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An engaging, solutions-oriented look at how cities and nations can better foster innovation and equality. From San Francisco to Shanghai, many of the world's most innovative places are highly unequal, with the benefits going to a small few. Rather than simply asking how we can create more high-tech cities and nations, Innovation for the Masses focuses on what we can learn from places that foster innovation while also delivering the benefits more widely and equally. In this book, economist Neil Lee draws on case studies of Taiwan, Sweden, Austria, and Switzerland to set out how innovation can be successfully balanced toward equity. As high-tech economies around the world suffer from polarized labor markets and political realities that lock in these problems, this book looks beyond the United States to other models of distributing a leading-edge economy. Lee emphasizes the active role of the state in creating frameworks to ensure that benefits are broadly shared, revealing that strong policies for innovation and mutual prosperity reinforce each other. Ultimately, Innovation for the Masses provides a vital window into alternative models that prioritize equity, the roadblocks these models present, and what other countries can learn from them going forward

The concept of "Inclusive Growth" – a concern with the pace and pattern of growth – has become a new mantra in local economic development. Despite enthusiasm from some policymakers, others argue it is a buzzword which is changing little. This paper summarises and critiques this agenda. There are important unresolved issues with the concept of Inclusive Growth, which is conceptually fuzzy and operationally problematic, has only a limited evidence base, and reflects an overconfidence in local government's ability to create or shape growth. Yet, while imperfect, an Inclusive Growth model is better one which simply ignores distributional concerns.

The 'Northern Powerhouse' is the UK government's latest attempt to reduce regional disparities. By bringing together the cities of the north into a functional economy, the aim is to create an agglomeration with the scale to counterbalance London. This paper summarises and critically reviews this agenda. While sympathetic to the basic idea, it argues that the Northern Powerhouse is a vague and problematic concept. It can be understood both as an economic development strategy and a political brand, giving focus to disparate and often pre-existing policies. It has meant new resources and institutional change, but is geographically fuzzy with insufficient funding to achieve its unclear aims.

Policy makers in the UK see the creative industries as a key sector for regenerating inner cities and stimulating flagging urban economies. The creative industries may raise productivity through spillovers or as part of the production processes of other firms. Creative firms may squeeze out other, less productive sectors. Highly skilled workers may be attracted to creative cities. Or the creative industries may thrive in growing cities with strong demand for their products. This paper tests the link between the creative industries and wage and employment growth in a panel of travel-to-work areas from 2003 to 2008. The results suggest the creative industries drive both wage and employment growth in other sectors. However, when only urban areas are considered the creative industries drive wage growth but do not increase employment. These findings are consistent with the idea that the creative industries help other sectors grow, but may squeeze out declining industries from urban areas.

Studies of the United States have suggested that the most innovative areas are also the most unequal. There are a number of potential processes that might lead to this. Innovation may raise the return of human capital in ways which can lead to localised inequality. Innovative industries may be subject to greater wage polarisation or offer more erratic returns than other industries. Moreover, the affluent may hire others to work in poorly paid personal service employment nearby. However, while there is some evidence for these processes in the US, whether this applies in the European case is less certain. I use the European Community Household Panel and the Eurostat Regio database to test the link between innovation and wage inequality in a panel of European regions for the period 1996–2001. Two measures of innovation are used: employment in knowledge-based industries and the level of patenting in a region. The results are indicative of a positive link between regional innovation, as measured by patenting, and inequality. In contrast, there is little evidence of a link between knowledge-based industries and inequality, with the exception of a positive relationship between employment in knowledge-intensive financial services and inequality.

There are many reasons why cities with diverse populations may grow faster. Ethnic diversity might attract human capital, tourists or firms, increase productivity through diverse approaches to problem-solving or ethnic minority entrepreneurship. Yet there are also reasons to believe that diversity could be harmful, by leading to sub-optimal provision of public goods or reducing trust or social capital. Or it may be irrelevant, being merely a proxy for class. A number of studies have shown both positive and negative relationships between diversity and growth, using a range of different measures for 'diversity'. This paper asks two questions: have more diverse English cities grown faster? And does measurement matter: is it important to have a multinational population or an ethnically diverse one? To answer these questions, in this paper a range of models are estimated for employment growth for 53 English cities between 1981 and 2001. The evidence suggests that cities with a high proportion of their populations born abroad in 1981 grew faster in the subsequent 10 years. Neither diversity by country of birth nor ethnic diversity is significant in the period 1991—2001. However, when variables accounting for both are included together, it appears that cities with a large number of migrants saw higher employment growth in the 1990s, but that ethnically diverse cities were less successful. The results presented here suggest that considerable attention needs to be paid to the variable used to indicate 'diversity' in these studies and that the impact of diversity varies according to nature of the groups any indicator for 'diversity' is representing.