policy making should be clear not only about the heterogeneity of regional techno-economic situations which reflect strongly diverse situations in terms of RTD-related policy making but also about different possible development paths.
EVENTS [Table of Contents]
Toronto, 8-9 December, 2008
The Toronto Region Research Alliance (TRRA) is a sponsor of the Toronto Forum for Global Cities summit that focuses on making cities competitive and features business leaders from leading urban centres. Two critically important issues - "Transportation: Better Tools for Global Cities' Competitiveness" and "Global Cities' Energy Needs Innovation and the Knowledge Economy" - will be addressed.
The 5th International Conference on Innovation and Management (ICIM2008)
Maastricht, Netherlands, 10-11 December, 2008
Organized by UNU-MERIT (The Netherlands) and supported by Wuhan University of Technology (China) and Yamaguchi University (Japan), This conference will bring together academics, practitioners and other professionals involved in the filed of innovation and management. The conference format includes plenary and parallel sessions with both academic and practitioner presentations and workshops. In addition, the conference will provide networking opportunities together with a taste of local culture.
Toronto, 3-4 March, 2009
Canadian Innovation Exchange (CIX) is a two-day event showcasing Canada’s hottest new and innovative technology companies. A nexus of multiple meeting and networking opportunities, CIX is designed to enable the who’s who of North American investors to discover Canada’s next great companies. With facilitated and informal networking events, this innovation marketplace features Flash-forward presentations on the future of media, software, mobile and technology.
Understanding and Shaping Regions: Spatial, Social and Economic Futures
Leuven, Belgium, 6-8 April, 2009
Many topics will be discussed such as regional policy and evaluation, regions as innovative hubs, economic restructuring and regional transformation, and local and regional economic development. Abstract submission deadline: Sunday, 4th January 2009.
Creative Industries, Scenes, Cities, Places: Idiosyncratic Dimensions of the Cultural Economy 
Cardiff, UK, 22-23 April, 2008
This seminar will focus on the relationship between places (cities, neighbourhoods, and quarters) and the development of creative industries. The range of papers should cover both theoretical perspectives and practical examples of the issues and challenges faced by researchers in trying to capture the economic, social and cultural dimensions of the creative economy. The conference will focus on four themes and questions: How to study the relationship between creative industries and city-regions. What are the
methodologies which address the way creative industries produce and interact with their markets? What is the role of place at various levels (city, neighbourhood, regions) in fostering creativity and creative production? What is the importance of public support policies and frameworks in developing the creative industries sector? Does fostering creative industries mean enabling regional growth?
Community Engagement and Service: The Third Mission of Universities
Vancouver, BC, 18-20 May, 2009
The conference will showcase research and practice of what in North America is called 'service to the community'. Although newly discovered by some universities, service to the community has long traditions in others, and in many cases is recognized as an explicit mandate in the university charter. Service is understood to be the Third Mission alongside teaching and research. Service and community engagement take many different forms. Examples are community based research and learning, assistance in regional development, continuing and community engagement, technology transfer and commercialization, and other forms of knowledge sharing and linkages.
Glasgow, Scotland, 17-19 June, 2009
Triple Helix VII offers a multi-disciplinary forum for experts from universities, industry and government. The Conference is designed to attract leading authorities from across the world who will share their knowledge and experience, drawing a link between research, policy, and practice in sustainable development. The Conference will bring together policy-makers, academics, researchers, postgraduate students, and key representatives from business and industry. The theme for Triple Helix VII - “The role of Triple Helix in the Global Agenda of Innovation, Competitiveness and Sustainability” - reflects the interaction between academia, the private and the public sector.
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