Tag Archives: innovation

How analysing co-creation during the Covid-19 pandemic offers insights on the simultaneous generation of academic, social and business value

Dr Muthu de Silva from the department of Management gives an overview of the findings of two recent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development reports, published with her co-authors, about the role co-creation played during the Covid-19 pandemic, and how it can shape innovation going forward.  

Co-creation is a mechanism of simultaneously generating academic, business and social value. During co-creation actors of the innovation ecosystem – such as businesses, universities, governments, intermediaries and society – act as collaborators to integrate their knowledge, resources, and networks to generate mutual benefits. The idea behind co-creation is that the joint efforts towards change or impact can lead to lasting and effective innovation.  

As an institution, Birkbeck is committed to delivering theoretically rigorous research with real-terms, practical impact, and a concept like co-creation is a really great way to facilitate this. Co-creating with non-academics enables academics to integrate needs and resources of both academic and non-academic communities, enhancing the reach and usefulness of their research.   

Over the years, I’ve published about 20 journal articles on the topic of co-creation and received eight best paper awards for these publications. In 2019, I was invited by the Working Party on Innovation and Technology Policy of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to develop a conceptual framework on co-creation between science and industry. This meant publishing a high quality journal article and leading their 2021 – 2024 co-creation project that directly influences the strategies of innovation agencies, and ministries of 37 countries who belong to the OECD, and a wider audience that benefits from OECD publications.  

This work resulted in two reports and a journal article designed to influence innovation strategies of OECD member states. It has also resulted in leading another project regarding the importance of university and industry co-creation for a societal and economic green transition.  

Based on evidence gathered from 30 COVID-19 co-creation initiatives from 21 countries and three international cases, the two reports showed that co-creation was widely used to respond to the challenges raised by the COVID-19 pandemic. What was evident through the reports was that existing co-creation networks enabled the rapid emergence of new initiatives to address urgent needs, while digital technologies enabled establishing new – and, where necessary, socially distanced – collaborations.  

For instance, co-creation of medical innovation relied on substantially larger existing networks due to the complexity of medical discovery and manufacturing processes involved in developing these innovations. The COVID-19 Türkiye Platform, the transnational Exscalate4CoV, and the UK’s Oxford-AstraZeneca initiatives are examples of this. Digital tools were also used in numerous ways. As an example, the COVID Moonshot project which aimed to develop antiviral drugs against COVID-19 by identifying new molecules that could block SARS-CoV-2, involved three scientists who organised a hackathon inviting researchers/virologists to submit molecules, donations and assays (testing) via Twitter, resulting in over 4 000 submissions.  

Aside from funding initiatives, governments engaged actively in co-creation by granting access to their networks, advising on initiative goals and offering support to improve quick delivery.  The role of civil society was important as well, and the socially impactful nature of research and innovation was a motivating factor for engagement. For example, the Austrian COVID-19 Pop-up Hub initiative; the Federal Ministry for Climate Action, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation and Technology co-developed the themes (Digital Health, Distancing, Economic Buffers and State Intervention) for public virtual discussion and participatory policy idea development taking place via the Hub.  

What emerged from the reports, were the following lessons for the design and implementation of future policy programmes for co-creation:   

  • Purpose is the strongest driver of co-creation; incentives to support co-creation should go beyond facilitating access to funding.  
  • Crisis-specific programmes may not be needed out of the crisis, but networks and infrastructures should be strengthened during “normal” times. 
  • There is room for building new collaborations between researchers and producers to accelerate innovation during “normal” times.  
  • Policy should support wider development and use of digital tools for co-creation.  
  • New approaches should be leveraged more to tap into the large pool of diverse and readily available capacities in the economy.  
  • Governments’ involvement in co-creation activities as network builders can help speed up solutions; enhanced agility in their operations should be encouraged.  
  • Public engagement in co-creation can help market uptake of new solutions. 

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From improving assessment centres to preventing match fixing: Birkbeck’s business and management research

All Birkbeck’s REF 2021 impact case studies in business and management were rated ‘world leading’ or ‘internationally excellent’. Discover our research case studies below. Full details can be found on the REF website.

Reforming governance in the UK non-profit sport sector

Following a series of scandals in the UK sports sector, research completed since 2011 by Birkbeck’s Richard Tacon and Geoff Walters has shaped significant reforms to the country’s sports governance landscape.

