Exploring regional innovation more deeply
A while back some folks at McKinsey published an interesting — albeit incomplete — map of “innovation clusters”. At the Purdue Center for Regional Development, we’ve been spending a lot of time looking an how regions establish “ecosystems” that support open innovation. You can see some of our latest work here.
The McKinsey map is interactive and it accompanies a good article on innovation. The authors have read too much into their data, so their grand categories are flawed. At the same time, they do a good job of recognizing the different types of formation patterns.
The key issue, from my perspective, is the role of universities in shaping the regional innovation landscapes. For too long, economists have been focused too narrowly on patents — because the data are available and easy to measure — or on small business births (or a subset, spin-outs), also easy to measure.
An effort is now underway among universities to develop a better description of how they leverage knowledge in a region through a range of activities. Penn State has been convening a group of universities, including Purdue, to explore these issues. As Sean Safford at the University of Chicago has clearly outlined in his comparison of Akron and Rochester, universities shape their role in regional economies differently.
You can access the McKinsey article here:
