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We use the concept of ‘imagined communities’, and related work on socio-technical imaginaries and expectations, to reflect on how Scotland is represented simultaneously as ‘sick and unhealthy’ and a ‘living lab’ due to its innovative medical research. Together, we suggest these narratives have driven a broader health and wealth agenda in post-devolution Scotland, which became salient during the 2014 independence referendum. We draw on research conducted during the independence referendum to consider how key stakeholders enacted imagined communities/identities (sick but also innovative) as they considered the historical impact of devolution on health and research systems and envisioned future independence. The referendum provided an opportunity to consider how Scottish health and research systems have been imagined over time. Our findings further the understanding of the impact of devolution on healthcare and medical research, revealing the role played by policy narratives rooted in imagined identities.

This paper presents an approach developed by the Innogen Centre for the analysis of systems of innovation. The approach, developed through the study of innovation in the life sciences, is unique in that it features a triangular view, alongside consideration of the behaviours and interactions between innovators, regulators and policymakers, and advocacy and public interest groups. Furthermore, while the approach can be characterised as co-evolutionary and system-based, it also allows for the user to shift from the macro to micro – considering the impact of institutions on actors and innovation within an institutional milieu, but also considering the individual behaviours and business plans or actions of the actors involved. This paper presents both the approach itself and how the approach was developed.

Regulatory authorities in developing economies not only face challenges regarding their own capabilities, but also have to grapple with heterogeneous levels of technological and innovation capabilities in firms. This paper draws from a firm-level analysis of internally created knowledge, externally sourced knowledge and firm heterogeneity among medical device manufacturers in South Africa to consider the corresponding evolution, development and deployment of regulatory capabilities in firms in their efforts to comply with the country’s health and allied products regulatory authority requirements. From this consideration, the paper explores possible broader adjustments in the country’s medical device sectoral system of innovation which would promote, nurture and embed the desired regulatory capabilities in firms to enable medical device firms to be locally and globally competitive and to contribute optimally to the country’s health sector objectives.

There is potentially tension between world class research and global standards on the one hand and local contexts of engineering and development practice on the other. One aims at scientific status and entirely new knowledge, suggesting just one standard of quality. The other at building products and processes that might bring socio-economic development, often prizing pragmatism and bricolage. The UK-funded programme ‘Understanding Sustainable Energy Solutions in Developing Countries’ (USES) was set up on the understanding that such tensions, if they exist, can be transcended. It was funded by two organisations, the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the UK international development agency, Department for International Development. This paper analyses the USES research programme, looking at the processes of its establishment, partnership building, the research undertaken and its early impact. The paper shows that the USES programme goes beyond ‘normal’ pure versus applied, research versus policy and low-tech versus high-tech dualities. Instead, it throws up a complex series of issues that require attention if research is to lead to long standing and sustainable economic and social development. The paper suggests that the concept ‘liquid engineering’ might be a good way to conceptualise the ways in which the programme, without denying the tensions of dualistic realities, has moved towards a more fluid process to take account of its multiple and complex goals. The programme highlights that progress can be made towards engineering and development being accepted as a legitimate area of engineering theory and practice.

Covid-19 has forced many countries to rapidly increase their technological capabilities in diagnostics, personal protective equipment (PPE) and medicines. Global shortages of critical equipment and supplies induced by the pandemic have forced countries that traditionally import such equipment and supplies to build and ramp up their indigenous testing capacities and scale up production of PPEs. While shades of a new economic nationalism pervade much of the political discourse in support of this approach, there is surprising institutional variation in the Covid-19 industrial response of supplier countries. When viewed through an innovation system lens, we suggest that this inward focus on domestic capacity and production is actually coupled with intensified global outreach to new and existing suppliers. Contrary to some of the accompanying rhetoric, the actual policy and practice is one where no nation can do it alone. In this way, the pandemic can illuminate the adaptability of innovation systems and the continued importance of external sources of knowledge and resources under emergency conditions. This industrial policy response can also be viewed as largely temporary, although its influence on post-pandemic industrial strategy and future emergency response warrants further inquiry into how it has been implemented in various national contexts. As such, this paper looks at the COVID emergency industrial response of the UK for several reasons. In particular, we look at the UK’s efforts at building their laboratory testing capabilities and for increasing production of PPE. The paper’s early findings present useful building blocks of how industrial innovation systems can effectively respond and adapt, while also exposing some limitations to the innovation systems approach, specifically concerning local health capabilities, production, and delivery.

