The ministerial reshuffle following the elections to the sixth Senedd has seen the briefs for both research and innovation move from education to the economy department under the new leadership of Vaughan Gething.
What this will mean for the innovation agenda in Wales remains to be seen, but it is to be hoped that there will be a new desire to develop a more ambitious and inclusive approach to innovation, placing it at the heart of government as a key element in addressing the challenges facing the nation.
We have recently completed a review of innovation policy for Welsh Government under a commission from the Innovation Advisory Council for Wales. The current strategy was published in 2014 and is now well past its sell-by date. For the review, we collated secondary data and spoke to over 50 people from across the regions and sectors of Wales.
Our report is a contribution to current debates on innovation in Wales as the administration looks to revise and reinvigorate its approach to innovation strategy. A number of key points emerged from the discussions we had with contributors and these ought to shape how Welsh Government develops its innovation policy.
First, we need to take a holistic view of the innovation landscape. The most successful innovation ecosystems have some key characteristics in common: they are coherent, connected, agile, and adaptive systems with access to the resources, skills and capabilities needed to generate new ideas, technologies and services which meet or create market demands and produce new value.
It is widely acknowledged that such complex systems cannot be created by government, but it is also increasingly accepted that innovation policies can play a part in nurturing their development and sustaining their vitality.
Second, we need a capacious view of what innovation actually involves. Innovation is not just science and technology, the invention of new technologies and engineering solutions.
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Wales needs an approach that supports social innovation to address societal challenges, promotes public service innovation to create value in and for the public sector, and socio-ecological innovation to address the climate emergency.
Much innovation policy is orientated around ‘picking winners’ by trying to identify the most promising firms and sectors for investment. But a wider ecosystem conception allied to this more holistic view of innovation means that we need a broader investment in what is termed the ‘innovation commons’ alongside targeted and tailored support.
Thus, a new innovation strategy must be accompanied by investment in the skills, capabilities and resources needed to support innovation.
This should include a suite of innovation support programmes for SMEs, increased availability of venture capital, and investments in unlocking data resources and enabling digital technologies.
These investments in an innovation commons will help to create a context where innovation can flourish in various ways that are inclusive, agile and responsive but not overly reliant on specific sectors, or even individual firms, being successful.
This does not mean that the key actors in the ecosystem are not crucial to delivering improvements. A collaborative approach must be the cornerstone of Wales’ innovation ecosystem, but that must not be mistaken for a lack of ambition and a failure to reward the most capable.
The strongest actors in Wales should provide the benchmark against which others are measured. In our discussions, we heard too often from ambitious and innovative contributors that they felt held back by expectations that they ‘should work at the speed of the slowest’ or that ‘this must work for or be done in the whole of Wales.’
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Wales is not blessed with a large number of leaders and innovators – at either individual or institutional level – and it is important that we nurture a culture of learning from the best (whether they are within or beyond Wales) while supporting those who wish to forge ahead and pave the way for others. How that learning takes place is crucial; it has been observed that ‘good practice is a bad traveller’ in Wales.
Another reason why an ecosystem approach is important is because it puts the ‘place-based’ nature of innovation in sharp relief. Wales is home to an increasingly complex multi-actor, multi-level innovation ecosystem. Indeed, there is a new multi-level innovation system across the 海角视频.
In Wales there is a newly polycentric system emerging through the establishment of the four economic regions.
Upon this are layered the City Deals and Growth Deals that provide new sources of funding and capacity for innovation. But these subnational developments raise new challenges as to how Wales’ institutions can work effectively and collaboratively to deliver at a national scale while operating within these regional systems, each of which has discrete links to London and 海角视频 Government departments.
As one respondent put it: ‘We need to get the institutional conditions right so we can have serious dialogue with the key 海角视频 actors’. Recent developments with regard to Whitehall departments setting up offices in the devolved nations are further complicating this landscape.
So, the Welsh Government has plenty to consider when it comes to developing a future-oriented innovation strategy that can help Wales move up the league tables of economic and innovation performance. Nurturing an innovation ecosystem that is fit for the future will require radical, rather than incremental, developments that embrace both institutional and cultural change.
- Rick Delbridge, Dylan Henderson and Kevin Morgan are based at Cardiff University's Centre for Innovation Policy Research.