Skills, Knowledge, Innovation, Policy and Practice

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This research project explores the relationship between skills, management practices and innovation to better understand how government policy and industrial management might intervene to improve the performance of the UK economy. Previous work has shown how different levels, types and arrangements of workforce skills and managerial practices improve innovative performance when they are grouped together in "bundles". So while managerial interventions to improve performance may have little or no impact on their own, when they are combined the impact can be considerable. This project is exploring those relationships in more detail, and trying to unpick the complex causality at work. The project involves exploiting detailed datasets based on repeated surveys of firms over a number of years, that allow these relationships to be explored over extended periods of time. Together with the new statistical methods that the project will develop, the team will be able to analyse these causal mechanisms in a robust way to show the directions and strengths of the relationships, and how they vary across different types of firms. In conducting this research, the project team aim to help improve engagement between academic researchers, industrial practitioners and policy makers through a programme of collaborative research that will highlight points where both managers and policy makers can intervene to improve performance and contribute to improved innovation, productivity and job creation. The project involves five subprojects that address: a) which pattern of complementary skills and managerial practices are associated with what kinds of innovative performance, b) how these relationships change over the long term for a sample of high tech firms, and what the causes and impacts of those strategic changes are,c) how the increased number of graduates in the UK have been distributed across sectors over the last 15 years, and what impact that has had on wages and productivity,d) how new econometric methods can be used to understand the causal relationships that link skills and innovation, ande) how the results of the project can be packaged and diffused to best influence policy and practice.Improvements in skills are one of the main ways in which individual employees improve their working conditions and firms improve their economic performance. However, the way in which they interact with each other, and with different managerial practices within firms, is very complex. This project hopes to unpick some of this complexity to enable policy makers, firms and individuals to make better, more informed choices about the value of those skills.