Posted By
Charles Levy
29 November 2011
Today Osborne was able to stand up the House of Commons and rely on the latest forecasts from the Office for Budgetary Responsibility. Things are bad, but with reliable numbers behind him we can have confidence that he is honestly telling us just how bad things are. No longer does a Chancellor have to risk his credibility on the dark art of economic forecasting. He can leave that to the technocrats and we can get on with discussing the relatively minor tweaks to his spending plans.
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Posted By
Dr Benjamin Reid
29 November 2011
The ‘vital 6%’ of high growth firms in the UK, it has been said, are responsible for up to half of new job growth. That 6% are, almost exclusively, Small or Medium Enterprises (SMEs) – at least when they start their growth spurt. So how is the pool of ‘potential’ high growth SME firms in the UK likely to be feeling following George Osborne’s 2011 Autumn Statement, and what are the implications of its prescriptions for their opportunities to innovate and create jobs?
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Posted By
Andrew Sissons
29 November 2011
The Coalition has always towed a pretty consistent line on geographic re-balancing in the UK: we need to become less dependent on the South East, and spread growth more evenly around the country. The message from today’s Autumn Statement was no different – the Chancellor announced a series of measures that aim to boost prosperity around the UK.
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Posted By
Mark Lloyd
25 November 2011
It is a central tenet of economics that competition helps to drive innovation. So when the government announces that it wants to make it easier for firms to compete for public contracts, as it did this week, it is generally a welcome development. Public procurement can help to drive innovation through creating large-scale markets for new products and processes that might otherwise take longer to take off, and by demonstrating that these new ideas can work.
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Posted By
Professor Birgitte Andersen
22 November 2011
Competitiveness and economic performance of firms, regions and nations has to be understood in a local context. This is not despite, but because of the globalisation of production, trade and labour mobility - the growth of trans-national corporations, information and communication advances and the emergence of the e-business. Far from wiping out the role of local business networks or the regions, these forces of globalisation reinforce their importance. Directors of leading companies, for example, look closely at the innovation and investment ecosystems of different cities and regions when they make decisions about where to invest and create jobs.
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Posted By
Lucy Montgomery
16 November 2011
Creative entrepreneurs need access to the raw materials of innovation when they are exploring the possibilities of new markets, new technologies and new business models. When copyright locks up these resources, it acts as an impediment to innovation.
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Posted By
Spencer Thompson
15 November 2011
Business minister Mark Prisk yesterday marked the start of Global Entrepreneurship Week by launching two new government services designed to enhance the capabilities of start-up or early stage firms.
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Posted By
The Work Foundation
14 November 2011
Watch Will Hutton present a keynote speech at the Innovate '11 Conference, from 11 October 2011.
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Posted By
Mark Lloyd
11 November 2011
The Eurozone crisis has reached a crescendo over the past few days, with newspaper headlines declaring an ‘endgame’ and reports that Angela Merkel’s party are investigating ways in which countries could leave the single currency.
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Posted By
Birgitte Andersen
09 November 2011
Higher education and public research are currently a focus for much heated debate. There are huge higher education funding cuts and changes to funding schemes for institutions in the UK, as well as EU initiatives - including expert recommendations for metrics for ‘knowledge transfer’ from Europe - which have provoked responses from the member states. It is worrying that the EU’s recommendations (and many of the member states' responses to them) on boosting university-industry collaboration mainly use a linear model of ‘knowledge transfer’ to prescribe policy related to ‘goal setting targets’ and measurement. The metrics used are as quantitative as possible, mainly in relation to patent applications, patent grants, licences executed, license income earned and spin-offs established.
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Posted By
Libby Hackett
03 November 2011
The vital role that universities play in creating economic growth is a huge focus for University Alliance. It is a fact that seems self-evident and yet as Professor Wendy Purcell highlights in our ‘Growing the Future’ publication, “this role is often underplayed, under-utilised and misunderstood.”
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Posted By
Andrew Sissons
28 October 2011
At the end of October, the world’s population will officially reach 7 billion. Two hundred years ago, at the birth of the industrial revolution, there were roughly 1 billion people on the planet, and this doubled to 2 billion over the next century. The last increase of a billion has taken just 12 years, an extraordinary growth rate.
This remarkable population explosion poses a series of daunting global challenges. How can we provide food and water for all these extra people?
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Posted By
Jason Edwards
14 October 2011
The French Room in The Midland is often the venue for exquisite and luxurious dining in one of Manchester’s finest hotels.
Yet the dinner suits were firmly off as the panel got down to discussing the pressing issues facing the British economy and the need to ‘innovate’ if the country is to pull out of another near recession.
The third and final Big Innovation Centre fringe debate took place at the Conservative Party Conference with a high profile panel of experts from the private, educational and public policy sectors. .
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Posted By
Tony Raven
13 October 2011
The big guns of UK innovation - Cable, Willetts, Hutton, Hauser and a Who's Who of the innovation community - were out in Islington on Tuesday for the fourth annual Technology Strategy Board flagship event, Innovate 11. From a tentative start back in 2008, this year's event had a real buzz about it. The main stage set pieces were lightly attended in general but many of the more focussed satellite sessions were sta
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Posted By
Andrew Sissons
04 October 2011
The financial crisis has left behind many lessons for developed economies. Among the most widely accepted is the need for advanced economies to re-balance towards manufacturing and other export-intensive activities, reversing decades of relative decline in manufacturing.
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