Using a combination of measures of employment rates, pay rates, health, formal education attainment levels and productivity provides a proven way to map some of the inequalities across the UK, and show which areas and regions might benefit from ‘levelling-up’.…
Continue ReadingWe found this interesting… Note: Higher Education is virtually free in Estonia, France and Germany. Source: Industry Strategy Council: What does it take to “level up” places? Evidence from international experience. Research Paper. January 2021
Continue ReadingAs the discussion rages across what levelling-up means, might mean, and what is might deliver, we need to look beneath the bonnet. What we see is the need for a range of progressive policies around the family, childcare, education before…
Continue ReadingThe development of a successful national set of policies that can capitalise on specific industry and technology developments in a country need to be based on a simple series of principles. Looking at the UK, one international benchmarking study found…
Continue ReadingHere are some findings from our recent research: UK Sectors in which the lack of skills is holding back innovation Level 4: Nanotechnology; Big Data Level 3: Civil aviation; Creative industries; Financial services; Industrial biotechnology Level 2: Agri-science; Electronics, photonics,…
Continue ReadingThere is a direct link between skills and innovation and, to be truly innovative, businesses need people with balanced sets of innovation-related skills. The higher STEM-based skills, which tend to be the focus of ‘traditional’ Research and Development (R&D), are…
Continue ReadingIn UK businesses, innovation has fallen alarmingly in recent years. So the publishing of the UK government’s new Research and Development (R&D) Roadmap seems to us to be falling into the old British trap of taking overstated pride in research,…
Continue ReadingFor manufacturing businesses in the UK, building workforces to be able to take advantage of Advanced Manufacturing (AM) innovations is quite different from that usually associated with more traditional Research and Development (R&D). Why? Well, normally R&D workforce development focuses…
Continue ReadingMore UK businesses need to be innovating. At a national level, R&D investment needs to be raised, together with the related spend on education and training for innovation. Together this would lead to greater levels of productivity and generate high-quality…
Continue ReadingThe business of information: looking for the golden threads? This post follows on from our main post here. Barrier 2: Focusing too much on products only The Data Value Chain[1] runs from generation, through collection and analytics through to exchange,…
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