Issue #196
August 1, 2009
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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 Joins International Effort to Provide Access to Health Research
PubMed Central repository will open new pathways to Canadian health research accelerating the development of discoveries and innovations and facilitating their adoption through free and open access to research findings. This is the aim of an important new initiative that will provide researchers and knowledge users free access to a vast digital archive of published health research at their desktop and connect them to an emerging international network of digital archives anchored in the United States. The National Research Council's Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), and the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) have announced a three-way partnership to establish PubMed Central Canada (PMC Canada). PMC Canada will be a national digital repository of peer-reviewed health and life sciences literature, including research resulting from CIHR funding. This searchable Web-based repository will be permanent, stable and freely accessible.
Ontario Government Makes it Easier to Buy Electric Vehicles
Ontario's target is to become a world leader in building and driving electric cars. The McGuinty government aims to have one out of every 20 vehicles driven in Ontario to be electrically powered by 2020. This would put Ontarians into cleaner, more efficient vehicles, and expand the electric vehicle market for manufacturers. Under a recently announced plan buyers of plug-in hybrid and battery electric vehicles will receive rebates and other benefits. Ontario will also add 500 electric vehicles to the Ontario Public Service fleet.
A New Vision for US Urban and Metropolitan Policy
The White House Office of Urban Affairs and the Domestic Policy Council hosted a day-long discussion about the future of America’s urban and metropolitan areas. Participants included policy experts from across the country, several cabinet members, and elected officials. Discussions covered the evolution of metropolitan areas, best practices in urban communities, and how the federal government can be a more effective partner in these communities. After the roundtable discussions, the President spoke on some of the challenges facing urban communities today. The President is personally familiar with these challenges after spending much of his life in urban areas, saying he received his greatest education working in Chicago’s South Side. These challenges are only exacerbated by the recession, which is why the administration has been committed to making sure our cities not only rebound, but also prosper in the future. This site has a summary of the events of the day and a link to a transcript of the full remarks made by President Obama.
EDITOR'S PICK [Table of Contents]
Choosing Our Future: An Action Plan for Economic Recovery
On May 7, 2009, a coalition of regional leaders convened the first ever Greater Toronto Region Economic Summit. Over 250 stakeholders we invited to participate from all parts of the regions. The Summit's ambitious goal: to identify specific actions and propose a concrete plan to combat the recession and lay the groundwork for the region's economic recovery. While medium and long-term strategies are essential, the focus of the Summit was on "quick wins" - actions that could be implemented quickly and have impacts that would be visible, measurable, future-oriented, and regional in scope. By the end of the day, participants had brought forth hundreds of ideas and concerns. On this basis this report proposes a twelve-point action plan for economic recovery.
INNOVATION & RELATED POLICY [Table of Contents]
Beyond the Box: Innovation Policy in an Innovation Driven Economy
Brian Kahn, Science Progress
Everybody agrees that innovation is important to the nation’s economic growth and future prosperity, but what can the government do to promote it? The consensus of four years ago focused on remedying perceived competitive shortcomings in science education and research, especially in the physical sciences. Today, the question takes on new urgency with the recognition that much of the economic growth experienced over the past decade was illusory. Thinking through the long terms requires taking a closer look at the institutions that enable innovation, not only to see how they can be better coordinated but also how they can respond to the evolving forms and practice of innovation.
The Brookings Institution
To renew America’s status as the world’s leader in college attainment, the federal government needs to transform America’s community colleges and equip them for the 21st century. This long-overdue investment should establish national goals and a related performance measurement system; provide resources to drive college performance toward those goals; stimulate greater innovation in community college policies and practices to enhance the quality of sub baccalaureate education; and support data systems to track student and institutional progress and performance.
