On Wednesday 29 October I was listening to AC/DC and thinking about innovation. No, I’m not talking about the new album just released last week by the legendary Australian rock band. I was at the launch of the AC/DC model of innovation at NESTA in London. AC/DC stands for “Absorptive Capacity/Development Capacity,” and it forms the heart of a new innovation system model that is aimed at capturing the simultaneously local and global aspects of innovation. It is an interesting and sophisticated model that is decidedly geographic, in the sense that it measures various types of connectedness that are geographically specific. I haven’t had a chance to read and ‘absorb’ the whole report yet, but it certainly looks intriguing.
The report is called “Innovation by Adoption: Measuring and mapping absorptive capacity in UK nations and regions” [PDF, 12.3MB]. It was in fact released alongside another complementary research report, entitled “UK Global Innovation: Engaging with new countries, regions and people” [PDF, 2.8MB]. The latter focuses on the relationship between the UK and some emerging innovative places outside the UK, while the former maps UK nations and regions in terms of their AC/DC. The 29 October launch event for these two reports was video-recorded and the presentations and panel discussions can be viewed on the NESTA website.
While I wished that I had a chance to read the reports prior to the event, a number of interesting ideas have emerged from the discussions still. First, the speakers painted a picture of innovation that was thoroughly complex and heterogeneous (in terms of flows), locally specific, yet globally distributed. Given the context of the current financial crisis, the main threat to innovation (or rather to the system of innovation as a global phenomenon) appeared to stem from the protectionist actions of territorial nation states.
At the same time it also became apparent that the very definition of innovation continues to be a major issue, in the way it underlies particular opinions, research approaches, and policy decisions. The various contributors, whether in the panel or in the audience, used a variety of terms as synonyms to innovation, such as ‘research,’ ‘R&D,’ ’science,’ or even ‘knowledge.’ While it is understandable that when one discusses innovation at the scale of nation states and the global economy it may be necessary to use such shorthand, it also made me wonder what gets lost in such aggregation. Certainly not all research or knowledge is equally innovative: in some (if not most?) cases the outcome of scientific or academic research may very well be keeping things stable, as opposed to radically changing them. Such re-productive knowledge then could be contrasted with innovation that results in a major rearrangement of the world.
Indeed, the last speaker, Nigel Thrift, started his contribution by implying a definition of innovation along these lines, as something that makes a difference in the world, especially in relation to global problems such as climate change. Although he was also quick to point out that he considers innovation as something that arises incrementally out of tinkering and messing around, rather than as a result of planned activity by entrepreneurial heros. Thrift defined globalisation as ‘inter-connectedness,’ and he provided an illuminating assessment of the role of universities in innovation as a global phenomenon. Watch the video recording of his talk here.
Tags: absorptive capacity, development capacity, globalisation, globalization, NESTA, Nigel Thrift
