Jorge Tiago Martins (p), Ivan Rajic

Technology foresight is a critical component in the development of industrial strategy. It offers a promising new lens to address the challenge of regional growth. It holds the potential to help regions identify, absorb and exploit a variety of technological innovations that can drive transformation across UK manufacturing: save time, increase productivity, reduce costs, and respond more effectively to consumer demands. For this to become a reality a number of challenges need to be overcome. In regions that rely significantly on the industrial manufacturing sector, a high degree of specialisation and the existence of historically determined path dependencies may induce lock-ins or inhibit the ability to recognise and apply technological trends. Frequently the meaning of technological trends is unclear and results in the establishment of strategic regional development goals that are too generic. This often results in a disconnection between industrial strategy making and the technology foresight process. In order to address this disconnection, stakeholder participation, networking and the preparation of decisions concerning the future of regions is an increasingly essential dimension of managing technology foresight activities.

In various regional contexts, manufacturing is a sector topping the policy agenda but there remains a substantive opportunity to understand how technological innovation can be accessed and exploited. Focusing on the United Kingdom’s Sheffield City Region as a manufacturing hub of the ‘Northern Powerhouse’, this paper addresses this issue with a technology foresight lens, and it explores how technology foresight is articulated within national and regional policy.

Indeed, future-oriented research methods require a comprehensive appraisal of regions’ strategic policy, and a thorough understanding of existing structures, so as to adequately define visions that can be exploited by decision-makers.

The analysis presented in this paper is based on an extensive review of relevant regional documents undertaken for the ESRC-funded Regional Technology Foresight project (www.regiotechforesight.org). Following a critical discourse analysis approach to identify how discursive practices have both enabling and impeding implications and effects, the paper illuminates the role of strategy discourse, notably the goals and values carried in regional technology foresight strategy texts.

Barbara Martini (p), massimo giannini (p)

The ever-growing availability of internet access, especially from narrowband to broadband, shapes individuals and households behaviour as well as socio-economic performance of communities. Individuals and firms can access to a larger market to satisfy their needs. Moreover, thanks to the net, ideas and culture spread freely among them, increasing human capital, social cohesion and labour productivity. This is expected to boost growth process and to reduce inequality, both in communities and individuals. Empirical studies stress the positive effect of internet access in fostering local convergence and national performance. The nexus is circular: if internet access fosters the growth process, hence increasing the standard of living, more people and firms will be induced to adopt such a technology, triggering a virtuous multiplicative effect.
Nonetheless such a circular nexus could operate in the opposite direction as well. Individuals who cannot access to the net could be stacked in a “poverty trap” that increases inequality and slow the convergence process.
Obviously, much part of the story is related to investments in internet coverage and its costs, and this adds a policy implication to the question. If internet availability produces positive spill-overs, then national and local governments should implement policy actions targeted to make internet access as large and cheap as possible. The Italian strategy for next generation access network, approved by the Council of Ministers in March 2015, aims at developing a high-speed access network to maximise the take-up of an infrastructure able to guarantee services above 100 Mbps and to ensure the availability of services above 30 Mbps for all by 2020. Italy adopted a national state aid scheme to support ultra-broadband in areas where market failure is present.
But even when internet access is available, individuals could be able not to exploit it. According to the Italian National Institute for Statistics (Istat) in 2016, about 57% of Italian households did not use internet because of a lack in their skills. This opens to another way at perpetuating inequality among individuals and communities and calls for another policy action: the digital education.
The aim of the paper is to manage the questions in a whole view. By starting from a simple micro-founded model of individual behaviour in choosing whether adopt internet - given social, economic and infrastructural constraints – we investigate empirically such a choice by means of Italian data at Nuts2 and the effect on the convergence process among Italian regions.

Manuel Acosta Sero, Lydia Bares Lopez (p), Daniel Coronado Guerrero, Maria Dolores Leon Rodriguez

The main objective is to analyse the possible consequences of stimulating commercial exploitation of academic research, encouraged by recent policy initiatives and legislative changes, on the dissemination of scientific knowledge and the quality of research output in public research organisations in Andalusia (southern region of Spain). To achieve the main objective, we will need to identify two specific objectives. Firstly, to analyse the impact of patents over the number of scientific publications. To do this, we start from two effects: the crowding-out effect (substitution effect between patents and publications) and the complementarity effect (patents and publications are complementary). Secondly, to assess the impact of patents on the quality of scientific publications. The quality of scientific publications will be measured with the journal impact factor (JIF). Our panel dataset is 9,444 members of a research group in universities or in the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), in different fields (agrifood; health science and technology; life sciences; physics, chemistry and mathematics; natural resources and environment; communication and information technologies; production technologies – we exclude social sciences and humanities-) published by the Regional Government of Andalusia in 2003. We construct the database of patents using the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office and our sample consists of 1,251 patents for the period 1998-2013 that have been applied by public research organisations in Andalusia. We find 682 scientists who applied for at least one patent in this period. For the construction of the database of publications we use the ISI Web of Knowledge database and we count a total of 105,589 publications, in which there are in the address at least one public research organisation from Andalusia. Furthermore, we have information about the individual characteristics of the scientists and about the institutions where they work. The econometric models indicate a beneficial effect of patenting on scientific productivity in terms of quantity and quality.