Blog post: Building winners: the policy levers for impactful innovation
October 17, 2024
October 17, 2024
October 17, 2024

In this blog, Tasos Kitsos, Dalila Ribaudo, Charlotte Hoole and Chloe Billing share details of their new project ‘Building winners: the policy levers for impactful innovation’ – this project is part of our first round of Flexible Funding and is led by academics under the IRC Network.
How can policy help innovation and growth? Our 12-month, cross-institutional project will seek to contribute to this objective using the views of innovators themselves.
Innovation has long been recognised as a crucial driver of growth and productivity (Hall and Sena, 2017), yet its spatial distribution remains uneven, contributing to economic imbalances within and between countries (Broekel et al., 2023). This necessitates a nuanced approach to innovation policy that considers place (Lee and Rodriguez-Pose, 2013; McCann and Ortega-Argiles, 2013; Kemeny et al., 2022).
Spreading the benefits of innovation by diffusing knowledge and enabling better quality innovations to emerge in different parts of the UK is expected to raise productivity and wages across local economies, contributing to the reduction of spatial inequalities (Lee, 2024). However, despite the plethora of quantitative explorations on the drivers of innovation and its diffusion, deep dives on the effectiveness of policies in encouraging and diffusing important innovations are few and far between.
To address this complex issue, the research team seeks to answer two fundamental questions:
- What policy mechanisms enable the emergence and diffusion of high-impact innovations?
- What are the processes governing the adoption of impactful innovations, and how can policy interventions enhance them?
This research project aims to contribute to the ongoing discussion on innovation policy and its role in fostering economic growth and reducing spatial inequalities to inform UK policymaking.
Our methodological approach combines quantitative analysis of patent data with qualitative insights from semi-structured interviews. We will identify and interview patent holders of impactful innovations to provide rich, contextual data on the experiences, effectiveness and challenges of R&D support and related policy interventions.
The research will generate important insights on how innovation policy can encourage the development, diffusion, and adoption of innovation across the UK. By combining expertise in patent data analysis and innovation policy research, we will identify high-impact innovations, understand the policy levers enabling their emergence and diffusion, and explore the processes influencing their adoption. The project is timely given the recent election of a new Labour government in the UK that seeks fresh approaches and evidence to develop their strategies and policy direction for innovation-led growth and tackling spatial inequalities.
Keep an eye for updates on the project and reach out to one of the project team with any questions and comments!