This special issue on the global and the local in engineering and development builds on an earlier JID Policy Arena on reflexive engineering. It extends our thinking by elaborating the notion of ‘liquid engineering’, which sees engineering and development as messy and improvisational, a borderland hybrid space, composed of objects and practices, and as reflexive and evolutionary. A set of research articles explore this in different ways using a set of case studies, and the policy arena that follows examines liquid engineering in the context of development practice. All the articles suggest that development engineering is at its most successful when embedded locally and informed by global standards flexed or adapted to local conditions. The local through the integration of relevant case studies can then also shape global practices in useful ways.

The paper aims to build understanding of the recent growth of interest in engineering for international development as an emerging focus of new knowledge, practice, and community development. In the paper, we create a borderlands approach to studying the activities referred to as engineering for development and development engineering. These activities take place in “borderland” spaces where new approaches are being tried out through creative engagement of networks and communities willing to integrate social as well as technical knowledge and practice. We analyze four cases, selected as exemplars of engineering for development, from a large data set of case studies to demonstrate the socio-economic impact of research. We found evidence of important and original engineering, which showed paradigmatic shifts in engineering knowledge and practice. There was ambivalence inside the engineering community about engineering quality, mixing pride in the building of new paradigms with modesty about whether new knowledge and practices were “real” engineering. These findings provide evidence that engineering aimed at global development offers an exciting new “borderlands” approach to engineering that warrants further study.

This paper focuses on business models and value chains to analyse sectoral innovation systems involving synthetic biology and gene editing, as potentially disruptive platform technologies in the life sciences. In the context of industrial biotechnology, we propose that the extent to which an innovation is expected to be disruptive, and the location of that disruption in existing value chains, are relevant to policy decision making on how to govern innovative technologies. Policy decisions on how to regulate or support an innovative technology will be among the most important factors determining the extent to which it is able to deliver its disruptive potential, leading to sectoral transformations through new business models and value chains. This mode of thinking about disruption and innovation could be incorporated in standard procedures for policy makers to guide decisions designed to support translation from basic scientific research to societally useful products and processes.

Some emerging countries have made significant progress in developing local pharmaceutical and biotechnology but had less success in building medical device industries. This paper explores the weak development of local medical device industries by analysing the contrasting evolutionary trajectories of Indian healthcare technology sectors. The Indian pharmaceutical and biotechnological industries have emerged as leading global suppliers of generic drugs and vaccines, in marked contrast to the medical devices industry. This paper reveals that weak collaborative linkage between medical device manufacturers and the Indian health system, largely absent systemic and cross-sectoral linkages, and weak communication between industry and government policy makers have become a huge barrier to the development of the Indian medical device industry in the contemporary neo-liberal environment. The weak connection between technology and industrial policy and healthcare policy objectives has severely hampered both development of national technological capabilities and the creation of affordable healthcare.

We use the concept of ‘imagined communities’, and related work on socio-technical imaginaries and expectations, to reflect on how Scotland is represented simultaneously as ‘sick and unhealthy’ and a ‘living lab’ due to its innovative medical research. Together, we suggest these narratives have driven a broader health and wealth agenda in post-devolution Scotland, which became salient during the 2014 Independence Referendum. We draw on research conducted during the Independence referendum to consider how key stakeholders enacted imagined communities/identities (sick but also innovative) as they considered the historical impact of devolution on health and research systems, and envisioned future independence. The Referendum provided an opportunity to consider how Scottish health and research systems have been imagined over time. Our findings further understanding of the impact of devolution on healthcare and medical research, revealing the role played by policy narratives rooted in imagined identities.

This paper presents an approach developed by the Innogen Centre for the analysis of systems of innovation. The approach, developed through the study of innovation in the life sciences, is unique in that it features a triangular view, alongside consideration of the behaviours and interactions between innovators, regulators and policymakers, and advocacy and public interest groups. Furthermore, while the approach can be characterised as co-evolutionary and system-based, it also allows for the user to shift from the macro to micro – considering the impact of institutions on actors and innovation within an institutional milieu, but also considering the individual behaviours and business plans or actions of the actors involved. This paper presents both the approach itself and how the approach was developed.

