Research and Innovation in the North of England, Wednesday 9 December, 16:00 – 17:30

Research and Innovation in the North of England

This webinar presents results from a forthcoming report prepared for Transport for the North on the state of and potential for development of research and innovation in the North of England. This research focused on exploring the factors that can meaningfully influence productivity growth in the North through a series of questions:

• How does innovation happen within a geography and how does that knowledge and technology diffuse throughout the economy?
• What are the drivers, enablers, and barriers to these processes?
• What do key indicators tell us about how Northern LEPs perform relative to each other and the rest of the UK?
• What questions do these results raise and how might they be tested to deepen our understanding of the North’s innovation landscape?

Presentations will unpack specific dimensions of these questions:

Jen Nelles (University of Sheffield) “Understanding the innovation process” will present the theoretical underpinnings of the report including a summary of a more nuanced approach to understanding how innovation works. She will also present the logic map – inspired by system dynamics – of how drivers and enablers interact to produce innovation outcomes and summarise implications for policy.

Adam Brown (Cambridge Econometrics) “Why the South is different to the North” explores several regional patterns that emerged from an analysis of driver and enabler indicators. He will specifically challenge the traditional North/South geographies of innovation differences and develop a series of arguments about what sets higher performing regions apart and how the North can leverage these findings.

Dieter Kogler (University of Dublin) “Regional knowledge spaces” will explore historical and emerging patterns of knowledge creation through the lens of related variety. He will reflect on the evolution of the knowledge base in the North and discuss opportunities for using strategies to optimise knowledge recombination to drive innovation as well as the roles of specific geographies in national and sub-national knowledge ecosystems.