Making Innovation Flourish

Making innovative places (part three - conclusions)

Concluding thoughts on the first NESTA Summit: Making Innovative Places, held on 12 December at NESTA's head office in London.

Some further observations on the Place Summit we held last week.  Read back for some earlier thoughts on the event.

5.    It’s a jungle out there – John Goddard took issue with the concept of an ecosystem, claiming that in an ‘ordinary region’ (another Benneworth-ism – not as insulting as it sounds), it was less a smoothly-functioning ecosystem and more a policy-strewn jungle.  Looking at the recent roll-call of recent ‘place-based’ initiatives, he might have a point.
  Watch John Goddard's speech (as part of the panel session)   

6.    It’s the people, stupid – the more the researchers and panellists talked about absorptive capacity, about leadership, about innovation beyond science & technology, the more we came back to a common theme: people.  AnnaLee Saxenian is known as the originator of the concept of ‘brain circulation’ in her research into the origins of the growth of Silicon Valley.  Notably, however, innovative people are far away from traditional innovation policy, which touches on them only rarely – such as the carriers of ideas in Knowledge Transfer Partnerships.  When AnnaLee talked about policy, she talked only about the importance of indirect policies (no ‘innovation policy’ in sight) – and in particular about immigration laws and the role of the (previously) most excellent California Community College system.
    See AnnaLee Saxenian's keynote speech 

7.    Crisis, what crisis?  There was, unsurprisingly, some scholarly disagreement during the day.  Paul Benneworth’s work (and that of a team from the Young Foundation in a forthcoming NESTA publication on local social innovation) pointed clearly to the role of crisis in forcing a city or region to get its act together.  This, however, posed a problem for our path dependence specialists, who seemed to imply that a region had very limited ability to change direction, crisis or no crisis.  Ron Martin gave the example of the North West of England in the 19th century which continually failed to adapt to the rise and rise of overseas cloth producers, despite massive mill closures.  I think that the key to unlocking this dichotomy is in a word that Paul used: perception.  The crisis needs to be seen, comprehended and acted upon by the existing regional leaders.  If that’s the case then urgent action can result.  If it’s not, then stagnation and collapse won’t be far away.

My final comment is one of observation and challenge.  Richard Leese talked of a city’s ‘strategic capacity’ in decision-making and leadership.  Charlie Leadbeater observed that Richard himself had over the course of 20 years walked the line between civic boosterism and challenge – something that is often missing in other regional leaders.  The challenge, therefore, is how to develop more regional leaders like that: sophisticated consumers of analysis who are able to take what works, challenge what doesn’t and bring people with them on their regional innovation journey.

What do you think?

Making innovative places (part two - observations)

Continuing from yesterday's post - reflecting on the first NESTA Summit: Making Innovative Places, held on 12 December at NESTA's head office in London.  You can see videos of highlights from the event here.

I've tried to capture some of what I felt were the main lessons of the day - I'll post more next week.

1. History matters – James Simmie and Ron Martin from Oxford Brookes and Cambridge Universities respectively presented the interim findings of their research on path dependence.  Path dependence means that a region’s past industrial structure and performance will have a significant bearing on its future.  But like so many powerful theories, it sounds deceptively simple.  To put it in context, demonstrating this would mean thinking again (and ideally quite quickly) about cluster-creation policies and about the ‘real’ choices that cities and regions face when attempting to shape their futures.

Download the reports from the NESTA website

2. Innovation goes global – It’s always the way.  We staged a major conference about the criticality of thinking on a sub-central level about innovation policy and already the delegates were ahead of us.  Several pointed out that thinking smaller than the nation also meant automatically thinking larger than the nation too.  Firms and individuals increasingly have less respect for administrative boundaries, so why should innovators or, for that matter, innovation policy?  Luckily, our very own Sami Mahroum was at least one step ahead.  He is already talking to me about the international bent of his next research strand.

3. Don’t create, absorb!  Michael Kitson, James Simmie, Ron Martin and Paul Benneworth all addressed to various degrees the concept of ‘absorptive capacity’.  This is bedded in sound theory and masses of empirical observation – that many innovations that create value result from the identification, absorption and recombination of existing ones.  Taken to an extreme, one can imagine a highly innovative economy that creates no new knowledge but simply takes it from elsewhere, applies it to problems and creates value-generating solutions.  Thinking in these terms means thinking of universities not simply as producers of knowledge, nor as ‘transferors’ of technology, but as highways of international knowledge and homes to bright people who know where good ideas are.

Download the reports from the NESTA website

4. Leading in harmony – If it wasn’t obvious already, Richard Leese’s address at lunchtime proved that regions don’t lead themselves.  Paul Benneworth’s report took this observation to new analytical heights.  He identified not only a ‘regional innovation journey’ that stacked up remarkably robustly against the eleven case studies in his report and (by all accounts) the experience of the practitioners in the room.  His presentation was helped by his highly accessible 2x2 matrix which went on to describe four types of leadership styles through the analogy of musical groups – from a few leaders leading a lot of innovation actors (an orchestra) to lots of actors without any leadership (enthusiastic improvisational jazz).  I’m pleased that he stopped before he decided to characterise either the nations and regions of the UK and/or our leadership of this group of research projects.

Download Richard Leese's speech and Q&A (MP3) or watch them online.

Thoughts?

Making innovative places (part one)

Over the next few days I will be reflecting on the first NESTA Summit: Making Innovative Places. It was quite a day. Stephen Timms, Sir Richard Leese and AnnaLee Saxenian delivered keynote addresses and we launched three final reports, one interim report and one policy briefing. 

That all sounds very impressive but I said it then and I’ll say it again: the 90 delegates were collectively as impressive as the ‘big names’ and I hope that much of the value will live on in the connections made as much as the evidence heard and opinions formed.

‘Yesterday’ actually started on Tuesday. The Daily Telegraph picked up on a pre-publication copy of ‘Rural Innovation’ and extensively quoted Dr. Sami Mahroum, the NESTA Senior Policy Analyst who has driven our ‘place’ agenda.  In a significant article, Richard Tyler talked of a ‘new industrial revolution’ that was going ignored by central innovation policymaking. He wasn’t wrong.