Mapping the production, diffusion and drivers of future technologies

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We propose to map and track the state of technological change in the UK, understand its drivers, impacts and help to improve the UK's productivity record via our collaboration and engagement with industry and policymakers. We focus on the role of frontier or 'future' technologies, such as AI, robotics, clean tech, blockchain and quantum. The contribution of these technologies to UK productivity will depend on the twin channels of their production and use (diffusion), the determinants of which we will seek to model theoretically and empirically. We will build up quantitative evidence on economic activity in the UK's 'future-technology-producing' and 'future-technology-using' sectors. First, through description - which will include both sectoral and geographical elements; and second through building evidence on the extent to which financial or skills frictions constrain investment. We are therefore addressing two of the challenges set out by the PIN workshop: understanding and improving innovation diffusion; and understanding and improving regional and local productivities. An innovation in our approach is that we will use a range of emerging databases on technology-oriented firms linked to text-based information on their activities to build a comprehensive empirical picture of the future technology sectors. We will also use these databases to track the diffusion of technologies in novel ways, and plan to conduct a survey to shed more light on the barriers to diffusion, for SMEs in particular. We will work together with leading industry and policy stakeholders with expertise on new technologies, relevant data and techniques. Our empirical exercises will be guided by a conceptual framework that will model the effect of frictions in the financial market and the labor market on innovation, diffusion and economic growth. Our project deliverables will consistent of four main components: 1. Future sector data and measurement network: Together with our project collaborators, we will host two major research meetings involving academics studying future technologies and relevant stakeholders from policy and business (e.g. NESTA and Be the Business). The first of these would seek to bring together the key stakeholders and set the agenda for research; and the second would involve presentations of our findings and developing an ongoing research agenda. We would also hold intermediate less formal working sessions.2. Report: Our core deliverable after 18 months will be a report containing (i) a review of the relevant literature, empirical and theoretical; (ii) new descriptive statistics of the size, geography, structure and performance of the future technology sector in the UK (comparing and contrasting with traditional SIC based estimates); (iii) a conceptual framework to inform the drivers of the production and adoption of future technologies - by building a minimalistic model, the theory will aim to guide the empirical exercises using new data we collect or consolidate; and (iv) empirical modelling of production and adoption of future technology using new firm level databases and a survey, including external (to the firm) measures of the supply of finance/skills where possible.3. Agenda for future academic research with new co-authorships from the project team: extending theoretical work and testing its predictions using our new data, and identifying areas where additional data are required. We envisage that the project will lead to the development of at least 2 academic papers, most likely one more focused on the FTP firms, and one on the FTU sectors, with paths to causal identification.4. Data: Where the data we are using are purchased, we will seek to provide resources and guidance for researchers wishing to build on our analysis. According to standard academic practice, we would share our own generated survey data on an anonymised basis to interested parties, via the UKDS as appropriate.