Universities, Entrepreneurship and Innovation: Criteria and Examples of Good Practice
OECD
The case study work conducted by the OECD Local Employment and Economic Development Program so far has contributed to an assessment of graduate entrepreneurship support in the participating higher education institutions. This has led to the development of a criteria list of what constitutes good practice, which is presented in this booklet. The criteria list can be read as a “tool”, which allows universities to self-assess and re-orient (i) their strategy in supporting entrepreneurship, (ii) their pool of financial and human resources, (iii) the support structures they have established, (iv) their current approaches in entrepreneurship education and start-up support, and (v) their evaluation practices.
Europe's Regional Research Systems: Current Trends and Structures
European Commission
It is now commonly accepted that a science-based, regional development strategy is an important precondition for European growth.
In many countries of the EU, the regional level has become the starting point for policy measures to better exploit research and technology potentials. Regions have become the object of multi-actor and multi-level governance structures and hierarchies. Their policy arena is populated by a variety of political, corporate, social and scientific actors. The move towards the region brought a stronger emphasis on the sub-national, mainly regional level of intervention as a driver of public-private processes regarding technology and knowledge transfer, interactive and mainly incremental learning, new modes of the division of labour in technological
development, and overall regional institutional building. Within this context, the "network idea" or the "network paradigm" and the possibilities for making use of spatial and cultural proximity between firms and supporting institutions is considered crucial. This
becomes an important analytical perspective in the framework of the construction of the European Research Area.
CITIES, CLUSTERS & REGIONS [Table of Contents]
The New Geography of United States Immigration
The Brookings Institution
New trends in immigration are changing communities across the United States. The movement of immigrants from abroad to the heart of America’s largest cities is no longer the dominant pattern as it was in the past. The restructuring of the U.S. economy and the accompanying decentralization of cities and growth of suburbs as major employment centers have shifted immigrant settlement to a new class of metropolitan areas. Emerging destinations tend to be metropolitan areas with more recent development histories, largely suburban in form. Many of the newest destination areas have little history or identity with immigration.
Buy Local? The Geography of Successful and Unsuccessful Venture Capital Expansion
Henry Chen, et al.
This paper documents geographic concentration by both venture capital firms and venture capital-financed companies in three cities - San Francisco, Boston, and New York. It finds that firms open new satellite offices based on the success rate of venture capital-backed investments in an area. Geography is also significantly related to outcomes. Venture capital firms based in locales that are venture capital centers outperform, regardless of the stage of the investment. Ironically, this out performance arises from outsized performance outside of the venture capital firms' office locations, including in peripheral locations. Out performance of non-local investments suggests that policy makers in regions without local venture capitalists might want to mitigate costs associated with established venture capitalists investing in their geographies rather than encouraging the establishment of new venture capital firms.
STATISTICS & INDICATORS [Table of Contents]
Nanotechnology: An Overview Based on Indicators and Statistics
OECD
Nanotechnology is commonly considered to offer considerable promise extending from business opportunities throughout various industries to broader socioeconomic benefits, especially in the context of pressing global challenges such as those related to energy, health care, clean water and climate change. Governments around the world have invested heavily in R&D in this field and companies are also becoming increasingly engaged. Despite this promise, investments and company involvement in nanotechnology developments are still poorly monitored. The objective of this report is to provide a comprehensive overview of these developments through a systematic and critical analysis of available indicators and statistics, while acknowledging that there is a need for further work to both broaden the range of, and develop further, nanotechnology metrics.
POLICY DIGEST [Table of Contents]
Universities and the Commercialization of Science: Retrospect and Prospect
Alan Hughes, University of Cambridge
In the UK as elsewhere in the OECD economies it has been a common place in innovation policies to stress the role that universities can play in driving forward economic welfare. The world financial crisis and recession of 2008/9 has served to reinforce that role by attributing to universities and innovation a pivotal role ensuring competitive recovery in the hoped for upturn to come.
