Raise the Hammer

In reference to:

"Knowledge, innovation, information, skills, etc. are only valuable when they can be applied to something and the only something to which they can be applied and provide added value is the production of useful things in an economy that needs or can benefit from them." ~ ViennaCafe

Here is an example of "Gross Value Added (GVA) per job" in UK:

How The Knowledge Economy Varies by Region

The interactive chart at above link - shows how the different regions and nations of the UK have developed their knowledge economies over the last 15 years. It presents the proportion of knowledge workers (both public and private sector) on the horizontal axis, with Gross Value Added (GVA – a measure of economic output) per job on the vertical axis. The size of each bubble shows the total size of each region’s economy.

The data highlights a few simple, but important, points about how the UK economy is changing:

• The economy has been getting more knowledge-intensive in all parts of the UK. Both the proportion of knowledge workers and the value of each job have risen in every region of the UK.

• London is a more knowledge-intensive and high-value economy than any other part of the UK, with the South East consistently second, but still some way behind. Over the last 15 years many of the other regions have caught up with London in terms of the share of knowledge workers, but London has continued to leave the rest behind in terms of value per job.

• Places with more knowledge workers tend to have higher GVA per job. This is an obvious point, but it is important: if towns and cities want to boost prospects for both knowledge and non-knowledge workers, then they need to grow the innovative, knowledge-based parts of their economies.

The Big Innovation Centre will be doing more work on the regional innovation gap under our Markets, place and networks theme. At the same time, The Work Foundation’s Cities 2020 programme is doing excellent work looking at how innovation works in British cities.

In Hamilton, we are confusing the so called hip, liberally defined "creative industry" with the "knowledge economy".

The parameters and research methodology used to generate data-sets for defining Hamilton's creative industry will not give us a true picture of our knowledge economy. In fact, we continue to be under the impression that what we are seeing as the re-birth of certain areas on account of a thrust on the arts, is our knowledge economy. It is not, it simply cannot turn into a knowledge economy.

Hamilton's EcDev Dept needs to seriously look at measures such as what Vienna Cafe speaks off above - and which are being used in the UK as seen here, to begin to truly understand where Hamilton is on the growth curve of an Knowledge Economy.

But for this, first we need to outgrow the media hype surrounding the 'creative industry' - and realign our community level economic development efforts around the imperative of creating added value in the production of useful things.

Mahesh P. Butani

ps: Three Productive Anchors of The UK Economy

Comment edited by Mahesh_P_Butani on 2012-04-16 02:14:27