Connected clusters: landscaping study

This study presents evidence from five dynamic, city region-based climate innovation clusters. Here businesses, academics, communities and government work together to deliver low-carbon innovation. We believe this concentration of resources, expertise and initiative is our best chance of meeting the Paris climate targets while also reaping social and economic benefits that come with the development and delivery of cleantech solutions. Climate-KIC’s ConnectedClusters project is an alliance of five city regions – Birmingham, Edinburgh, Frankfurt, London and Valencia – committed to sharing, replicating and scaling what works in developing innovation ecosystems for delivering effective climate action. Between now and 2020, the project will work hard to accelerate and enable transformation of the places we live into clean, prosperous and thriving cities and regions by developing new collaborative approaches to technology, procurement, investment and training. ConnectedClusters will help inform a transition away from product and technology innovation in isolation, towards a systemic, regionally-embedded approach to climate innovation. Paris shows that for our continued prosperity, transformation on a scale never witnessed before is imperative. Only by working together can we achieve that change

The American Assembly: Art, Technology, and Intellectual Property

Examines intellectual property issues as the arts sector joins other sectors in the race to deal with an increasingly information-driven economy

Face-to-Face and Central Place: Covid and the Prospects for Cities

This contribution looks at how great-city working life and business are increasingly oriented towards the activities in high-added-value trades and 'opaque' markets, where face-to-face interactions are still a vital part of what they offer. It argues that whilst the pandemic has undoubtedly hit hard, its longer-term impacts should not be over-stressed: the world cities look set for continued dominance, centrality and scale will still be vital for the smaller conurbations, and the prospects for more peripheral locations may not be as positive as proponents of ex-urban flight might anticipate

TRANSPORTATION MANAGERS’ PERCEPTIONS OF THE DIFFUSION OF INNOVATION WITHIN LOGISTICS CLUSTERS

The human capital capacity for innovation is crucial for business success. Cluster theory posits that this capacity for innovation is enhanced by industrial clustering geographic proximity. The innovative capacity is expected to be facilitated by institutions for collaboration, informal knowledge flow, short feedback loops, and collective action regimes. Research on logistics clustering has supported this supposition. Still, no research has explicitly examined whether being physically located in a logistics cluster enhances a company’s human capital capacity for innovation. This study uses the Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) approach to determine the innovative operational processes involved in the diffusion of innovation within logistics and non-logistics clusters, particularly for vehicles engaged in commercial transportation use. This research conducts 18 semi-structured interviews of managers of commercial trucking companies regarding the diffusion of innovation (e.g., alternate fuels, autonomous vehicles, the Internet of Things, big data/artificial intelligence) in the trucking industry. Interviews were conducted in three logistics clusters, including Memphis, Atlanta, and Dallas, and non-logistic clusters in Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana. The interviews results were triangulated and compared between cluster and non-cluster regions. The primary finding is that no noticeable difference exists regarding the diffusion of innovation in the trucking industry for companies in logistics clusters versus those not in logistics clusters. Without adequate, open, honest communication, innovation does not occur. Truck drivers want to be a part of a change in their work. Finding innovative, primarily managerial, solutions for trucker driver turnover is a common theme across all trucking companies, with turnover at greater than 100% in some companies; great focus has been directed to this issue. Although not the focus of this research design, hierarchical company structure and the number of terminal driver locations appear to influence the human capital capacity for innovation, which should be examined in future research

Regional screen ecosystems at the peripheries: Production and talent development in Tromsø and Aarhus

This article addresses the regionalisation of screen culture in Norway and Denmark, focusing on how regional screen entities in Tromsø and Aarhus are working to professionalise production and talent development at the peripheries of both countries. We outline their distinctive characteristics and circumstances as regional hubs and delineate the key actors that constitute the respective screen ecosystems. We analyse the interplay between regional film policy, production, and talent development in relation to regional development, geography, creativity, innovation, and the economy of culture. Based on an analysis of policies, strategy documents, and interviews conducted with practitioners in Aarhus and Tromsø over the period 2014–2019, we explore the diverse strategies that these regional production hubs employ to develop and—more challengingly—retain talents in the region, and argue that despite the increased attention given to ‘diversity’ in film policy, structural and cultural obstacles remain in the way of sustainable growth

Tracing the evolution of service robotics : Insights from a topic modeling approach

Acord transformatiu CRUE-CSICAltres ajuts: Helmholtz Association (HIRG-0069)Altres ajuts: Russian Science Foundation (RSF grant number 19-18-00262)Taking robotic patents between 1977 and 2017 and building upon the topic modeling technique, we extract their latent topics, analyze how important these topics are over time, and how they are related to each other looking at how often they are recombined in the same patents. This allows us to differentiate between more and less important technological trends in robotics based on their stage of diffusion and position in the space of knowledge represented by a topic graph, where some topics appear isolated while others are highly interconnected. Furthermore, utilizing external reference texts that characterize service robots from a technical perspective, we propose and apply a novel approach to match the constructed topics to service robotics. The matching procedure is based on frequency and exclusivity of words overlapping between the patents and the reference texts. We identify around 20 topics belonging to service robotics. Our results corroborate earlier findings, but also provide novel insights on the content and stage of development of application areas in service robotics. With this study we contribute to a better understanding of the highly dynamic field of robotics as well as to new practices of utilizing the topic modeling approach, matching the resulting topics to external classifications and applying to them metrics from graph theory

Tracing the evolution of service robotics : Insights from a topic modeling approach

Altres ajuts: Acord transformatiu CRUE-CSICAltres ajuts: Helmholtz Association (HIRG-0069)Altres ajuts: Russian Science Foundation (RSF grant number 19-18-00262)Taking robotic patents between 1977 and 2017 and building upon the topic modeling technique, we extract their latent topics, analyze how important these topics are over time, and how they are related to each other looking at how often they are recombined in the same patents. This allows us to differentiate between more and less important technological trends in robotics based on their stage of diffusion and position in the space of knowledge represented by a topic graph, where some topics appear isolated while others are highly interconnected. Furthermore, utilizing external reference texts that characterize service robots from a technical perspective, we propose and apply a novel approach to match the constructed topics to service robotics. The matching procedure is based on frequency and exclusivity of words overlapping between the patents and the reference texts. We identify around 20 topics belonging to service robotics. Our results corroborate earlier findings, but also provide novel insights on the content and stage of development of application areas in service robotics. With this study we contribute to a better understanding of the highly dynamic field of robotics as well as to new practices of utilizing the topic modeling approach, matching the resulting topics to external classifications and applying to them metrics from graph theory