This week we launch two new NPRU reports stemming from the Innovation and Place research programme. One report focuses on the new forms of globalisation characterised by the entrants of new players using new tools to engage in global business, and another focuses on the absorptive capacity of UK nations and regions. Initially, we became interested in the two topics of globalisation and local absorptive capacity from an Emerging Markets perspective, the rise of the BRICS and what does that mean for the UK. While we did cover these grounds pretty well in the globalisation report, the most provocative messages came from the absorptive capacity report (Innovation by Adoption). In this report we came to the following conclusions:
• Knowledge exploitation happens through multiples routes. The routes to moving a new idea, technique or discovery from its birth place to the market are diverse. Exploitation does not always happen through production lines co-located between a university and a firm, but can occur through multiple pipelines of deployment. A new technique can be learnt through formal and informal networks, by a local professor, expert, a firm or a university. Utlimately, a new technique will diffuse widely and become a known practice to a wide sprectrum of users who will pick it up through formal or informal training.
• Creation and exploitation do not always have to be co-located. There is no point for cities, regions, and sometimes not even countries to try create all the components of an innovation system within their boundaries. If your city or region is good at popping out new discoveries and ideas, but bad at exploiting them locally, then your best most optimal option is to team up with another city, region, or foreign country to help you exploit your discoveries and ideas at a massive scale.
• New value is, more often than not, a result of a successful adoption-exploitation process rather than creation-exploitation. The ultimate benefactors of one innovation will always be the wider users who will create more value from it than the original creators. Put simply, you don't need to have invented the computer to exploit it for creating new value for yourself.
• Innovation policies should support the capacities needed to be competitive within global value chains. The obsession with creating all encompassing national and regional innovation systems that seek to function as localised factories of innovation are doomed to failure. It has not worked in the past and there are no reasons to believe that they will work in the future. Instead focus on what you can do best within an innovation system that is intrinsically global.