This article analyses important changes in technological innovation in the upstream petroleum industry. It provides evidence that shifts in sectoral patterns of innovation over the petroleum industry’s lifecycle from the 1970s up to 2005 were dependent on the dynamics of knowledge base complexity, a key dimension of an industry’s technological regime. Accordingly, observed shifts in innovation patterns are understood to be the aggregated strategic response of industry innovators to changes in the technological regime. The article proposes a quantitative method for exploring knowledge base complexity and Schumpeterian patterns of innovation, and interactions between the two at the industry level. As the industry evolved, its knowledge base moved to higher orders of complexity creating a shift in the Schumpeterian pattern of innovation. Increased knowledge base complexity was found to alter Schumpeterian patterns from Mark I towards a ‘modified’ Mark II. Instead of coming predominantly from ‘traditional’ established oil operators, technological innovation was increasingly triggered by a new class of emergent integrated service companies – ‘second tier’ systems integrators of the upstream sector able to cope with increased knowledge base complexity.

In this paper, we investigate the implementation challenge of Smart Specialisation Strategies (S3) in catch-up regional environments, through the lens of capacity building. We analyse capacity building at two levels: micro-level (individual organisations) and meso-level (regional inter-organisational networks). We use empirical evidence from 50 interviews conducted in the period 2015–2017 from two Greek regions dramatically hit by the economic crisis (Crete and Central Macedonia). We argue that in the Cretan and Central Macedonian context, the difficulty of implementing S3 is directly linked with firms’ lack of adsorptive capability to exploit university-generated knowledge, university knowledge that is too abstract for firm’s to easily acquire, as well as to the capability of regional actors to build inter-organisational networking that fits their strategic needs.

The importance of science in development has been increasingly recognised in development discourses and policy since 2000. Engineering is less visible though engineering and engineers are important for the building and maintenance of transport, water, energy, industrial, informatics, urban and health systems. This article aims to investigate why engineering has not received more emphasis, including why development engineering has not been institutionalised like tropical medicine. It explores the nature of engineering in development, highlights recent efforts to headline engineering for development and, using analyses of what engineers know and do inside international development, suggests that its profile and effectiveness is emerging.

For the first time, the UK research evaluation system, known as the Research Excellence Framework, considered ‘measures’ of impact in the 2014 review. Here, we focus on impact case studies that had an engineering and international development orientation. We found that writers of impact case studies commonly chose to employ an ecological modernization (economic, environmental, and social value) discourse to shape value claims. We also found that the type of engineering and international development research that appears in impact case studies tends to be high tech, best-with-best, and exclusive, rather than low tech, humanitarian, and inclusive.

This paper addresses important changes in innovation patterns in the upstream petroleum industry over the period from the 1970s to 2005. It argues that the shifts in patterns of innovation over that period can be explained by the dynamics of knowledge base complexity (KBC). We develop a quantitative method to explore KBC and show that increasing KBC has shifted innovation patterns, from a broadly Schumpeter Mark I to a 'modified' form of Schumpeter Mark II, led less by the established oil majors, but by a new class of integrated service providers.

The Scottish referendum of 2014 encouraged massive public debate, including on Scotland’s scientific performance and its ability to harness innovation and increase global competitiveness. The science base in Scotland has traditionally been strong with world leading universities driving development of science. However, the science base has not translated well into innovation. This paper uses statistical data, over 30 interviews and two workshops/focus groups with business and policy leaders to analyse the key scientific and industrial dynamics feeding into the debate and investigate the potential impact of enhanced autonomy on the Scottish innovation system.

Innogen (the UK ESRC Centre for Social and Economic Research on Innovation in Genomics) began its second five-year phase in late 2007. Innogen, a collaboration between the University of Edinburgh and the Open University, began in 2002. It belongs to the ESRC Genomics Network, made up of two other centres: Cesagen and Egenis and the ESRC Genomics Forum. From the beginning, Innogen’s aim has been to research the big changes right across the life sciences. We study the new science but also the implications for new technologies and how genomics and post-genomics might change the life science industries – health, crop and animal. Thus, our aim has been to study genomics as an integral part of the life sciences.

