In a previous post in this series, we explored a reframing of Workplace Innovation as Inclusive Innovation at the Workplace level. The larger framework of Inclusive Innovation aims to expand the range of people who participate in innovation and who benefit from its impacts.
The scope of Inclusion Innovation has been expanding to consider the impacts of innovation on the environment we share with other forms of life. Inclusive Innovation has also become a lens through which to expand participants and beneficiaries in global initiatives like the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals:
Let’s re-invigorate the need for “inclusion” to take environmental concerns at heart when thinking about distribution, representation, and exclusion. Inclusive innovation…needs to be inclusive of more than societal distribution…Innovations developed by socially-oriented entrepreneurs often combine the twin aims of alleviating the problems facing the most excluded and underserved members of society by focusing on environmental sustainability. (Klingler-Vidra & Lor 2021)
You can get a good grasp of the global scope of Inclusive Innovation in this 3-minute video on YouTube (from a team King’s College in London, U.K., which includes the authors of the quote above).
Our own work is focused on helping organizations and educators to create the resources, plans and policies to support Inclusive Workplace Innovation. In this post, we explore some of the resources, plans and policies addressing Inclusive Innovation at these macro levels. It is worth noting the increasing complexity that emerges: as the scope of Inclusive Innovation grows, so also does the challenge of connecting the many stakeholders whose behaviours affect the inclusivity of our innovation initiatives.
We regard Inclusive Innovation at the Workplace level as a fundamental building block for progress on Inclusive Innovation at a grander scale.
Inclusive Innovation Within National Economic and Social Policy
We turn first to the national level, to explore how innovation policy and programs can address Inclusive Innovation along the three dimensions outlined above. We will use examples from research by Amos Zehavi and Dan Breznitz [2017] to highlight national innovation policies designed to address inclusive distribution of innovation participation and benefits.
Currently…[national] innovation policy is geared almost exclusively to reaching the overarching goals of increasing domestic firms’ international competitiveness, economic growth, and national security...However, the economic inequities arising from innovation are to a great degree the result of innovation policy… policies formulated without concern for distributive outcomes can expand inequality.
For example, different innovation policy packages may stimulate different types of jobs: some are likely to increase inequality by creating only skilled, high-end jobs, while others create more inclusive employment opportunities that could also benefit low- to medium-skilled workers. (Zehavi & Breznitz 2017)
Inclusion of Industries and Sectors in Innovation: “Without innovation, traditional industries are unable to compete with the cheap labor cost of developing economies...In Sweden…the [national] joint industrial committee, which includes both employer and union representation, plays a critical role in shaping…innovation policy. This is important because it offers a policy venue in which the interests of traditional industries (which in Sweden are highly organized and powerful) can lobby intensively for public…support. In an interview, the chief economist of the metal union stated specifically that the Swedish unions understand that the future of their industries depends on continuous innovation”.
A similar dynamic was observed in Germany: “Much of the public spending on innovation in both countries is focused on infusing new technologies and innovation into existing industries and firms. This is almost the opposite to the state of affairs in…the United State…where until recently innovation policy has been focused on the creation of new industries and companies.”
Regional Inclusion in Innovation: Geographic criteria are embedded in inclusive innovation policies in several countries. This is particularly evident in the European Unio, where the EU “has been a leading organization in linking distribution, industrial, and innovation policies with respect to regions”. In Germany, for example. public support for innovation in lagging regions “was viewed as a high priority by the government, especially in light of German reunification and the political imperative of closing the gap between the eastern and western parts of the country”.
Inclusion based on sectoral or geographical criteria also often coincide. For example, in one Mediterranean country “to increase innovation participation and impact beyond the major urban areas and high-tech industries, the share of government financial support for innovation in peripheral areas and more traditional industry sectors was increased eight-fold”.
Demographic Inclusion in Innovation: In the Mediterranean country referenced in the previous example, “other policies have been designed to improve participation of disadvantaged demographic groups in innovation-rich industry sectors and to foster innovations to create equitable employment opportunities for those with special needs in working conditions”. In a later post in this series, we will highlight further examples of initiatives to ensure inclusion of specific disadvantaged groups at the workplace level (e.g., adapting social technologies for innovation to be more inclusive of neurodiverse workers).
Many of the same issues arise in national innovation policies in other geographic and cultural contexts. For example, Planes-Satorra & Paunoz [2017] summarize lessons from case studies of Inclusive Innovation for countries in Southeast Asia. Inclusive Innovation is also being used as a lens through which to view environmental goals and inclusion of global participants and beneficiaries in Sustainable Development (e.g., Klingler-Vidra & Lor [2021]).
