STEM assets in the West Midlands innovation landscape:The Manufacturing Technology Centre

This policy briefing looks at the Manufacturing Technology Centre and explore the extent to which it is being leveraged to improve economic performance and social inequality in our region

Advanced Ceramics Sector - An Industry of the Future:Sector Profile for the Midlands (UK) – 2021

This sector profile evidences demand for the rapid expansion of advanced ceramics, and the Midlands is well positioned to grow and create jobs in this industry.This report was commissioned by the Midlands Industrial Ceramics Group (MICG) (an academic and industrial consortium) in partnership with the Midlands Engine Observatory. . Its purpose is to raise awareness of the importance of advanced ceramics to UK industry and highlight the opportunities for growth in the Midlands.<br/

City-REDI Policy Briefing: Improving Understanding and Measurement of Productivity

Productivity is considered to have a direct impact on individual business success and therefore is a critical determinant of economic growth. However, understanding what productivity means varies across economic sectors and these sectoral differences in understanding productivity are also linked to differences in prioritising what is measured, and in turn, differences in actions taken to improve the firm performance. In order to improve productivity levels, it is essential to have a clear understanding of what productivity means and how can we measure it. We are seeking to address this is the gap in knowledge in our study by exploring the measurement of productivity from the managers’ perspective and also the measures used and the actions taken to improve it. In this policy brief, we are reporting the findings of our study which collected data from 300 managers’ firms in the West Midlands region, across the Business Professional and Financial Services (BPFS); Advanced Manufacturing (AM); Retail (R); and Hospitality (H) sectors. This brief provides a list of policy implications of the variation in understanding productivity and concludes with a series of recommendations for policymakers

Industrial path development in the UK space sector: processes of legitimacy building in the establishment of Space 2.0

This paper explores the processes behind legitimacy building and its role in new path creation and the path transformation or the ‘de-locking’ of an established industry. We use a mixed-methods approach and focus on the emergence of ‘New Space’ or Space 2.0 in the UK, a new-to-the-world industry, with radically different products and/or conventions. Legitimation of new product categories is essential to enable future adoption by regulators and consumers. Our findings suggest that this is not a linear process but involves interlayering, or complex feedback loops, between three distinct types of legitimacy building: regulatory, normative, and cognitive. Failure in some of these feedback loops, for example, problems with altering regulatory legitimacy, would prevent the formation of new industrial pathways with significant implications for the development of new-to-the-world and new-to-region industries

Commercialisation: Bridging the University-Industry Gap

The Industrial Strategy Green Paper (2017) highlighted that whilst the UK ranks first in many key global measures of research quality; in terms of intellectual property income generated against research resources and the number of successful spin-off companies the UK performs far behind US institutions. This paper investigates this long-term, systemic problem of the UK university-industry gap which limits the adoption and diffusion of new technologies

Commercialisation: Bridging the University-Industry Gap

The Industrial Strategy Green Paper (2017) highlighted that whilst the UK ranks first in many key global measures of research quality; in terms of intellectual property income generated against research resources and the number of successful spin-off companies the UK performs far behind US institutions. This paper investigates this long-term, systemic problem of the UK university-industry gap which limits the adoption and diffusion of new technologies