Research Agenda

Increasingly, national competitiveness and productivity is derived from innovation undertaken at the local level of an economy, where city-based industrial clusters and information and communications technology-enabled entrepreneurs create new forms of competitive advantage, differentiation and productivity.

As such, national competitiveness is predicated on the ability of individual city governments to create ‘hubs’ of innovation that develop  and attract people with the belief, skill and tenacity to create new companies, innovate in existing industries, attract investment and create high- skilled jobs in their local economy.

Therefore, an understanding of linkages between national competitiveness, the use of ICTs, the role of government and the development of industrial clusters and such hubs of innovation is equally important for social and economic policy development in both national and local government.

At The Future Cities institute, our current research agenda covers five topics:

• Competitiveness: National competitiveness and ICTs
  
  
• ICT Enablers: The key enablers of ICT industry development
  
  
• Governance: City governance and iInnovation policy development
  
  
• Innovation Networks: Incubators, innovation centres industrial clusters and hubs of innovation.
  
  
• Sustainability:  Measuring innovation, urban development and sustainable city competiveness

Competitiveness

The world is transitioning from the 20th century paradigms of ‘productivity and planning’ to ones of ‘flexibility and entrepreneurialism’ (Jessop 1992) where city-based innovation development, industrial clusters and entrepreneurship (Hutton 2004) generate national outcomes, and have a significant impact on national competiveness (Porter 2002).

In addition, information and communications technologies (ICTs) have been identified as a key attribute of the ‘techno-economic’ age (Jessop 1992), and a significant contributor to the development of new industry clusters in the urban/inner city setting (Hutton 2004).

Because of these impacts on national, regional and city economies, the ability to understand the process of change that ICTs bring, and how ICTs affect an economy is a core element in creating policies that drive national competiveness, economic productivity and social growth via an ICT-‘enabled’ information economy (Gibbs and Tanner 1997).

In particular, as the ICT industry comprises various sub-sectors such as hardware, software and services, the ability to understand the relationships of these sectors to both national competitiveness and economic productivity may assist policy, investment attraction and economic program development.