Inclusive innovation in cities: from buzzword to policy

ABSTRACT

‘Inclusive innovation’ has become an increasingly important subnational policy agenda. This paper reviews this agenda, critiques its current usage and presents a new framework for how the concept can be applied by city government. Efforts to shape the direction, improve participation in and share the benefits of innovation should be an important part of place-based innovation policy. Yet, inclusive innovation strategies face three related problems: neophilia, a tendency for technological fixes and the lack of local powers. The paper concludes with a framework for how the concept could be used by policymakers to link innovation with better distributional outcomes.

KEYWORDS:

• inclusive innovation
• urban policy
• inclusive growth
• innovation

JEL:

• D63
• O3
• R58

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks to Saadia Ahmed for research assistance on the project. Thanks to the participants at Lund University and the 2020 Geography of Innovation Conference in Stavanger, and Rune Dahl Fitjar, Emma Haigh, Benjamin Klumpf, Laura Gilbert, Josephine Rekers, Eleanor Springer, Anoush Darabi, Emma Frost, Claire Eagle, Alex Gardiner, Mike Emmerich and Madeleine Gabriel for useful discussions on the topic.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. There are some hints at this in the development literature (e.g., Foster & Heeks, 2013a), but it is less forceful.

2. There are other, related concepts – such as social innovation – but there are too many of these to consider in this paper.

3. A sharp reviewer notes that these are all liberal market economies. This may bias the results, of course. Future research in other countries would help address this problem.

4. The Olympic Park was renamed the Queen Elizabeth Park.

Additional information

Funding

This paper was funded by the Inland University Norway and the research project REDINN, Stiftelsen Sparebank1 Hedmark; and supported by LSE International Inequalities Institute.