Making Innovation Flourish

Making Connections

In the latest essay from our series on how to equip young people for a rapidly changing world, entrepreneur Ben Way argues that making connections is key. He notes “the challenge is to learn from the theory and make it work in reality. One way to do this is by ensuring children have more exposure to the real world at a younger age. They should spend time in businesses and the workplace to see what the world is really like.”

This view echoes current policy thinking and Government initiatives, such as the 14-19 reforms (including the introduction of the Diplomas, the review of the Framework for Career and Work-Related Learning 11-19, and Enterprise Education).

Ben’s essay raises a number of questions. In particular, what types of ‘real-life’ experiences encourage young people to develop the skills and attitudes necessary to succeed in the future? How do we ensure that the experiences provided are relevant, and encourage learning and reflection? In what ways can the system facilitate effective connections between young people and employers?

We are developing a strand of work that is exploring these questions. We believe that for young people to appreciate the challenges and opportunities that the future world of work will present, they need to become familiar with the ever-increasing variety of careers, ways of working and emerging sectors of the economy.

Working closely with the DCSF, we are developing projects that will test how to deliver work-related learning in a way that will provide this. To inform these pilots, we have commissioned some studies to examine how businesses in the creative industries, the third sector and rural economy can become more engaged in education in a way that will be mutually beneficial.

Another approach to making connections is through interdisciplinarity. The world of work is not compartmentalised into subjects, so why does the education system encourage young people to learn in this way? There are a number of projects attempting to address this. For instance, the Young Foundation’s Studio School programme aims to teach the National Curriculum through interdisciplinary, enterprise-themed projects with a strong focus on practical work and enterprise. NESTA’s Crucible programme offers early-stage researchers an opportunity to develop new collaborations across disciplines. Can such a programme be adapted for young people?

As always, I welcome your views on this and, in particular, on what is the most effective way of linking theory and practice to ensure that young people succeed in the future.

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.

 

Lord Sainsbury's Review of the Government's Science & Innovation Policies

On Friday morning, I had the honour of attending the Prime Minister’s launch, at No 10, of Lord Sainsbury's Review of the Government's Science & Innovation Policies.  He responded favourably on behalf of the Government.  Of course, firm commitments will only become clear when the Comprehensive Spending Review is released tomorrow. However, he did make four specific statements of support:

1. Bringing together funding from the TSB, RDAs and Research Councils to deploy £1bn in support of innovation over the next three years.  He said that this would be ‘written into’ this week’s public spending announcements.
2. Doubling the number of Knowledge Transfer Partnerships.
3. Launching a ‘major campaign’ to support STEM skills, building on the recommendations in the Review.
4. Forcing government departments to allocate a share of their research spend to early-stage high-tech businesses. He further confirmed that this would be recorded.