Posted By
Birgitte Andersen
28 September 2012
Five years since the collapse of Northern Rock and the start of the credit crunch, the austerity policy has lost sight of what exactly drives growth – innovation. With the UK in a double-dip recession and the Government’s budget deficit increasing, the Big Innovation Centre’s fringe events will ask - are we going far and fast enough to create a 21st-centruy framework for recovery, growth and prosperity?
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Posted By
Andrew Sissons
27 September 2012
The headline from today’s GDP statistics – that the contraction in Q2 has been revised from 0.5% to 0.4% - is about the least interesting statistic in there. Today’s release, the Quarterly National Accounts, is packed full of numbers that give us a clue about how and why the UK economy is shrinking.
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Posted By
Anna Kharbanda
25 September 2012
Throughout history heavyweights have come together to fight about the big issues of the day. From the boxing bouts of Ali v Frazier or Foreman v Ali to the political and budgetary battles of Clinton v Bush and Osborne v Balls. Yesterday’s fringe - It’s innovation, stupid - hosted by the Big Innovation Centre at the Liberal Democrat conference, was no different in leaving its mark.
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Posted By
Spencer Thompson
20 September 2012
Today’s BIS announcement on reducing the regulatory burden on businesses contains a lot of interesting proposals, around high-growth, or ‘challenger’, businesses, around intellectual property, and more. One area that BIS, alongside the IEA’s Mark Littlewood, has looked at is peer-to-peer (P2P) lending.
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Posted By
Birgitte Andersen
13 September 2012
The main thrust of David Willetts’s speech today at the Universities UK conference is welcome. Two points strike me which relate to the innovation and knowledge ecosystems...
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Posted By
Charles Levy
13 September 2012
In a speech to the Universities UK conference today David Willetts reiterated just how difficult this year has been for many institutions. For all involved it has been a year of unprecedented change. Tuition reforms (read: higher fees), advancement towards the new Research Excellence Framework for measuring impact, announcements on the importance of open access to academic publications, changes to the fundamental definition of who can hold university status, new calls on universities to support their local areas and Local Enterprise Partnerships, and the unfortunate visa situation at London Met have all happened against the backdrop of a double dip recession of unprecedented scale, and a very tough labour market for recent graduates.
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Posted By
Birgitte Andersen and Hiba Sameen
12 September 2012
Vince Cable’s industrial strategy launched yesterday at Imperial College shifted the government’s focus from the short-term to the long-term, taking a strategic approach to the government’s long-term investment in the British economy. He outlined the Coalition’s long-term vision in supporting sustainable economic growth, identifying 5 key areas: access to finance, building partnerships with key sectors, supporting emerging technologies, skills and procurement.
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Posted By
Prateek Sureka
12 September 2012
Monday was a very interesting day for many reasons. There were two major report launches around innovation: one about the Value of Open Innovation, and one from the Big Innovation Centre and Nesta. Oh, and not forgetting the London Olympic parade around the city.
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Posted By
Spencer Thompson
21 August 2012
Whilst there has been an undoubtedly positive change in the labour market movement in recent months, the unemployment rate remains largely unchanged from a year ago, and amongst young people is still showing an increase. But when sustained employment growth starts to kick in again, it will be tied to emerging and growth sectors of the economy.
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Posted By
Charles Levy
10 August 2012
London secured the games, in part on the back of their promised legacy impact. It will be many years before we know the extent to which London 2012 changes the fate of the East End of London, but in one area the legacy is off to an incredible start.
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Posted By
David Wong
08 August 2012
The jargon “big data” is already being widely brandished about in both management and policy circles, while academic research on the subject is also gaining momentum. The Big Innovation Centre will soon launch an exciting initiative centred around this theme but cutting across all domains of the subject and every sector of the economy. Big data might be increasingly fashionable in recent parlance, but many people still don’t have a clue what it is about, much less what it implies.
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Posted By
Dr Lucy Montgomery
27 July 2012
Few people working within Universities will have missed the recent furore surrounding academic publishing. What has been termed ‘the academic spring’ started with an angry blog post by a Cambridge based mathematician about the rising costs of peer reviewed journal subscriptions and the monopolistic practices of journal publishers. Last week it culminated in the announcement by the UK Minister for Universities and Science, David Willetts, of ‘the most radical shakeup of publishing since the invention of the internet.’
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Posted By
Spencer Thompson
24 July 2012
Design is a definite strength of the UK economy. A wide variety of businesses and industries use design in order to create new products, improve existing ones, and to make their business processes more efficient. Today the Intellectual Property Office is publishing our research on UK design as a global industry, which sets out the contribution design makes to UK exports, and offers recommendations as to how this important activity can be best supported by intellectual property (IP) policy.
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Posted By
Charles Levy
24 July 2012
Today (Tuesday 24th July) the Lords Science and Technology Committee published a detailed report into Higher Education in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths subjects (STEM). The paper rightly highlights that we simply don’t have enough good quality science graduates to drive innovation and growth.
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Posted By
Spencer Thompson
19 July 2012
Today’s retail figures make very interesting reading. We know consumers are facing unprecedented squeezes on their income, and, despite recent improvements, unemployment remains high. But despite the lack of money in consumer’s pockets, retail seems to be holding up, or at least treading water, with both sales volumes and sales values up in the 12 months to June 2011.
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