markets

economies

innovation

UK Innovation Centre

In March 2008 the Government published its ‘Innovation Nation’ White Paper, laying out the Government’s intention to “build on the UK’s current impressive performance on research and broaden the traditional knowledge exchange agenda to encompass new disciplines, new sectors, new businesses and those who work in the development and delivery of public services.

In response to this, a joint centre focusing on how innovation can make businesses more competitive, improve the delivery of public services and help the UK meet its social, environmental and economic challenges has been set up jointly at Imperial College Business School and the Centre for Business Research at Judge Business School, University of Cambridge.

The UK Innovation Research Centre is to receive £2.8 million of public funding over the next five years from four partners: the Department for Innovation, Universities & Skills, the Economic and Social Research Council; the National Endowment for Science, Technology & the Arts; and the Technology Strategy Board.

The new Centre is intended to carry out new research for practitioners and policymakers to help them understand the key issues in all forms of innovation. It is hoped this will equip them to better respond to a worsening economic climate that makes traditional R&D expenditure less attractive. The output of the Centre is also expected to inform the way issues like aging populations and climate change can be dealt with.

The proposed research programme at this new Centre is expected to explore the relationship between innovation and business performance and how this affects the national economy and the individual organisation. The view is that this will feed directly into both innovation policy and practice, with an example be given of how it will help to open companies up to new forms of collaboration and policy makers to develop new instruments and strategies to promote innovation and knowledge exchange.

In addition to actively building research capabilities on effective innovation policies, the Centre will also actively disseminate its work through a ‘Knowledge Exchange Hub’. This will coordinate the communication and sharing of the Centre’s findings with business people, other academics and policy makers.

Together with an existing nationwide research programme, UK’s Productivity Grand Challenge, which will produce tools and create new practices to ensure innovation can be more effectively managed in businesses it is hoped both policy and effective implementation is covered. This existing programme is also led by Imperial College.