PROFESSOR DYLAN JONES-EVANS

During the last few months, we have seen various plans for new developments focused on innovation across the three Welsh cities. In Swansea, both universities are creating campuses that are aiming to boost the competitiveness of the region .  In Cardiff, the university has announced a £300m development that is focused on boosting innovation and entrepreneurship in our capital city whilst the whole of Newport seems to be involved in creating a new future based on initiatives such as the Software University and the Innovation Company. Given this, those putting these new plans should certainly take time to read a new report from the New York-based think tank, the Brookings Institute.  “ The Rise of Innovation Districts ” is a comprehensive up to-date analysis of the growth of this type of phenomenon across the World. It examines, in detail, how these so-called “innovation districts” enable the creation of synergistic relationship between people, firms and place that prom...

Back in 1940, the Royal Commission on the Distribution of the Industrial Population reported that "London acts as a continual drain on the rest of the country both for industry and population, and much evidence points to the fact that it is already too large.”  Such a sentiment is shared by many living in other parts of the UK seventy four years later, with evidence of a continued imbalance between investment into London as compared to other cities across the nation. In fact, many would not be surprised that, during the last decade, it has been responsible for a third of all economic growth within the UK. And according to a recent study, this is set to continue with the City of London showing a resurgence in the last twelve months and developments such as Silicon Roundabout in the East End of London - where companies such as Facebook, Google, Intel and Cisco have located to create  a high technology hotspot - attracting young people from all over the country into the c...

Last month, I left the University of Wales after five years to take up a new chair in entrepreneurship and strategy at Bristol Business School. It will be a fascinating challenge but not one that means that I will be leaving the world of business and enterprise in Wales. I will remain as a business columnist for the Western Mail and its sister paper in North Wales, the Daily Post. The Wales Fast Growth 50 – which is in its fifteenth year – goes from strength to strength and we have a full house for the award ceremony in October. I am also continuing to work closely with the Welsh Government to complete the second part of the access to finance review by the end of the year. More importantly, of course, I will still be living in Wales and spending my income in the restaurants and pubs of Cardiff! In fact, having been employed within the Welsh university sector since 1996 when I returned from Ireland to take up my first chair at the University of Glamorgan, a number of friends...

Last week, the major announcement from the Welsh Government concerned the report of a special taskforce that had been commissioned into looking into the potential of city regions as drivers for economic growth. Essentially, city regions are exactly what they say on the tin – they are those areas surrounding a major urban location that, as academic research has shown, are major drivers of economic growth and employment. Normally, they consist of areas that collectively have a minimum population of 500,000 residents, thus creating the critical mass needed for economic growth and enables policies on issues such as transportation to be effectively utilised towards maximising the potential of the city region. Given Wales’ demographics and geography, it is not surprising that the Task Force recommended that only two city regions should be created. The first, with a population of 1.4 million would be in South East Wales and centred on Cardiff and taking in Newport, Bridgend and the ...

The American academic Richard Florida, whose work should be compulsory reading for every economic policymaker in Wales, stated in his seminal book “The Rise of the Creative Class” that “access to talented and creative people is to modern business what access to coal and iron ore was to steel-making.” Given this, you have to wonder why politicians and policymakers are not doing more to encourage greater creativity in the economy. Indeed, that was the subject of research released last week by the software company Adobe. The “State of Create” report was commissioned not only to get a handle on how important creativity is to the UK economy but, more importantly, how its affects people in their everyday lives. The main finding is that whilst a high percentage of people in the UK agree that creativity is the key to driving economic growth, we are not living up to our creative potential as a nation i.e. 63 per cent of adults consider themselves to be someone who is creative but ...