City-REDI seminar series: Fostering regional diversification and transformation through public procurement - Dr Elvira Uyarra, University of Manchester

City-REDI is delighted to invite you to our seminar series covering economics, economic geography, regional science, economic development, critical urbanism and urban policymaking. 

On the 12th of March, Dr Elvira Uyarra from the University of Manchester will deliver a seminar titled "Fostering regional diversification and transformation through public procurement".  

Innovation policy debates increasingly recognise societal challenges as drivers for innovation policy. Their traditional basis in market and system failure concepts, means innovation policy has paid too little attention to the content of innovation and has been ineffective in solving so-called ‘wicked’ problems such as poverty, ageing, climate change, economic renewal etc. (Weber and Rohracher, 2012; Coenen et al, 2015; Frenken, 2017). This has motivated recent views which advocate for greater challenge orientation in innovation policy (Schot and Steinmuller, 2016; Mazzucato, 2013) and targeted policies to articulate societal needs at the demand side (Boon and Edler, 2018). However, the literature has remained rather silent about the role of regions in this ‘transformative’ or challenge-oriented innovation policy agenda (Coenen et al, 2015), and how they shape the context and outcomes of innovation policy realisation, including the complexity of multi-level governance and the importance of regional contextual factors enabling transformative change including reflexivity, legitimacy, policy coordination and demand articulation through practices like public procurement (Weber and Rohracher, 2012). The literature is particularly silent on demand articulation, and lacks frameworks focusing on how innovation-related problems are framed and solutions are identified using local arenas and knowledge networks. Integrating insights from the literature on public procurement of innovation, evolutionary economic geography and ‘transformative’ innovation policy, the paper proposes a new conceptualization of regional diversification and transformation through public procurement. This framework is illustrated in two sectorally and structurally different regions in Spain (Basque Country and Galicia).

This seminar will take place in Room 524, the Education Building, University of Birmingham, 29 January 2019, 2 - 3pm.

You can find directions to the venue here.