This is a report commissioned by the OECD. Innogen was asked to write a scenario report for the OECD International Futures Programme to consider the pathways that health biotechnologies could follow, the future trajectory of the bio-economy primarily in the context of human health and the likely societal, economic and policy impacts of these projected outcomes, focusing on the period 2015 to 2030 . We chose as a starting point a world health care system that, from the perspective of potential impacts of biotechnology, has been mainly under the influence of the innovation model of the multinational drug companies. To date the scope and inventiveness of this model has been constrained by the expensive and lengthy regulatory systems that act as a barrier to entry for small companies that could challenge the industry status quo and our report focuses on the need for regulatory change as a prelude to the emergence of a new, more radically innovative, health care sector. In the absence of such change our scenario predicts a health care sector that is increasingly populated by pharmaceutical commodity producers, research and development focused on incremental, piecemeal change, lack of both public and private sector funding, dysfunctional competition within and between companies and adversarial relationships with regulators. A radical change scenario on the other hand “Networked Health Care” would depend on regulatory agencies collaborating, as an integral component of the innovation system, in the proactive development of new, smarter regulatory approaches to the generation of benefits based on fundamental discoveries in life sciences. Our report describes the pre-conditions needed to lead to the more positive scenario and the roles of key actors in promoting or resisting such changes.

Scientific and technological breakthroughs do not necessarily lead to the public’s access to a new product. There is no automatic, smooth transfer from laboratory to product, and then to delivery and uptake by the user. For useful innovation and product development to happen funding, regulatory, production and delivery issues need to be resolved not only by African governments but also the international community, industry and civil society. In this paper we address three questions around this issue of transfer or rather translation, since changes needed are more systemic and more complex than simple transfer: which technologies do health experts consider have the greatest potential to address Africa’s health challenges; what are perceived to be the main barriers and challenges to developing or accessing those technologies; and what can be learnt from existing initiatives which are aimed at producing, supporting or promoting the procurement and application of science and technology (S&T) advances. To help us answer the questions we carried out a Delphi-type survey of more than 100 experts – especially focusing on prominent scientists and health policy makers in Africa and those working in global initiatives – and an extensive literature review.

Science, technology and innovation are vital to poverty alleviation and improved health. However, although improving immediate access to health care and existing health technologies is essential, simply importing technologies and products is not enough to create sustainable health care systems. Countries also need to build the capacities and institutions to develop their own technology and innovations which are tailored to local needs. But for innovation to meet local needs, countries need to develop dynamic and integrated health innovation systems. This is for several reasons. Firstly, there tends to be a profound lack of understanding between those in the world of healthcare and those who work in health innovation and production of pharmaceuticals. And unless researchers and producers network with local users and consumers, they are much less likely to respond to local needs. Secondly improved innovation capacity that responds to the needs of users does not occur in isolation - it is not the product of one-off scientific inventions, heavy investment in science or one-off policies. Rather it is dependent on networks through government institutions, private companies and a wide variety of end-user groupings at national, international and sectoral levels. Finally, knowledge is not accumulated and built up in one set of institutions and transferred to another set - it results instead from the interplay between different organisations and institutions. There is now an unparalleled opportunity to address both the issues of neglected diseases and to develop such integrated health innovation systems. Huge investments are currently being made in global health programmes which seek to improve health services and health innovation systems. The challenge for African policymakers is to adopt strategies for integrating global programmes with local and regional health innovation systems.

The Scottish referendum of 2014 encouraged massive public debate, including on Scotland’s scientific performance and ability to harness innovation and increase global competitiveness. The science base in Scotland has traditionally been strong but has not translated well into innovation. This paper uses statistical data, over 30 interviews and two workshops with business and policy leaders, to analyse key scientific and industrial innovation dynamics, using a regional innovation systems approach. It investigates the perceived impact of increased autonomy on the dynamics of the Scottish innovation system. The paper shows the weak relationship between science and innovation and evidences the static nature of Scottish innovation policy geared to bridging a gap rather than improving the dynamics of the various elements in the innovation system. It suggests that an approach which aims to spur evolution in specific elements of the territorial governance system would strengthen Scottish innovation capabilities.

In this paper we investigate the implementation challenge of Smart Specialisation Strategies (S3) in catch-up regional environments, through the lens of capacity building. We analyse capacity building at two levels: micro-level (individual organisations) and meso-level (regional inter-organisational networks). We use empirical evidence from 50 interviews conducted in the period 2015-17 from two Greek regions dramatically hit by the economic crisis (Crete and Central Macedonia). We argue that in the Cretan and Central Macedonian context, the difficulty of implementing S3 is directly linked with firms’ lack of adsorptive capability to exploit university-generated knowledge, university knowledge that is too abstract for firm’s to easily acquire, as well as to the capability of regional actors to build inter-organisational networking that fits their strategic needs.

