City REDI round up

It’s been a busy month for the City-REDI team. Here’s a round-up of what we’ve been up to…

Local and Central Government:  

• On the invitation of the Mayor of Birmingham, Andy Street, Professor Simon Collinson has joined the ‘West Midlands Funding for Growth Commission’. The Commission met on Monday 4^th September 2017 and will work on the challenges of fiscal devolution to promote economic growth for the region.
• On 12^th September, two members of City-REDI, Professor Simon Collinson, Director, and Rebecca Riley, Administrative Director, attended the City-REDI sponsored West Midlands All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) at the House of Commons, with MP’s from the region to discuss the Midlands Engine.
• Professor Anne Green gave a presentation on ‘Employment, Skills and Productivity’ at a Westminster Social Policy Forum Keynote Seminar on ‘The future for the Midlands engine’ in Birmingham on the same day.

Awards/ Funding:

• Professor Simon Collinson was awarded Fellow of the British Academy of Management (BAM Fellow) at the BAM Annual Conference awards ceremony last week. Simon also presented at the plenary session at the Conference, invited by the Dean of Fellows on a panel to discuss “The Future of Business Schools and Management Research: Key Challenges for Difficult Times”

• Chloe Billing, Research Fellow at City-REDI, was awarded the annual prize by the Economic Geography Research Group, Royal Geographical Society, for the best PhD thesis in the field of economic geography submitted at a UK institution during 2016. Chloe’s thesis, Satellite, Rockets and Services: a Place for Space in Geography? explored the competitiveness, organisation and governance of the UK space sector and was praised for the quality of the research, the novelty of the empirical context and the approach taken.
• Chloe has also been awarded an ESRC IAA National Productivity Investment Fund for a secondment into PA Consulting, working on the operationalisation of City-REDI’s research to develop both

  

  organisations’ thinking and response to the Industrial Strategy. This secondment will be aligned to the theme of transforming business practices and several pillars of the Industrial Strategy: predominantly the commercialisation of the science base (pillar 1), but also infrastructure (pillar 3) public procurement (pillar 5), and trade and inward investment (BREXIT) (pillar 6). The secondment meets the need of PA Consulting and the wider industry to develop their Industrial Strategy related activity (and thought leadership) with the input of objective academic research. The benefits to Chloe will be gaining knowledge and understanding of how to write commercial presentations/reports/briefings; building links with experts in key areas; experience in setting up and managing impact events; working in a commercial environment; and the potential for academic papers around implementing industrial strategy thinking in a commercial environment.

• Tasos Kitsos, City REDI Policy and Data Analyst, has been awarded ESRC Impact Accelerator Account funding to be seconded to PA Consulting and test the feasibility of applying their COMPETE methodology at the sub-national level. Tasos has also successfully concluded the examination and been awarded minor revisions for the completion of his PhD.

Publications: 

• Professor Anne Green has contributed a chapter called Understanding the Drivers of Internal Migration in the recently published book – Internal Migration in the Developed World.
• Dr Max Nathan, in conjunction with Dr Anna Russo, has contributed a chapter called Exploring Digital Technology Industry Clusters Using Administrative and Frontier Data in the recently in the recently published book – Big Data for Regional Science.

Look ahead to the coming months…

• As part of the Birmingham Weekender, Rebecca Riley, Administrative Director, will be talking at Active Participation and Enabling Citizenship, on the 24th September.
• City-REDI will be co-sponsoring fringe events at the Labour and Conservative Party Conferences.
• Professor Anne Green will be presenting at the Work Foundation on the 27^th September 2017 – Supporting more inclusive employment outcomes in growth sectors.
• Amir Qamar and Emma Gardner, as part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science, are preparing for an event they are putting together on the 8th November 2017 titled – Relevance: Bridging the Gap between Research and Business Practice.

Professor Raquel Ortega Argiles will be –

• Presenting the paper European Disparities in Regional Health R&I Performance at the 6^th European Conference on Corporate R&D and Innovation, 27-29 September 2017, at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, in Seville (Spain). Raquel will also be chairing the session Supporting R&D at the same conference.
• The discussant at the ERSA European Regional Science Association Lecture on the 6th October 2017 in Brussels.
• A panellist at the European Week of Regions and Cities 2017, in the workshop session titled: The regional dimension of inequality: territorial policy responses in a rapidly changing economic environment, talking about Regions and Policy on the 10th of October 2017, Brussels, Belgium.
• A panellist at the Annual Northern Ireland Economic Conference 2017, presenting the first results of my Brexit project: The Economic Consequences of Brexit in its Regions and Cities on Wednesday 25th of October in Armagh City, Northern Ireland, UK.
• Presenting at the Houses of Parliament the first results from the ESRC project, The Economic Consequences of Brexit in the UK, its regions, its cities and its sectors, at the ESRC Brexit Research for Policy event on Monday 30^th October 2017 at Portcullis House, Westminster, London, UK.