The University is to be a key partner in a new national effort to boost British productivity, bringing together expertise to tackle questions of job creation, sustainability and wellbeing, as the UK looks to its post-pandemic future.
The insights generated by working across disciplines will be critical to help revitalise the productivity of the UK economy as we further embrace digital technologies in a post-pandemic world.
Professor Tim Minshall
The new £32.4m Productivity Institute, announced recently by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, is the largest economic and social research investment ever in the UK.
Two faculty members from the Institute for Manufacturing (IfM), part of the Department of Engineering, will be involved with the research initiative. Dr Chander Velu, Head of the Business Model Innovation Research Group, and Dr Eoin O’Sullivan, Director of the Centre for Science, Technology & Innovation Policy, will help to explore the implications of business model innovation on productivity resulting from the adoption of digital technologies.
They will contribute to managerial and policy understanding of how knowledge capital helps improve productivity within firms and across the supply chain of complex products and services.
The IfM will work closely with researchers from a variety of departments, including Politics and International Studies (POLIS), Psychology, and Economics. Professor Diane Coyle from The Bennett Institute will provide leadership from Cambridge on this multi-University initiative.
Professor Tim Minshall, Dr John C Taylor Professor of Innovation and Head of the IfM, said: "We are very excited about IfM’s contribution to this new interdisciplinary Productivity Institute. The insights generated by working across disciplines will be critical to help revitalise the productivity of the UK economy as we further embrace digital technologies in a post-pandemic world."
Read more about the Productivity Institute.
This article first appeared on the IfM website.