Science and technology - and particularly biotechnology - are increasingly central to development agendas in Africa and elsewhere. Implicit within the centralitiy of science and technology lie a set of policy issues regarding how best to shape contextually appropriate, innovative and sustainable science and technological products in, with and for developing countries. The work of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) is a case in point and we draw our empirical material from the evolution of two biotech bovine vaccine development programmes housed in a CG centre. In the paper, we seek to show tha broadening our understanding of scientific 'excellence' can lead to more innovative, systemic research that may produce more appropriate technological solutions. We believe that this has key implications for science policy, development policy and the practice of science for development itself.

The last decades have witnessed major growth in the bioeconomy. Emergence of the bioeconomy as a broad, creative and rapidly expanding part of the global economy coincides with the maturation of the established drug discovery system. This paper presents research evidence focused on the relationships between changes in the bioeconomy and changes in the global economy. It argues that new forms of governance and regulation are key to strengthen industrial policies needed for emerging and developing countries to take account of the complex interactions in life science innovation between technology, markets, regulation and civil society, which could significantly impact on global distribution of the industry.

Investment in biotechnology has yielded relatively disappointing results and illustrates the gap between the promise and reality of new science. This begs the question: Does research on ‘life’ bring different complexities and uncertainties that act as a barrier to the application of new biology in global health and agriculture? There has been high-quality research on the social and ethical impacts of new biology and on the economics of biotechnology but few systematic and integrated attempts to undertake interdisciplinary research and address these constraints. This paper provides an original empirical analysis of contemporary and future understandings of the bioeconomy using a co-evolutionary and interactive approach to examine the extent to which it may be different from other technological transformations. We focus on the Innogen Centre’s extensive research results on three important and contemporary themes: food and energy security, life science and healthcare translational medicine, and global health.

Since the development of the national systems of innovation theory in the early 1990’s there has been a succession of attempts to research the systemic dimension of innovation at many different levels of economy and society. More recently, there has been some shift in the academic and policy debate on innovation from a more traditional systems approach to ecologies and/or ecosystems. The latter are concepts transferred from the world of biology to the social world in order to explain the evolutionary nature of interrelations between different individuals, their innovative activities and their environment. This paper evaluates the concept of knowledge ecology and the related implications for innovation systems theory on two fundamental grounds: firstly, on the grounds of theoretical plausibility and conceptual consistency; secondly, on empirical grounds of the case of public-private interrelations of biotech innovation in Cambridge. The paper argues that the concept of knowledge ecology and the associated version of innovation systems theory can lead to problems of reductionism and functionalism. This is due to its development in abstraction from more grounded analysis of historical processes of capitalism. Knowledge and innovation need to be looked at in the context of historically founded processes of economic and social development.

Smart Specialisation Strategy (S3) research has contributed to better understanding of that policy framework’s conceptual underpinnings but some European regions still find it difficult to turn S3 theory into policy implementation. A key element of the implementation challenge concerns the enabling or constraining role of local institutions on regional development strategies and, more specifically, the entrepreneurial discovery process (EDP). Such a challenge appears to be particularly acute (and empirically unexplored) in lagging regions, characterised by weaker knowledge bases and innovation capacities. It is often in less advanced settings where weaker institutions are found. This paper addresses these gaps by investigating S3 implementation in lagging regions focusing on the dynamic interdependence between the regional institutional environment and EDP. It evidences how particular features of the regional institutional environment hinder EDP, as well as how institutional change could enable S3 implementation in two Greek regions. Our results reveal mutual interdependence between inadequate institutions and weak administrative and entrepreneurial capacities, creating adverse pre-conditions for S3 implementation. They also suggest that change requires the replacement of existing features of the institutional environment or creation of new ones, rather than gradual institutional adaptation or transformation.

This paper focuses on business models and value chains to analyse sectoral innovation systems involving synthetic biology and gene editing, as potentially disruptive platform technologies in the life sciences. In the context of industrial biotechnology, we propose that the extent to which an innovation is expected to be disruptive, and the location of that disruption in existing value chains, are relevant to policy decision making on how to govern innovative technologies. Policy decisions on how to regulate or support an innovative technology will be among the most important factors determining the extent to which it is able to deliver its disruptive potential, leading to sectoral transformations through new business models and value chains. This mode of thinking about disruption and innovation could be incorporated in standard procedures for policy makers to guide decisions designed to support translation from basic scientific research to societally useful products and processes.

