This research theme examines the effectiveness of government support for innovation and how policy can best be designed to accelerate innovation.
Staff
- Dr Abdullah Gok
- Dr Matthew Hannon
- Professor Jillian MacBryde
Research
Abdullah Gok
Abdullah Gok has undertaken research into how innovation policy is evaluated, particularly by employing an evolutionary view of innovation. He has been involved in a number of evaluations of innovation policies as well as large-scale projects that collect, analyse and conceptualise evaluations.
Gok was a Co-Investigator of the Compendium of Effectiveness of Innovation Policy project in which a large team synthesised the existing evidence on the effectiveness of business innovation support programmes. As an output of this project, he recently co-edited the authoritative Handbook of Innovation Policy Impact.
Matthew Hannon
Matthew Hannon has examined the effectiveness of government public policy and industrial strategy in supporting the commercialisation of new technologies.
His research has examined:
- why policy failures contributed to wave power’s failure to commercialise in the UK
- policy recommendations to support the uptake of innovative Energy Service Companies (ESCos)
- how China’s industrial strategy was able to secure an international lead in wind power manufacture in such a remarkably short period of time
More recently he has examined the burgeoning floating wind sector, offering an international examination of this growing market and a series of recommendations for UK to support floating wind innovation; which was cited in the Scottish Government’s Draft Offshore Wind Policy Statement, and reported on by BBC News.
Bringing this work together, he has helped develop innovation metrics to help gauge innovation performance across different technology and countries, in the context of different policy regimes.
Jillian MacBryde
Jillian MacBryde is an active member of the ESRC/Innovate UK Innovation Caucus. As such, she regularly contributes to debates and advises policymakers around innovation.
She currently sits on the UKRI Future Flight Advisory Board and is chairing a working party looking at Social Science Research and Future Flight. She has recently been awarded funding from EPSRC to undertake work to “Understanding the impact of the Covid-19 crisis on UK manufacturing and identifying priorities for renewal through innovation.”