It is well evidenced that public funding of R&D plays a pivotal role in encouraging private-sector innovation. This support acts as a catalyst, boosting the confidence of businesses to invest in new, often high-risk but potentially revolutionary research areas. In this report NCUB estimates that in the UK each £1 of public R&D stimulates between £0.60 to £1.10 of private R&D investment in the short term, and between £3.09 to £4.02 in the long term.
Over 100 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and universities have collectively underscored the vital role of SME and university collaborations in NCUB’s new report, Arresting the decline: Unlocking the potential of university-SME interaction in the UK. This report demonstrates how essential university-SME partnerships are for driving groundbreaking research and development, leading to new products, services, and technologies. These innovations not only enhance productivity but also open up new markets and boost economic growth at both national and regional levels.
This study aims to compare the drivers of clustering of rural and urban creative industries in England. We use pre-pandemic web-scraped data from 154,618 creative industry organizations in England, and use a novel technique to identify 71 distinct rural creative “microclusters” of geographically proximate creative firms. We then consider the role of place-based assets and agglomeration in the presence of microclusters at a micro-level geography and find that the determinants of microclustering are generally consistent between rural and urban areas. On that basis we argue that policies to support creative clusters may drive rural regional development.
This report is an integral component of the NCUB Researcher Career Mobility Taskforce’s evidence base. It provides valuable insights into intersectoral mobility in the UK. The report analyses data from diverse sources to understand how mobility varies across career stages, disciplines, technology sectors, and industries. The approach encompasses both macro and micro perspectives, incorporating national and international statistics on intersectoral mobility, as well as micro-level data from research and innovation professionals, businesses, and LinkedIn profiles. These insights deepen the understanding of mobility trends, aiding in the development of a comprehensive evidence framework.
The European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) has been an important source of funding for universities across the UK, enabling partnerships with local business communities and allowing universities to create impact from their research. But this year that funding runs out. This report puts the ERDF under the microscope and explores how universities have used the ERDF to create and maintain research and innovation activities that are driving local growth across the UK. These findings pose important questions about how the UK higher education sector will be impacted by and respond to the loss of ERDF funding.
This short insight paper provides a snapshot of the UK’s graduate entrepreneurs based on insights from the Graduate Outcomes Survey. Graduate entrepreneurs are defined as those that, within 15 months of graduating, either started their own businesses, considered themselves self-employed (freelancers), or are at the conceptual stage (i.e., developing a creative, artistic or professional portfolio). It shows that graduate entrepreneurs in the UK come from different backgrounds and locations. They tend to undertake entrepreneurship activities in the places they have an existing connection to. In other words, the majority of UK graduate entrepreneurs are local entrepreneurs (i.e., they were born and studied locally).
This research uses pre-pandemic web scraped data of 184,791 creative industries organisations in England to identify rural creative microclusters of geographically proximate creative firms. Our cluster mapping demonstrates that rural microclusters are widely spread across the country, with about one-third of the rural firms and organisations in our sample are operating in one of the small clusters. Our results for rural clusters are also largely in line with previous findings, which have mainly focused on urban settings and the importance of place-based assets (such as cultural institutions and social capital), location and diverse economies. We find that the drivers of clustering in rural areas are not inherently different from urban areas, apart from a weak link between rural microclustering and informal social networks.
This is the second report from the Creative Radar series, by PEC researchers at the University of Sussex, and funded by the AHRC. The authors analysed data from a survey of creative businesses initially carried out just before the COVID-19 pandemic, and then again a year later. This is the second report from the Creative Radar series, by PEC researchers at the University of Sussex, and funded by the AHRC. The authors analysed data from a survey of creative businesses initially carried out just before the COVID-19 pandemic, and then again a year later.
This report introduces a new experimental approach to understanding the clustering of UK creative industries businesses. By using web scraped data of 200,000 creative industries businesses and organisations, we identify creative ‘microclusters’ at the street, neighbourhood, and town level. We then explore the UK’s creative clusters and microclusters in greater detail through a representative survey of 976 creative industries businesses.
This paper investigates the impact of public support to business investment R&D over the different phases of the business cycle. It uses firm-level data for Spain during the period 2005 to 2014, thus covering an expansion, a recession and a recovery. Propensity score matching and differences in differences methods are combined to estimate the response of supported firms in each phase. Findings show that the profile of beneficiaries of public support did not change significantly over the cycle. Estimated effects depend on the stage of the cycle, the duration of support and the type of outcome indicator. The impact on total investment is positive during expansion years and null during the crisis years; when looking at firms’ allocation of human resources to R&D, the multiplier effect is higher during the crisis years; finally effects last longer for longer spells. Direct support allowed participating firms to allocate more of their employees’ time to R&D activities during the recession. This suggests that under some conditions the multiplier of public support to innovation may be higher during recessions.
We contribute new evidence on the relationship between public support, innovation and productivity at the firm level by investigating several under-explored issues. Using firm-level data for Colombian Companies, we try to identify and compare the profile of firms that have access to public support for innovation in manufacturing and service industries separately. In the second block of research, we examine whether the association between the introduction of innovations and productivity varies across the productivity distribution; third, we distinguish between technological and non-technological innovation, since the latter may be especially relevant in the service industries relative to manufacturing.
We investigate the determinants of R&D subsidization persistence and its impact on innovation results. The empirical analysis comprises three reduced-form equations which involve estimating survival rates of R&D subsidies and analyzing their effect on firms’ innovation results including the decision to stop innovation projects. First, we find that firms’ continuous engagement into R&D subsidies is a self-sustained process which is in part fueled by the accumulation of experience in getting funding even once unobserved heterogeneity is controlled for. Second, R&D subsidy persistence is positively correlated with innovation outcomes, including a lower probability of abandoning innovation projects. Results confirm some heterogeneity between SMEs and large firms. In particular, R&D subsidy persistence is associated with New-to-market innovation for SMEs but not for large firms. From the policy perspective, encouraging continuous use of R&D subsidies in SMEs seems to be particularly more appropriate in fostering innovation results which are far from the market (i.e., more radical innovation) and whose degree of market failure may be higher.