Inclusive Innovation Initiatives at Regional and City Levels
There are three groups of European countries that are strong on innovation, where a high proportion of the benefits go to workers: the Nordics, the lowland countries, and Alpine areas of Germany, Austria and Switzerland…And it’s delivered through an interplay of national, city and workplace policies. (Neil Lee Interview 2023b)
As the quote above points out, promoting Inclusive Innovation requires alignment across a cascade of policy scopes. We will highlight in this section how similar goals around Inclusive Innovation have been addressed at regional and city levels. Many of our regional and city highlights come from recent work by Neil Lee (2019, 2023a), from which the quotes in italics below are taken.
The idea of inclusive innovation has become increasingly important at a subnational scale. For example, the U.S. state of Georgia has launched a partnership for inclusive innovation, the Northern Irish city of Belfast has launched a commission for ‘Innovation and Inclusive Growth’, and Innovate North Carolina, a partnership body, has an ‘inclusive innovation Policy Toolkit’.
(In our Canadian context, efforts to explore Inclusive Innovation at the provincial level have emerged in the province of Ontario – e.g., Rivera et al (2018), Munro & Zachariah (2021) – although these have not yet been taken up by the provincial government. The tension between the city of Toronto’s goals to be a ‘creative city’ and an ‘inclusive city’ have also been explored as part of a multi-national study (Alsayel, et al 2022)
Other cities have more formally integrated inclusive innovation as part of their economic development strategies, or even launched specific ones for inclusive innovation…[These developments are] driven by a global trend to devolution and a growing interest in the subnational level for innovation strategies… but also a wide-spread concern that existing national policies have resulted in the benefits of the innovation economy being concentrated rather than spread.
Inclusive innovation provides political cover to do so: few people can oppose either innovation or inclusion. However, well-meaning urban policymakers often lack powers over inclusion but have a strong desire to achieve inclusive growth (Lee, 2019). In the U.K., inclusive innovation has become part of the policy discourse at both strategic and delivery levels in the city of London.
But the term is used differently in different parts of the city. For example, very different meanings are used by the Mayor’s Office for the city as a whole versus its use as a rationale for the Olympic Park’s ‘inclusive innovation district… [The failure of that Olympic Park initiate] shows the problems of applying a concept such as inclusive innovation at the city level… Other cities have encountered different issues: …In Washington D.C., for example, the city took a Silicon Valley-style tech model of innovation and tried to make it inclusive – with limited success.
Perhaps the most important part of the inclusive innovation agenda at the city level is that it reframes innovation to put attention on the purpose and rationale for innovation. Innovation is not a ‘good’ nor a ‘bad’ thing, but a means to a wider end…Inclusive innovation strategies can be helpful in that they force policymakers to reflect on these questions of beneficiaries and participants, rather than simply considering innovation for its own sake. (Lee 2023a, 2023b)
References
Alsayel, A., de Jong, M., & Fransen, J. (2022). Can creative cities be inclusive too? How do Dubai, Amsterdam and Toronto navigate the tensions between creativity and inclusiveness in their adoption of city brands and policy initiatives? Cities, 128, 103786.
Klingler-Vidra, R., Glennie, A., & Lawrence, C. S. (2022). Inclusive Innovation. Taylor & Francis.
Klingler-Vidra, R., & Lor, R. (2021). Bringing the Environment back into our Understanding of Inclusive Innovation. Blog post, May 20, 2021. United National Development Program, https://www.undp.org/philippines/blog/bringing-environment-back-our-understanding-inclusive-innovation
Lee, N. (2019). Inclusive growth in cities: A sympathetic critique. Regional Studies, 53(3), 424–434.
Lee, N. (2023a). Inclusive innovation in cities: From buzzword to policy. Regional Studies, 1-12. See also Bramwell, A. (2021). Inclusive innovation and the “ordinary” city: Incidental or integral? . Local Economy, 36(3), 242-264.
Lee, N. (2023b). Interview with Neil Lee-" If we want to have innovative cities, they have to deliver for everyone". Blog post in the LSE European Politics and Policy (EUROPP) blog; Apr 12, 2023.
Munro, D. and Zachariah, J. (2021). Inclusive Innovation Monitor: Tracking growth, inclusion, and distribution for a more prosperous and just society. Brookfield Institute for Innovation, Feb. 2021. https://brookfieldinstitute.ca/wp-content/uploads/Inclusive_Innovation_Monitor-Report.pdf
Planes-Satorra, S. and Paunov, C. (2017). Inclusive innovation policies: Lessons from international case studies. OECD Science, Technology and Industry Working Papers, No. 2017/02, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/a09a3a5d-en.
Rivera, D., Villeneune, S., Breznitz, D. and Zehavi, A. (2018). Pathways to Inclusive Innovation: Insights for Ontario and Beyond. Brookfield Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
Zehavi, A. & Breznitz, D. (2017). Distribution sensitive innovation policies: conceptualization and empirical examples. Research Policy 46, no. 1 (2017): 327– 336.