The wider adoption of advanced digital technology is essential to productivity improvement in many sectors and contexts. Centre members are working on several projects in this area.

They include:

• An ESRC-funded project, on the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in mid-tier law and accounting firms, which seeks to understand how firms in these world-leading sectors can take advantage of the potential of AI in improving productivity and innovating business models.
• The adoption of ‘Industry 4.0’ by smaller firms is a dominant global policy theme: we are working on a project with the University of South Australia and the South Australia Department for Industry and Skills to study the transition to intelligent manufacturing in South Australian SMEs. This complements our research in support of the North West pilot of the ‘Made Smarter’ initiative to enable adoption of industrial digitalisation by manufacturing SMEs.

Centre staff are making a sustained contribution to the development of industrial strategy or industrial policy in the UK and elsewhere. For instance, we have examined the links between economic insights at policy level, and management insights at organisational level. We made policy contributions to the:

• UK GO-Science Foresight ‘Future of Manufacturing’ study;
• development of the UK Government’s 2017 Industrial Strategy;
• 2018-19 ‘long tail review’ of productivity;
• development of ‘place-based’ industrial strategy, and subsequently to the Industrial Strategy Council, the body charged with monitoring Industrial Strategy delivery.

For further information:

• The Future of Manufacturing
• Future Manufacturing Business Models for Emerging Sectors
• Future Manufacturing: Industrial Policy

The wider adoption of advanced digital technology is essential to productivity improvement in many sectors and contexts. Centre members are working on several projects in this area.

Our research in this area includes a study to understand the appropriateness of structured performance management practices in the smaller firm (funded by the ESRC-backed Productivity Insights Network). Some of the work builds on previous research by the Centre for Performance-Led HR, once a world-leading centre of applied research into human resources. This Centre delivered vital research that continues to have significant impact, for example, in the work conducted with the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) on novel approaches to valuing talent. Current research is examining the impact of higher education in general, and Level 7 apprenticeships in particular, on graduate employment and productivity.

Productivity is typically measured at firm level, but it is also the outcome of activities in supply chains, networks and ecosystems. Centre researchers use a variety of approaches and techniques to understand productive and entrepreneurial activity in networks, rooted in specific places.

Work on entrepreneurial activity in networks and ecosystems builds on the School’s extensive work with regional SMEs over a period of twenty years, for example, the £32 million Wave 2 Growth Hubs programme. Recent and current studies continue to focus on the regeneration of excluded communities and economies, and the role of local innovation hubs in encouraging entrepreneurs from minority groups. Supply chain research examines resilience and risk in supply chains, drawing on research in various international contexts to develop general insights into these increasingly important, network-level phenomena.

The concepts of productivity and efficiency focus on the mapping of inputs onto outputs. In evaluating efficiency, this mapping is compared to some ideal – often best observed practice.

Our work in this area uses both the statistical method of stochastic frontier analysis and the non-parametric approach of data envelopment analysis. Current and recent work in the centre includes both methodological developments and applied projects. Methodological developments include:

• the adaptation of stochastic frontier methods to include regression discontinuities (crucial for causal analyses),
• the design of methods to evaluate efficiency in network stochastic frontier models,
• the evaluation of efficiency where securing efficiency gains is itself a costly endeavour,
• exploring the distinction between transient and permanent efficiency, and
• new approaches to the estimation of total factor productivity.

Productivity improvements often arise from innovation in one form or another and are often accompanied by growth. We examine the processes of innovation and ways to stimulate, value, and promote innovation-led productivity and growth.

Recent research has examined the role of targeted initiatives in public procurement, notably in the National Health Service and the Ministry of Defence, in stimulating and supporting innovation in SMEs. Several projects have examined the management practices required for the valuation of innovation, particularly in early-stage commercialisation in catalysts linked to bioscience and in novel energy systems, where new markets are being made. A current European-funded project called “I AM RRI”, focusses on innovation value chains in Additive Manufacturing, and how innovation can be conducted in line with the principle of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). Further funded research seeks to understand the relationship between past growth and future growth at firm level.

Funding source

EU Grant Agreement No. 788361