We use the concept of ‘imagined communities’, and related work on socio-technical imaginaries and expectations, to reflect on how Scotland is represented simultaneously as ‘sick and unhealthy’ and a ‘living lab’ due to its innovative medical research. Together, we suggest these narratives have driven a broader health and wealth agenda in post-devolution Scotland, which became salient during the 2014 Independence Referendum. We draw on research conducted during the Independence referendum to consider how key stakeholders enacted imagined communities/identities (sick but also innovative) as they considered the historical impact of devolution on health and research systems, and envisioned future independence. The Referendum provided an opportunity to consider how Scottish health and research systems have been imagined over time. Our findings further understanding of the impact of devolution on healthcare and medical research, revealing the role played by policy narratives rooted in imagined identities.

In this paper, we investigate the implementation challenge of Smart Specialisation Strategies (S3) in catch-up regional environments, through the lens of capacity building. We analyse capacity building at two levels: micro-level (individual organisations) and meso-level (regional inter-organisational networks). We use empirical evidence from 50 interviews conducted in the period 2015–2017 from two Greek regions dramatically hit by the economic crisis (Crete and Central Macedonia). We argue that in the Cretan and Central Macedonian context, the difficulty of implementing S3 is directly linked with firms’ lack of adsorptive capability to exploit university-generated knowledge, university knowledge that is too abstract for firm’s to easily acquire, as well as to the capability of regional actors to build inter-organisational networking that fits their strategic needs.

Some emerging countries have made significant progress in developing local pharmaceutical and biotechnology but had less success in building medical device industries. This paper explores the weak development of local medical device industries by analysing the contrasting evolutionary trajectories of Indian healthcare technology sectors. The Indian pharmaceutical and biotechnological industries have emerged as leading global suppliers of generic drugs and vaccines, in marked contrast to the medical devices industry. This paper reveals that weak collaborative linkage between medical device manufacturers and the Indian health system, largely absent systemic and cross-sectoral linkages, and weak communication between industry and government policy makers have become a huge barrier to the development of the Indian medical device industry in the contemporary neo-liberal environment. The weak connection between technology and industrial policy and healthcare policy objectives has severely hampered both development of national technological capabilities and the creation of affordable healthcare.

In this paper we investigate the implementation challenge of Smart Specialisation Strategies (S3) in catch-up regional environments, through the lens of capacity building. We analyse capacity building at two levels: micro-level (individual organisations) and meso-level (regional inter-organisational networks). We use empirical evidence from 50 interviews conducted in the period 2015-17 from two Greek regions dramatically hit by the economic crisis (Crete and Central Macedonia). We argue that in the Cretan and Central Macedonian context, the difficulty of implementing S3 is directly linked with firms’ lack of adsorptive capability to exploit university-generated knowledge, university knowledge that is too abstract for firm’s to easily acquire, as well as to the capability of regional actors to build inter-organisational networking that fits their strategic needs.

The Scottish referendum of 2014 encouraged massive public debate, including on Scotland’s scientific performance and ability to harness innovation and increase global competitiveness. The science base in Scotland has traditionally been strong but has not translated well into innovation. This paper uses statistical data, over 30 interviews and two workshops with business and policy leaders, to analyse key scientific and industrial innovation dynamics, using a regional innovation systems approach. It investigates the perceived impact of increased autonomy on the dynamics of the Scottish innovation system. The paper shows the weak relationship between science and innovation and evidences the static nature of Scottish innovation policy geared to bridging a gap rather than improving the dynamics of the various elements in the innovation system. It suggests that an approach which aims to spur evolution in specific elements of the territorial governance system would strengthen Scottish innovation capabilities.

The importance of science in development has been increasingly recognised in development discourses and policy since 2000. Engineering is less visible though engineering and engineers are important for the building and maintenance of transport, water, energy, industrial, informatics, urban and health systems. This article aims to investigate why engineering has not received more emphasis, including why development engineering has not been institutionalised like tropical medicine. It explores the nature of engineering in development, highlights recent efforts to headline engineering for development and, using analyses of what engineers know and do inside international development, suggests that its profile and effectiveness is emerging.

