Skills, Knowledge, Innovation, Policy and Practice

这项研究项目探讨了技能、管理实践和创新之间的关系，以更好地理解政府政策和行业管理可能如何干预以改善英国经济的表现。以前的工作表明，当劳动力技能和管理实践被组合在一起时，不同水平、类型和安排的劳动力技能和管理实践如何提高创新绩效。因此，尽管改善业绩的管理干预本身可能影响很小，甚至没有影响，但当它们结合在一起时，影响可能是相当大的。这个项目正在更详细地探索这些关系，并试图解开工作中复杂的因果关系。该项目涉及利用基于多年来对公司的重复调查的详细数据集，这些数据集允许在更长的时间段内探索这些关系。与该项目将开发的新统计方法一起，该团队将能够以强有力的方式分析这些因果机制，以显示关系的方向和优势，以及它们在不同类型的公司中是如何变化的。在进行这项研究时，项目团队旨在通过一项合作研究计划，帮助改善学术研究人员、行业从业者和政策制定者之间的互动，该计划将突出管理者和政策制定者可以干预的要点，以改善业绩，并为改善创新、生产率和创造就业做出贡献。该项目涉及五个子项目，涉及：a)哪种互补技能和管理实践的模式与何种创新业绩相关；b)这些关系如何在长期内对一些高科技公司样本发生变化，这些战略变化的原因和影响是什么；c)过去15年英国毕业生人数的增加是如何在各个行业中分配的，以及这对工资和生产率产生了什么影响；d)如何使用新的计量经济学方法来理解将技能和创新联系起来的因果关系。以及如何包装和传播项目成果，以最好地影响政策和实践。提高技能是个人员工改善工作条件和公司改善经济业绩的主要途径之一。然而，它们相互作用的方式，以及与公司内部不同管理实践的互动，是非常复杂的。该项目希望从这种复杂性中解脱出来，使政策制定者、公司和个人能够就这些技能的价值做出更好、更明智的选择。

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.