In particular, their work underpins the Voluntary Code for Good Governance, published by the Sports and Recreation Alliance in 2011 and revised in 2014; and through this, the Code for Sports Governance introduced at the recommendation of the UK government by Sport England and UK Sport in 2016. All sports organisations applying for UK government funding must comply with this code, which has therefore not only influenced the distribution of over £500 million between 2016 and 2022, but has also brought about significant change in individual organisations, who have reformed their governance procedures in order to comply with this essential requirement.

Numerous smaller, unfunded organisations have additionally signed up to the Sport and Recreation Alliance’s Principles of Good Governance, a voluntary code which is also based on Tacon and Walters’ research. Across the sector, governing boards are now better managed and more diverse. As such, this research can be seen to have shaped the entire UK sport sector and affected the lives and playing experiences of the millions of Britons who participate in organised sport each year.

Mobilizing the power of trade unions

John Kelly’s mobilization theory, first proposed in Rethinking Industrial Relations (1998) but refined and developed over the two decades since, offers an account of the conditions under which individual employees collectivise in response to problems at work (a sense of grievance, shared with fellow workers; a target to whom blame can be attached; and a belief that there are forms of collective action that will make a difference). The theory was taken up rapidly by trade union activists and has been widely used in trade union education programmes since 2004. In the period since 2014, major unions with a combined membership of over six million workers have drawn on Kelly’s work to educate union organisers and to inform the development of major campaigns.

In particular, Kelly ran and designed the ‘Leading Change’ programme for the Trades Union Congress (TUC), which ran between 2004 and 2018 and whose participants have gone on to become MPs, union general secretaries, and in one case the General Secretary of the Labour Party. Kelly’s work also underpins training programmes for the Public and Commercial Services Union, Universities and Colleges Union, and the NEU (National Education Union).

Kelly’s influence matters because unionized workplaces provide better terms and conditions, on average, than their non-union counterparts. The aggregated figures from the unions with which Kelly and his work have been associated tell us that between 2014 and 2020, millions of employees at thousands of workplaces received higher pay, longer holidays and better fringe benefits such as sick pay. Moreover, the achievement of collective bargaining over terms and conditions of employment means that these newly unionized workers now have more say in workplace decisions than would otherwise have been the case.

Don’t Fix It! Fighting match-fixing in European football

Match-fixing is a problem for professional sports because a perception of unfairness makes them less attractive to spectators, and because of the harm done to players (typically those who are younger, vulnerable, and less well-paid) who may be groomed or blackmailed into participating. It is also a wider social issue because match-fixing is typically orchestrated by criminal groups in order to fund their other activities. After a set of 2011-12 survey results revealed a worrying prevalence of match-fixing in the Eastern European football leagues in particular, Birkbeck researchers Sean Hamil, Andy Harvey, and Haim Levi were recruited in 2013-14 by FIFPro, the global football players’ union, to conduct research into football match fixing. Their work on the Don’t Fix It! project surveyed footballers from eight European countries and formed the basis for a code of conduct adopted by every key stakeholder organisation in European football, as well as a training programme that saw national associations develop and deliver anti-match-fixing initiatives in each of the countries concerned.

Don’t Fix It! also underpinned the development of the Red Button App for anonymously reporting match-fixing. Harvey and Hamil’s research identified the lack of a clear reporting avenue as a key impediment to reducing match-fixing and it is this that the app addresses. First developed with the Finnish football players’ union, this has now been adopted worldwide, with both FIFA and UEFA agreeing to recognise the app as a valid avenue for match-fixing reports. Another European project has seen the app expanded into sports beyond football, protecting both players and the sports they play.

Developing a co-creation model for innovation in the UK and EU

Working with major policy institutions such as the Big Innovation Centre, Innovate UK, the UK Intellectual Property Office, and the European Commission, Birkbeck researchers Brigitte Andersen, Federica Rossi, and Muthu De Silva have reshaped national and international approaches to the ways in which businesses and universities can best work together. Their research on knowledge co-creation has been a catalyst for major policy reform in the UK and EU. Andersen’s work as rapporteur for a 2012 European Commission expert group on open innovation fed directly into the delivery framework for the EU’s €80 billion Horizon 2020 programme, which has supported countless researchers and research projects across the continent. De Silva’s work with the Intellectual Property Office supported changes to the Lambert Toolkit, which is used by universities to set the terms for their engagement with business. Andersen and De Silva’s collaboration with HEFCE through the Big Innovation Centre (of which Andersen is CEO) helped to ensure the introduction of impact criteria into REF 2014, reforming the impact landscape in UKHE. And the Catapult to Success report, published in 2013, underpinned the development of the UK’s Catapult Centres and the distribution of over £1 billion in government funding.

Making assessment centres work for employers

The assessment centre process, in which candidates for a role or promotion are asked to perform a series of tasks under observation and evaluated on their performance, is widely used in employee selection, development, and promotion processes around the world. Work by Birkbeck researchers Duncan Jackson and Chris Dewberry has challenged received wisdom about assessment centre design, demonstrating that traditional dimension-based assessment (which seeks to measure candidates’ performance against specific skills or competencies) does not provide an accurate prediction of performance in-role. Instead, they propose a task-based model which replaces the abstract skill testing of a dimension-based assessment centre with a focus on candidate performance in specific, job-relevant tasks. This produces more consistent results which therefore allow employers to make better choices when it comes to promotion or recruitment.

Jackson and Dewberry’s work has been taken up by a variety of recruitment and HR consultants around the world, from America to Australasia to the Middle East. These consultancies have reshaped the tools they work with based on Birkbeck research and in doing so have improved their service to dozens of large-scale, multinational companies – providing economic benefits to the consultancies and their clients as well as benefiting the diverse customer-bases of these clients by ensuring that their service providers are run by the most competent candidates. Jackson and Dewberry have also worked directly with individual employers to improve their provision (including a London-based public service organisation which accounts for over 25% of the national budget for this service) and have helped to shape practice worldwide by contributing to the national and international guidance on assessment centres provided by British and international psychological societies.

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Ageing Populations and Macroeconomy

Yunus Aksoy smiling into the camera.Professor Yunus Aksoy shares how ageing populations impact the workforce and discusses possible policy responses.

Ageing populations are a global phenomenon. They are caused by two main trends:

  1. Fertility decline: the number of children per woman in a population has been slowly decreasing since the 1990s.
  2. Declining mortality rates: people are living longer due to medical advances and lifestyle changes.

These demographic structure changes have wide-reaching impacts in the short and medium/long term. However, the fact that their impact is not visible day-to-day means that they are relatively less discussed in everyday policymaking. My work with my colleagues Professor Ron Smith at Birkbeck, Dr Henrique Basso at the Bank of Spain and Dr Toby Grasl investigates the impact of ageing populations on macroeconomy in general and brings it to the table in policy circles. I am very pleased to see that the issue has started to be taken seriously by many international organisations like the IMF, ECB, World Bank, BIS and numerous central banks. Our research has had significant impact on the debate.

Economists tend to concentrate on growth, inflation and unemployment rates, and what Central Banks and Finance Ministries can do to stabilise the economy over the short term. However, there are other deep and slowly changing forces affecting the economy about which policymakers can do little. The weak recovery after the global financial crisis has sparked renewed interest in these longer term forces, including demographics, which had often been ignored. As individuals, we are often aware of the adverse effects of ageing, as the years go by. Societies can suffer similar adverse effects from ageing, and most developed economies are ageing.

According to the UN Population Division, almost every developed economy has seen a decline in fertility rates and an increase in life expectancy. As a result, the average proportion of the population aged 60+ is projected to increase from 16% in 1970 to 29% in 2030, with most of the corresponding decline experienced in the 0-19 age group in 21 OECD economies.

In the 1960s, Simon Kuznets suggested that a society consisting of consumers, savers and producers can grow in a sustainable way if the demographic structure was a rough pyramid. Larger at the bottom, where there are the youngest – up to the age of twenty or so – the working age next – then at the top a smaller group of older people. The pyramid is now turning upside down, with the bulge at the top.

Why is the demographic structure relevant?

Our research has examined the impact of demographic structure on economic activity, productivity, and innovation. Demographic structure may affect long and short-term economic conditions in several ways. Different age groups have different savings behaviour; have different productivity levels; work different amounts (as the very young and very old tend not to work); contribute differently to the innovation process; and have different needs. Therefore, changes to the demographic structure of a society can be expected to influence interest rates and output in both the long and short-term.

Our analysis shows that the changing age profile across OECD countries has economically and statistically significant impacts and that it roughly follows a life-cycle pattern; that is, people who are likely to be dependent on state or other forms of support – generally the very young and the old populations – seem to reduce economic growth, investment and real returns in the long-run.

Demographic structure also affects innovation; the economy is less likely to develop and/or patent new innovations/inventions. Similarly, productivity, which is driven by innovation, is positively affected by young and middle aged cohorts and negatively by the dependant young and retirees.