In the UK in the course of 2008 and 2009 a series of policy announcements and speeches by ministers at the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills stressed the importance of universities in the development of innovative strategies to recover from the recession. In doing so they emphasized the need for a strategic allocation of research resources both in terms of the restructuring of the economy in the aftermath of the collapse of financial services and the perceived need to redevelop strengths in manufacturing activities. They were also contemporaneous with a renewed emphasis on identifying and measuring the ‘impact’ of publicly funded research and changes which required applicants to the UK research councils to provide an indication of the wider “impact” of their proposed research. However, for many years, the British government has been guided by the Haldane Principle – detailed decisions on how research money is spent are for the science community to make through the research councils.
This highlights the long-standing issue of the tension between the objective of the scientific and academic community to maintain control of the process of identifying and pursuing topics of research and the apparently conflicting objectives of governments to pursue strategic objectives and allocate funding accordingly in pursuit of the commercialization of science. At the heart of this tension are claimed differences between the motivations for and purpose of research by groups and individuals based in the university sector and the research needs of government and the industrial and commercial sector. The main purpose of this paper was to use new data to explore the reality of business community interactions as perceived by the two key non-government players to this game, namely individual academics and UK businesses themselves. The paper also set their perceptions against a more macro analysis which showed the extent to which key R&D and research activities were located in the hands of relatively few major corporate and university institutions the relative role of public and private sector funding and ‘doing’ and the development of specific ‘Third Mission’ funding in the UK. The picture which emerges may be simply summarized:
First most academics believe their research to be user-inspired basic research or applied research. In Mathematics and Physics and the Arts and Humanities this is less likely to be the case. Academics also report a very wide range of interaction with external organizations. In terms of the latest jargon they are very ‘connected’ individuals in “connected” universities.
A critical question is whether they have the capacity for increasing the level of interaction further without prejudicing the current high standing of UK research judged by purely academic standards. To the extent that large majorities of academics report a positive impact of their interactions on their research, this may be thought less likely. However there is a large caveat. There is a belief amongst academics that the emphasis on third stream activities may have already gone too far. There are also limits to the absolute capacity of individuals or the current system to take on further activity without hitting capacity limits (PACEC/CBR 2009). Equally there are capacity limits on the business side too. In a result consistent with the findings of the Lambert review the paper shows that businesses regard the primary limitations in developing interactions to be their own internal capacity to manage these relationships and not cultural or institutional failings within universities.
Finally the paper’s results indicate the importance of taking a broad view across all disciplines and not just Science, Technology and Mathematics in looking at university industry links. There is an extensive pattern of both business demands articulated across the full disciplinary landscape.
EVENTS [Table of Contents]
Research and Entrepreneurship in the Knowledge-Based Economy
Milan, Italy, 7-8 September, 2009
Knowledge creation and management has been widely recognized as the main driving force for the economic growth of advanced economies. In the knowledge-based economy, learning, knowledge, research and human capital are key variables in the development of firms, sectors and countries. The increasing importance of the knowledge-based economy leads to a growing number of challenges for the actors involved: the need to integrate and coordinate research, a better definition of actions and the search for the right instruments to tackle the cognitive and management aspects of the processes and to evaluate outcomes and effects. Within this framework, the conference aims to create an opportunity for presentation of current research in the field and to open a space for debating on the impact of investments in research and human capital on firms, sectors and countries in the knowledge-based economy, and on the role for public policy. Keynote speakers include: Giovanni Dosi, Dominique Foray, Franco Malerba, Pascal Petit and Rehinilde Veuglers.
Linz, Austria, 9-10 September, 2009
Beginning in September 2006 eleven regions of old, new and associated European Member States came together in the European project “Central & Eastern European Cluster and Network Area”. All the members - Austria (Upper Austria, Lower Austria, Salzburg, Tyrol), Hungary (West Pannonia), Czech Republic, Italy (South Tyrol), Poland, Slovenia (Podravje Region), Slovakia and Croatia – cooperate in developing jointly our future innovation and cluster policy in the areas of economic strengths. The final conference of the Inno-Net project "CEE-ClusterNetwork" will take place in Linz, Austria. Many topics will be addressed, such as the role of clusters in times of economic changes, European innovation policy for a prosperous Europe, strategic framework and implementation of trans-regional Cluster Collaboration, and recommendations for the future challenges of cluster policies.
