PROFESSOR DYLAN JONES-EVANS

Earlier this week, there was some excellent news for the creative industries sector in South East Wales when the UK Government announced that media.cymru project was to be granted £22.2 million under its Strength in Places Fund.  This will bring together key stakeholders in the industry, including UK broadcasters, universities, small local businesses and freelancers in a £50m initiative to research and develop new products and services for global markets. The Strength in Places Fund - which has been established to support economic development across the UK – is an excellent policy tool in that it funds the specific competitive strengths of different parts of the UK. It forms an important part of the UK Government’s new innovation strategy to boost private sector investment in R&D across the whole of the UK and create the right conditions for all businesses to innovate. It is an ambitious approach that aims to increase annual government investment on R&D to £22 billion, help...

  Last week, the latest edition of the Global Innovation Index (GII) was published, a report. that is not only an annual assessment of innovation trends but also examines the individual performance of 131 economies around the world. According to the index, the three most innovative nations in the world are Switzerland, Sweden and the United States with the United Kingdom ranking fourth, an increase of one since last year. Interestingly, the UK ranks first in the world for the quality of scientific publications and second in the quality of its universities. More broadly, the report makes a number of notable findings. Whilst innovation is concentrated at the level of science and technology clusters in a small number of high-income economies (with Cambridge and Oxford identified as the leading locations), the innovation performance in many developing economies has been impressive despite various challenges such as the decline in the funding of innovation. In fact, there continues to b...

In business, change is usually a slow process that can years if not decades to take effect but we are finally seeing a revolution in the development of innovation that has the capacity to change the whole way that economies can achieve competitive advantage in a rapidly changing global business environment. What we saw during the last century was businesses generating ideas internally which they would then develop, manufacture and sell themselves. As a result, competitive advantage was based on heavy investment in research and development (R&D) and hiring the brightest people to get to market first. Once this was done, companies would then protect their new products through aggressively controlling intellectual property to stop anyone else exploiting it. This would then result in greater profits which could then be reinvested in more R&D and hiring more staff to develop more new products, thus creating a virtuous circle that led to a small number of large firms domina...

As regular readers will know, I have been a constant advocate for lower business rates for smaller businesses in Wales since I started writing my first newspaper column for the Daily Post back in 2003. And it would seem that this vital issue is now something that has become popular again amongst politicians in Wales. Last year, we saw t he publication of a Welsh Government commissioned review , chaired by Professor Brian Morgan of Cardiff Metropolitan University (above), into whether changing the business rates regime in Wales could aid economic development. And not to be outdone, Plaid Cymru have now made an announcement on the future of business rates in Wales at their annual conference in Aberystwyth . This would mean that firms with a rateable value of less than £10,000 would pay no business rates (rather than the £6,000 ceiling at present) and firms would qualify for reduced business rates if their rateable values were below £15,000 (rather than £12,000 under the current...

Increasingly, governments and policymakers are realising that entrepreneurs provide one of the primary engines of growth as the global economy emerges from the problems of the last few years. And not only do they now provide most of the new jobs in many countries, as various research studies have shown, but they develop new products and services, create new business models that can revolutionise industries and support local communities. This is despite the fact that most societies do very little to promote the development of an entrepreneurial culture where new businesses are promoted and supported, a finding that is reinforced by a study published this week which shows that there is still much work to be done by the World's leading economies if entrepreneurship is to be boosted to make a greater contribution to innovation, job creation and prosperity. The Ernst and Young Entrepreneurship Barometer provides a detailed insight of the entrepreneurial environment within the l...

One hundred and four years ago and thanks to a Welsh Chancellor of the Exchequer, the British Government granted the first pensions to its citizens who, when David Lloyd George was in charge of the nation's finances, had to be men of ‘good character’ over the age of 70 who had not been in the workhouse. Since then, all of us have become eligible for a state pension when we reach retirement age but are our older generation better off? Ironically, perhaps, the five shillings paid out in 1909 was, according to pensioners support groups, equivalent to 25 per cent of the average earnings. Compare that to the situation today where the state pension is equivalent to only 17 per cent of an individual’s average pay. In such a situation, it is probably not surprising to find that many pensioners are now going back to work to supplement what they get from the state. The latest data showed that in the last three years, the numbers of adults aged sixty-five years or older who are in ...

