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.

 

Over the course of the day, there was simply too much activity to faithfully record, so instead I’ll try to capture a few major lessons. In any case, the reports are available online and several of the sessions were captured on film and will be uploaded shortly.

Tomorrow, I will upload some of my initial thoughts on the day. In the meantime you can download audio podcasts here:

• (MP3)A  summary of the conclusions of the research reports
  • ‘Innovation and the city: how innovation has developed in five city-regions’ – Dr. Glenn Athey, Centre for Cities at IPPR
  • ‘Leading innovation: building effective regional coalitions for innovation’ – Dr. Paul Benneworth and Prof. David Charles, Centre for Knowledge, Innovation, Technology and Enterprise (KITE), University of Newcastle
  • ‘Rural innovation’ – edited by Dr. Sami Mahroum, NESTA
  • ‘Regional pasts, regional futures: Path dependency and innovation’ – by Prof. James Simmie, Oxford Brookes University and Prof. Ron Martin, Cambridge University
  • ‘The absorptive capacity of the UK’s regions’ – Michael Kitson,  Cambridge-MIT Institute
• (MP3)Rt Hon Stephen Timms MP; Enterprise Minister of State for Competitiveness, Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform
• (MP3)Panel session with the Q&A that I chaired:
  • AnnaLee Saxenian School of Information, Dean, UC Berkeley
  • James Price, Director, Policy, Strategy & Corporate Services, Welsh Assembly Government
  • Tom Tumilty, Head of Innovation Policy Unit, Scottish Government
  • Bernard McKeown, Innovation Policy Unit, DETI, Northern Ireland Executive
  • Jeff Alexander, Executive Director, Global Competitiveness, SEEDA
  • John Goddard>, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, University of Newcastle Science Cities
• (MP3)Sir Richard Leese CBE ; Leader of Manchester City Council and Q&A’s
• (MP3)AnnaLee Saxenian;Dean, School of Information, UC Berkeley
• (MP3)Q & A with AnnaLee Saxenian

Whether you attended in person, or have listened to the podcasts, I welcome your comments on the reports or the presentations....