4th European Conference on Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Antwerp, Belgium, 10-11 September, 2009
n the light of the European Lisbon goals, the importance of the conference topics cannot be underestimated. Entrepreneurship and innovation should be the driving force in the transition of the Western economies towards knowledge-intensive economies – a necessity to maintain our current living standards. Knowledge creation and dissemination to society are indispensable to advance into the next era. The conference welcomes academics, researchers and industrial delegates to join this innovative program.
Atlanta, 2-3 Oct, 2009
Science and innovation are aimed at change—new knowledge, new techniques, and fresh approaches to addressing the major challenges facing humanity. The 2009 Atlanta Conference on Science and Innovation policy will focus on ways that science and innovation policies can shape the future by setting goals such as safety, economic security, improved health, and environmental quality and by designing programs to reach these goals.
Learning Clusters: 12th TCI Annual Global Conference
Jyvaskyla, Finland, 12-16 October, 2009
Can clusters be learning organizations? How can learning clusters promote competitiveness for businesses and the regional economy in times of constant change? What are the disciplines of successful and dynamic clusters in the knowledge economy and network society? The 12th TCI Annual Global Conference aims to raise awareness and stimulate discussion of these issues in order to inspire sustainable clustering actions and better futures in clusters, businesses and regions.
Creative Spaces + Places: The Collaborative City 
Toronto, 28-30 October, 2009
Creative Places + Spaces is one of the world's leading forums on creativity. Under the theme of 'The Collaborative City', this year's event will engage global perspectives on collaboration and connect them with local change makers. Come meet some of the most creative thinkers in Toronto's exploration of the art and science of collaboration.
Global Recession: Regional Impacts on Housing, Jobs, Health and Wellbeing: Call for Papers
London, UK, 27 November, 2009
In recent years, issues of health and wellbeing have come to the fore in much public debate and policymaking. These related topics appear across a number of agendas and are significant elements in employment, housing, social inclusion, and social policy fields as well as under their own strategic and delivery areas. Not only do health, health service delivery, deprivation, happiness, incomes and wealth vary across countries and national boundaries, but also there are often strong regional and indeed local and neighbourhood differences. Although there is an established and well developed research landscape in these areas, they are often bound within particular disciplines so that other related interests are unaware of their existence and relevance to their own needs. As the global economy has entered a period of prolonged recession and uncertainty, it is timely to ask questions about the implications for people’s lives and livelihoods. The Regional Studies Association Winter Conference 2009 on Health, Housing, Jobs and Wellbeing presents an opportunity to discuss and debate these issues, to establish the research requirements and to address the concerns of practitioners and policymakers. The conference is keen to attract papers and sessions which address a broad active research and policy agenda, including contributions from any discipline which can offer insights at local and regional levels.
Entrepreneurship and Growth: The Role of Policy Reforms
Washington, DC, 19-20 November, 2009
This conference will address several topics such as the causal effects of institutional, regulatory, and fiscal reforms on entrepreneurial activity; the effects of financial, operational, and management constraints on entrepreneurship and policies that help alleviate these constraints; and the role of entrepreneurship in economic growth and development.
Stimulating Recovery: The Role of Innovation Management
New York, 6-9 December, 2009
Organised by ISPIM and hosted by The Fashion Institute of Technology this symposium will bring together academics, business leaders, consultants and other professionals involved in innovation management. The symposium format will include facilitated themed sessions for academic and practitioner presentations together with interactive workshops and discussion panels. Additionally, the symposium will provide excellent networking opportunities together with a taste of local New York culture.
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