The Republic of Ireland was one of the economies hardest hit by the recent global recession. With unemployment reaching 15 per cent earlier this year and the Irish Government having to make austerity cuts that make those emanating from Whitehall look positively generous in comparison, there remained serious doubts as to whether the Celtic Tiger could recover any of its bite during the next decade. Yet despite these challenges, the new Irish Government has begun a serious fightback and is continuing to look to innovation as the key driver in growing its economy for the future. In particular, it is developing key strategies that are focusing on those areas of the economy it sees as being critical in transforming the business sector over the next decade. One of these is the so-called Green Economy that encompasses a range of activities spread across different sectors that have the common objective of providing goods and services in a sustainable way that reduces the impact on t...

A few years ago, I was asked by the then Vice Chancellor of Cardiff University to come up with a business plan for a new entrepreneurship centre. Unfortunately, he decided not to invest in such a development at that time, which was a great shame given the latent entrepreneurial potential that exists within Wales’ best university and, more importantly, the impact it could have on the economy of the capital city. Nevertheless, the exercise did give me the opportunity to undertake some detailed research into what was happening around the World in terms of enterprise development and benchmark Cardiff against the best globally. Naturally, programmes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University were identified as world class, along with the courses offered at the most entrepreneurial higher education institution in the USA, namely Babson College. But the biggest surprise, at least at that time, was the growing reputation of the University of Colorado in Boul...

Earlier this year, the Dragon's Den panelist and entrepreneur James Caan was highly critical of the way in which government had been creating unnecessary rules for small businesses in the UK. In a wide ranging assault on the destructive nature of red-tape in the economy, he suggested that many of the regulations were nonsensical and overly-bureaucratic, such as requiring a £35 poisons licence to sell toilet descaler or ant killer and needing an alcohol licence to sell chocolate liqueurs. He also noted that there were barriers to getting businesses off the ground and creating jobs. For example, whilst opening a new warehouse in Germany took only four months, he claimed that the delay in Britain could be as long as 18 months, thus disincentivising potential investors. Whilst some in government circles dismissed his comments, they will not be a surprise to many businesspeople and lobbying groups. Recent surveys from the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) have suggested that ...

In an earlier blog post, I discussed the development of a new economic approach by the governors of the individual states that make up the USA . Having had the opportunity this week to fully digest the “Growing State Economies” report which sets out the priorities for such a strategy, it was heartening to note that the message was clear to those involved in economic development at a state level that they should stop competing against each other to attract investment from larger companies and move towards a more bottom-up approach to start and develop their own local businesses. This is not going to be easy. Data shows that individual states are, on average, still looking to spend twenty seven per cent more next year on strategic business attraction. And this is despite statistics that demonstrate that only two per cent of annual job gains across the individual states can be attributed to business relocations. Fortunately, for those keen to promote entrepreneurship at a local le...

Yesterday evening, I received a phonecall from a good friend asking me if I had read the Sunday Times that day. I hadn't and so he directed me to a story which, if true, could have serious implications for one of the Welsh Government's flagship policies. Unfortunately, due to the Sunday Times' web policy, I cannot provide the necessary link to the story (which may be why no-one seems to have picked up the article in the Welsh press). Essentially, the story suggests that the Welsh Government will have to pay the difference in fees for thousands of EU students wishing to study at English. According to the Sunday Times, "The loophole allows Europeans to exploit a decision by the Welsh government to pay any fees above £3,465 for students from Wales who attend courses in England from next year". It would seem that under EU laws, Wales is not permitted to offer a better deal to its own students than it offers to those of any EU state outside Britain...