RSA session recap - Clusters, Innovation, and Connective Infrastructure: Rethinking what drives regional innovation

The Network on Infrastructural Regionalism (NOIR) sponsored a session on Clusters, Innovation, and Connective Infrastructure with three paper presentations addressing how connective infrastructures shape regional innovation systems in the UK and US. Chaired by Jen Nelles (Oxford Brookes University), the papers in this session discussed how varying forms of infrastructure—from rail lines to social equity frameworks and supercluster support mechanisms—can shape how regions innovate, connect, and grow.

Connecting the Oxford to Cambridge Supercluster: East West Rail as an Innovation Corridor

Jen Nelles and Adam Brown (Oxford Brookes University) described developments along the Oxford–Cambridge Arc: a corridor that is more aspirational than real, though one with significant promise as a zone for job creation, investment attraction, and innovation cluster formation. The corridor suffers from mercurial support from central government, and from the persistent sense that it doesn’t function as a coordinated region. Nelles and Brown examine the emerging East West Rail project, describing it as connective infrastructure that intends to achieve the corridor’s promise. Nelles reflected on whether the corridor can function as a Regional Innovation System, and whether maturation of the rail linkages will cement a regional identity and spillover effects. Open questions about this corridor persist, including whether infrastructure development will lead to regional productivity gains, and how the mix of infrastructure systems in development will benefit some or all industries present in the corridor. They concluded by noting that functional connectivity could help locations ‘borrow’ complexity to benefit local sectors but argues that more ultimately needs to be understood about the specificities of how infrastructural investment creates externality effects for innovation systems.

Scotland’s Critical Technologies Supercluster: Findings from the SSAC Working Group

Lauren Tuckerman (University of Glasgow) presented early insights from a working group commissioned by the Scottish Scientific Advisory Council on Scotland’s Critical Technologies Supercluster. The Scottish supercluster’s innovation capacity (focuses on quantum, photonics, semiconductors, and connectivity/sensing technologies) is shaped by the comparative regional maturity and presence of infrastructural networks.  Tuckerman explained that the research finds that identifying the potential of specific infrastructural systems will be important to maximizing the prospects of the Scottish supercluster. The Advisory Council found that core infrastructure (labs, fabrication facilities, and shared technical environments) is essential to supercluster growth, while both physical and digital connectivity, along with the availability of soft and social infrastructure (including governance, trust, and identified responsibility) remains a strategic concern. She also argued that ensuring equitable access to infrastructure (especially for peripheral and rural actors) is a central issue to support broad outcomes from initial investments. Tuckerman argued that regional innovation systems depend not just on networks of firms, but on the foundational capacities that infrastructure provides—facilities, talent pipelines, and connectivity corridors that allow innovations to diffuse broadly.

Operationalizing Equity Through a Moral Ecology Framework

Anne Taufen (University of Washington-Tacoma) emphasized that cultural and social infrastructure shapes if innovation initiatives will become inclusive, sustainable, and equitable. Using a “moral ecology of infrastructure” approach and an empirical example from the Puget Sound, Taufen described how infrastructure should be considered a socially embedded field, where infrastructural projects are influenced by local cultures, narratives, and power relations. Her paper extends the notion of infrastructural regionalism beyond steel and fiber by considering infrastructure as a lived experience woven into regional social fabrics, where engagement with local communities with equity as a guiding principle can help to enhance overall economic wellbeing.

In his discussant remarks, Michael Glass (University of Pittsburgh) noted these papers were all rooted in a policy consensus that holds innovation-based economic systems to represent the prospect for regions to transform, transition, and ultimately grow. The empirical cases each reflected how significant regional infrastructures are in shaping how those transitions will occur and actively shape which sectors and sites will benefit most from innovation policy. