This is the second article in a two-part series looking into high-tech innovation districts and similar clusters.

Community-led change meets innovation management

The previous article on high-tech innovation districts questioned whether they are living up to their promise. Focused on being ‘smart hubs’, they are concerned primarily with economic and commercial results, not community and social wellbeing. Perhaps they can do both. 

The crossover between lessons on managing business innovation and those on empowering local communities is fertile ground to both broaden and strengthen the capabilities of high-tech innovation districts.

Innovation is more than technology

Innovation management has been defined as “the strategies and practices that can be used to improve organisational (and community) benefits from innovation” (Dodgson et al, 2013).

Innovation management covers a wide research field, drawing from an array of perspectives including science, economics, engineering and psychology. Similarly, innovation covers a broad sphere from the traditional topics of R&D, intellectual property, technology and creativity to the emerging initiatives in design, social networks, open and social innovation, and innovation in business models. (Dodgson, 2018).

Innovation management studies seek to explain how value from innovation is created, captured and deployed.

The key insight for innovation districts is not to become fixated on powerful new technologies, as they are only one of many ways to innovate. Don’t undervalue innovation in how enterprises learn and absorb knowledge, how they manage their people, organise relationships with customers and other key parties, and the business model used for earning money and sustaining the enterprise.

The imperative is not more advanced technologies or discoveries, but to ensure a critical mass of adept, agile enterprises, competing globally and able to solve problems that matter to customers or communities.

Innovation for all

Next, avoid the stereotype of innovation working and benefiting only the boffins and nerds, the ‘knowledge elites’. 

Innovation should not be a rarefied concept, either ignored or feared by the public at large, because it is irrelevant or else, brings job losses and service closures. Innovation must be managed to benefit the wider population, including those who are most likely to become the casualties of economic disruptions. 

A good starting point is with essential work and workers of the everyday economy, those providing the goods and services that sustain our daily lives. They include nurses, teachers, aged care and child care workers, those in retail, transport and the like.

The everyday economy impacts on innovation because everyone, irrespective of income, is involved and a significant element of the everyday economy is learning, caring and social support work. This work reinforces the social ties and human interactions crucial for social cohesion, resilience and a sense of belonging and community identity.

Strengthening the performance of the everyday economy is an innovation strategy—because it unlocks the untapped potential of communities. This includes those left behind by technological and economic change. It has been referred to as ‘the economics of belonging’. (Sandbu, 2020).

 Work on the economics of belonging has been taken further in Australia by projects on place-based capital and community wealth building, which aim to foster wealth creation, ownership and investment by local people in local enterprises.

Action on the everyday economy delivers both economic and social outcomes, and is a useful crossover strategy for innovation districts.

Community-led action for economic development and social wellbeing

Finally, social and community wellbeing measures should be included in the design of the priority economic development projects implemented by those responsible for high-tech innovation districts. A vital feature is ensuring community members and residents are co-designers of these projects and measures, not just consulted along the way.

A useful tool is the Cities and Regions Wellbeing Index for 2024 by SGS Economics and Planning. This is a rigorous and data-driven set of spatial wellbeing rankings for over 500 Local Government Areas across Australia, with 7 wellbeing dimensions measured by 24 indicators. Going beyond GDP, it shows how place impacts community wellbeing.

Innovation districts can use the Cities and Regions Wellbeing Index to explore the measures and indicators most relevant for their circumstances, to start conversations and to begin the assessment process to measure their progress on social and community wellbeing outcomes.

Equally important as what to measure, is how to measure. Participation by community members as equal partners is a priority. Rather than sporadic consultation or asking people what they think of a plan already developed by Government authorities or other officials, communities should be empowered to lead the task.

A case example is the broad-based wellbeing economy plan in the Corangamite Shire in south western Victoria, Grow and Prosper Corangamite. 

The distinguishing features of Corangamite Shire Council’s approach include comprehensive interrogation of data sources to explore trends and policy approaches, to define unique needs, diagnose the Shire’s strengths and weaknesses and identify the most effective actions for change. It made deliberate decisions to span boundaries. For example, melding three previously separate strategy plans, recognising the links between community and economy, and deriving the crossover benefits between economic development and cultural industries.

A further distinctive feature was abandoning standard consultants’ reports in favour of producing an integrated economic prosperity framework from a close, rigorous and highly interactive and interdependent working relationship with community members. Community members included residents, businesses, artists and creatives, service providers and more.

The method used was based on a human or user-centred design process, where priority is given to the ideas and solutions of those for whom the program is targeted. The motto was “with you, not for you”.

Council asked and aimed to understand what their people and communities actually wanted and worked through potent solutions and imaginative actions with them. They shared knowledge and collaborated on knotty problems around a myriad of ‘kitchen tables’ to come up with a common approach that incidentally, addressed both economic and social issues, from Agriculture to Art.

Australia’s current major industry policy debates centre on how we can become a powerhouse of cutting-edge technologies to underpin self-sufficiency in industries of the future and to aid solutions to big intractable societal challenges. The focus is on renewable energy, critical minerals processing, advanced manufacturing and the like.

But, focus does not mean loss of vision.

Australia’s future prosperity will equally depend on the human dimensions of innovation as the technological; knowledge and problem-solving from the arts and humanities as well as from STEM disciplines; and progress on measures of social wellbeing as well as on economic performance.

High-tech innovation districts keen just to mimic Silicon Valley need to be more ambitious!

REFERENCES:

Dodgson, M., Gann, D. M., Phillips, N. (2013), Oxford Handbook of Innovation Management, Oxford University Press.

Dodgson, M. (2018), Innovation Management. A Research Overview, Routledge.

Sandbu, M., (2020), The Economics of Belonging, Princeton University Press.

Szafraniec, J. and Tjondro, M., (2024), SGS Cities and Regions Wellbeing Index, SGS Economics and Planning, May 2024, https://sgsep.com.au/projects/sgs-wellbeing-index

Corangamite Shire, (2023), Grow and Prosper Corangamite: Framework 2023-2033, May 2023.