Building Winners: The Policy Levers for Impactful Innovation

The research will generate important insights on how innovation policy can encourage the development, diffusion, and adoption of innovation across the UK. By combining expertise in patent data analysis and innovation policy research, we will identify high-impact innovations, understand the policy levers enabling their emergence and diffusion, and explore the processes influencing their adoption.

Background

Innovation has long been recognised as a crucial driver of growth and productivity, yet its spatial distribution remains uneven, contributing to economic imbalances within and between countries. This necessitates a nuanced approach to innovation policy that considers place.

The project is timely given the recent election of a new Labour government in the UK that seeks fresh approaches and evidence to develop their strategies and policy direction for innovation-led growth and tackling spatial inequalities.

This research project aims to contribute to the ongoing discussion on innovation policy and its role in fostering economic growth and reducing spatial inequalities to inform UK policymaking.

Our methodological approach combines quantitative analysis of patent data with qualitative insights from semi-structured interviews. We will identify and interview patent holders of impactful innovations to provide rich, contextual data on the experiences, effectiveness and challenges of R&D support and related policy interventions.

Funded by Innovation and Research Caucus.

Timescales: June 2024-May 2025

Objectives

Spreading the benefits of innovation by diffusing knowledge and enabling better quality innovations to emerge in different parts of the UK is expected to raise productivity and wages across local economies, contributing to the reduction of spatial inequalities. However, despite an abundance of quantitative explorations on the drivers of innovation and its diffusion, deep dives on the effectiveness of policies in encouraging and diffusing important innovations are few and far between.

To address this complex issue, the research team seeks to answer two fundamental questions:

What policy mechanisms enable the emergence and diffusion of high-impact innovations?
What are the processes governing the adoption of impactful innovations, and how can policy interventions enhance them?

Research Team

Tasos Kitsos (Aston University)

Dalila Ribaudo (Aston University)

Charlotte Hoole (University of Birmingham)

Chloe Billing (University of Birmingham)

Project lead contact details:

Tasos Kitsos (Project Lead)

Charlotte Hoole (Birmingham Lead)

Reports and Publications

Building Winners: Strengthening the UK Innovation Ecosystem

Charlotte Hoole, Chloe Billing, Tasos Kitsos, Dalila Ribaudo, August 2025.

Building Winners: Strengthening the UK Innovation Ecosystem - IRC

Charlotte Hoole, Chloe Billing, Tasos Kitsos, Dalila Ribaudo, August 2025.