Inclusive Innovation: The Challenge for UK City-regions

Despite the lack of a universally accepted definition of inclusive innovation, the need to rethink innovation policy in a more capacious sense has been stimulated by critical perspectives of innovation policy which asks: what innovation is, and who it is for? Research points to a focus on elite STEM-centric models of innovation, located in the urban core, raising concerns for who has power and voice in setting innovation priorities and who ultimately benefits from innovation policy and practice. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with key actors representing the quadruple helix (public sector, private sector, higher education and further education and civil society) our report explores the ways in which four UK city-regions in Belfast, Cardiff, Glasgow and Greater Manchester are addressing the challenge of delivering inclusive innovation in practice.

We identify three dimensions of inclusive innovation within place-based settings: sectoral, socio-spatial and political. Taken together, these encapsulate the who, what, where and how of delivering inclusive innovation. These three dimensions also bring to light tensions around setting innovation priorities (frontier versus foundational economy, engagement with small versus large anchor companies and engaging the public), choices around where to focus innovation investment and activity (core versus periphery areas, redistribution mechanisms- sharing the benefits of innovation activity) and political agency (complexities,
fragmentation and continuity of evolving multi-level governance structures). In the wider sense, our multi-dimensional lens shows that the question as to whether to focus on inclusive innovation as an outcome or a process persists and our report points to a number of policy implications that emerged from our research. At the core of our argument are central government policy issues related to policy churn, framing and centralisation which challenge the coordination of multilevel policymaking. Our report
draws on the experience of interlocuters across city-regions located in each of the devolved nations of the UK to underscore the need to calibrate directionality and subsidiarity in order to deliver effective place-based inclusive innovation policy which delivers more equitable and inclusive forms of economic growth.

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