The Performance of Manufacturing: The UK in Comparison with Europe

There are two scientific goals of the fellow's project; first, it will overcome the problems associated with a single-country perspective, predominantly found in the existing literature on technological and non-technological innovation in manufacturing industry. Most studies analyse innovation in depth only for single countries, which contradicts the multinational focus of many firms. One aim of the fellow will therefore to be to produce outcomes that consequently take a cross-country perspective and to achieve this by building a community and establishing permanent co-operation between researchers from different countries. The project therefore aims to foster exchange in order to develop this common framework for empirical analysis of process and organizational innovation. This exchange should lead to more scientific publications by the partners involved and to a stronger visibility of the topic in the European political discourse. In addition to traditional peer reviewed publications the fellow will aim to regularly publish policy-oriented papers and contribute to the ISI papers series as well as in the working paper series of the partners.

A second scientific goal of the fellow will be to advance research on process and organizational innovation within manufacturing through the development of a common research agenda among the participants. The building blocks for such an agenda include:

Determinants: What factors determine firms to introduce various process and organizational innovations? How do these this decisions vary with size, sector, country, or with the characteristics of the production process?

Complementarity: How do processes and organizational innovations relate to product innovation? Do firms with a considerable level of process and organizational innovation also introduce more new products? Do they introduce more radical innovations, or introduce more services that complement their physical products?

Outcomes: How do different economics outcomes (e. g. productivity or employment growth) relate to different implementation strategies of process and organizational innovations? What is, for example, the impact of international outsourcing of firm employment growth? Is this different in different countries?

This research will be novel in that it will have a study focus on both the importance and contribution of advanced manufacturing innovation to both the recovery as well as the rebalancing of the economy. It will investigate high capability and cutting edge management and leadership practice in leading manufacturing firms across Europe (including the UK, Germany, Spain and Austria).

There is a unique interdisciplinary focus to the fellowship as it aims to bring together world leading academic mentors from technology and innovation, leadership and supply chains, with cutting edge engineering and manufacturing industrial firms, many of whom are world leaders in engineering innovation.

It is anticipated that the research investigation will have a major policy impact on UK and European Industrial and Innovation Policy including the following issues:

1.Manufacturing of R & D offshoring activities and related opportunities and risks.
2.Technical and organizational process issues.
3.Supply chain design.
4.Value adding process improvement.
5.Leadership and strategy development.
6.Shifting modes of production.
7.Future of the European technological base.
8.Trainings and education provision.
9.Mapping of capabilities and competencies.
10.Social and flexible network design.