Demographics, innovation and medium-run economic performance

When people expect to live longer, they save more for their retirement and consume less, increasing demand for investment products and causing a decline in their returns. This provides one explanation in the steady decline in real interest rates in OECD countries since the 1980s. But it leaves us with a puzzle. A decrease in long-term interest rates should increase investment, but that is not what we observe. Our estimates show that long-term investment is declining. Our solution to the puzzle is that aging has also lowered the productivity of investment, reducing the incentive to invest, because the rate of ideas production and innovation, mainly done by the young, has reduced.

With fewer younger people in the population, there will be less creativity and ideas. Thus, while the cost of investment finance may be lower due to higher savings of the aging population, there are not enough ideas worth capitalising on and so long-term investment and real output declines. An ageing population also throws up social challenges, such as the provision of care for the elderly and how this can be supported.

Are there solutions?

While immigration may address the shortage of workers in the middle of the age categories, the political problems it raises are such that governments are usually unwilling to develop immigration policies that would truly address the issue. Furthermore, as populations are aging globally, this is not an adequate long-term solution. Giving more childcare support for young parents could help increase fertility rates and this is also related to building human capital starting from a very young age.

Increases in productivity by investing in human capital, education and skills is of crucial importance, as is increased funding for research and development that could bolster a  generation of new ideas and create new innovations and investment opportunities.  At Birkbeck, we have long understood the importance of lifelong learning that is directly associated with productivity gains for the economy, which in the current climate could help to compensate for a reduced workforce and staggered productivity. Robots and AI could also address the productivity/labour supply challenges, especially if we reach a point where machines can generate innovations and robots might be used more to fill gaps in the work force and provide care for the elderly, but it might make more people unemployed.

A typical challenge is that politicians are often short sighted. Long-term investment in order to boost human capital and productivity would not be a top priority for an incumbent politician in the short term, despite the transformative effects they could have for the generations to come.  Often, what we think is happening now is the slow moving changes that started a long time back, so a long-term view is essential to tackle the economic impact of ageing populations to address the future.

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The surprising impact of innovation on reducing climate change

New research by the Department of Management’s Dr Fred A. Yamoah and colleagues explores the relationship between innovation input, governance and carbon dioxide emissions.

Picture of a wind farm

There is no doubt that the humanitarian and economic impact of climate change is a matter for global concern. However, prior research tells us that it is emerging and developing economies that are likely to be hit hardest by the impact of global warming.

In their 2019 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that emerging and developing economies, with their heavy reliance on agriculture, forestry and tourism, were more at risk from the adverse impact of climate change than more developed economies. Indeed, the IPCC found that every one-degree centigrade increase in temperature would lead to a 1.3% drop in economic growth in an emerging economy.

What role does innovation play in the fight against climate change?

Typically, the fate of countries in this position has been viewed somewhat fatalistically, with little known about what can be done to mitigate the damage caused by the poor climate choices of more developed countries. However, since innovative technologies are known to have a positive impact on climate change factors by conserving energy and reducing emissions, we wanted to know whether increased innovation input could support developing economies in the fight against climate change.

Our study involved an analysis of data from the World Bank database on 29 emerging countries over the period from 1990 to 2018. My colleagues Godfred Adjapong Afrifa, Gloria Appiah (both Kent Business School), Ishmael Tingbani (Bournemouth University) and I examined whether investment in cutting-edge technologies could help address climate change problems in emerging economies, and how this relationship is supported or mitigated by governance factors.

The impact of governance

Why is it important to consider governance alongside innovation and climate change? First of all, it is good for business: stakeholder theory tells us that organisations that please their stakeholders by following ethical norms of fairness, trustworthiness and respect are likely to see improved overall performance in the long term.

When it comes to climate change targets, governments and international governing bodies such as the EU or ECOWAS are among the most critical stakeholders, as they are more likely to take a long term view and possess the necessary regulatory powers to ensure best practices are upheld.

How innovation benefits emerging economies

The introduction of innovative technologies and practices can benefit emerging economies in a number of ways. For farmers, genetic technologies can develop resilient crops that adapt to environmental challenges in agriculture. New technologies also typically conserve energy and reduce harmful fuel emissions.

Looking at the data, our results suggest that emerging countries with high innovative competencies reduce climate change problems by approximately 26.8%, with a 10% increase in cutting-edge technology.

While these findings show the dramatic impact of innovation on mitigating the negative effects climate change, it is important to note that the positive results were moderated by governance factors, as the quality of governance influences countries’ investment in innovative technologies towards curbing environmental damage.

Contrary to the typically deterministic view of climate change, our results suggest that emerging economies’ innovation efforts could have a significant impact on national and global success in the fight against climate change.

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