This article analyses important changes in technological innovation in the upstream petroleum industry. It provides evidence that shifts in sectoral patterns of innovation over the petroleum industry’s lifecycle from the 1970s up to 2005 were dependent on the dynamics of knowledge base complexity, a key dimension of an industry’s technological regime. Accordingly, observed shifts in innovation patterns are understood to be the aggregated strategic response of industry innovators to changes in the technological regime. The article proposes a quantitative method for exploring knowledge base complexity and Schumpeterian patterns of innovation, and interactions between the two at the industry level. As the industry evolved, its knowledge base moved to higher orders of complexity creating a shift in the Schumpeterian pattern of innovation. Increased knowledge base complexity was found to alter Schumpeterian patterns from Mark I towards a ‘modified’ Mark II. Instead of coming predominantly from ‘traditional’ established oil operators, technological innovation was increasingly triggered by a new class of emergent integrated service companies – ‘second tier’ systems integrators of the upstream sector able to cope with increased knowledge base complexity.

For the first time, the UK research evaluation system, known as the Research Excellence Framework, considered ‘measures’ of impact in the 2014 review. Here, we focus on impact case studies that had an engineering and international development orientation. We found that writers of impact case studies commonly chose to employ an ecological modernization (economic, environmental, and social value) discourse to shape value claims. We also found that the type of engineering and international development research that appears in impact case studies tends to be high tech, best-with-best, and exclusive, rather than low tech, humanitarian, and inclusive.

This paper addresses important changes in innovation patterns in the upstream petroleum industry over the period from the 1970s to 2005. It argues that the shifts in patterns of innovation over that period can be explained by the dynamics of knowledge base complexity (KBC). We develop a quantitative method to explore KBC and show that increasing KBC has shifted innovation patterns, from a broadly Schumpeter Mark I to a 'modified' form of Schumpeter Mark II, led less by the established oil majors, but by a new class of integrated service providers.

The Scottish referendum of 2014 encouraged massive public debate, including on Scotland’s scientific performance and its ability to harness innovation and increase global competitiveness. The science base in Scotland has traditionally been strong with world leading universities driving development of science. However, the science base has not translated well into innovation. This paper uses statistical data, over 30 interviews and two workshops/focus groups with business and policy leaders to analyse the key scientific and industrial dynamics feeding into the debate and investigate the potential impact of enhanced autonomy on the Scottish innovation system.

The last decades have witnessed major growth in the bioeconomy. Emergence of the bioeconomy as a broad, creative and rapidly expanding part of the global economy coincides with the maturation of the established drug discovery system. This paper presents research evidence focused on the relationships between changes in the bioeconomy and changes in the global economy. It argues that new forms of governance and regulation are key to strengthen industrial policies needed for emerging and developing countries to take account of the complex interactions in life science innovation between technology, markets, regulation and civil society, which could significantly impact on global distribution of the industry.

Science and technology - and particularly biotechnology - are increasingly central to development agendas in Africa and elsewhere. Implicit within the centralitiy of science and technology lie a set of policy issues regarding how best to shape contextually appropriate, innovative and sustainable science and technological products in, with and for developing countries. The work of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) is a case in point and we draw our empirical material from the evolution of two biotech bovine vaccine development programmes housed in a CG centre. In the paper, we seek to show tha broadening our understanding of scientific 'excellence' can lead to more innovative, systemic research that may produce more appropriate technological solutions. We believe that this has key implications for science policy, development policy and the practice of science for development itself.

Investment in biotechnology has yielded relatively disappointing results and illustrates the gap between the promise and reality of new science. This begs the question: Does research on ‘life’ bring different complexities and uncertainties that act as a barrier to the application of new biology in global health and agriculture? There has been high-quality research on the social and ethical impacts of new biology and on the economics of biotechnology but few systematic and integrated attempts to undertake interdisciplinary research and address these constraints. This paper provides an original empirical analysis of contemporary and future understandings of the bioeconomy using a co-evolutionary and interactive approach to examine the extent to which it may be different from other technological transformations. We focus on the Innogen Centre’s extensive research results on three important and contemporary themes: food and energy security, life science and healthcare translational medicine, and global health.

Innogen (the UK ESRC Centre for Social and Economic Research on Innovation in Genomics) began its second five-year phase in late 2007. Innogen, a collaboration between the University of Edinburgh and the Open University, began in 2002. It belongs to the ESRC Genomics Network, made up of two other centres: Cesagen and Egenis and the ESRC Genomics Forum. From the beginning, Innogen’s aim has been to research the big changes right across the life sciences. We study the new science but also the implications for new technologies and how genomics and post-genomics might change the life science industries – health, crop and animal. Thus, our aim has been to study genomics as an integral part of the life sciences.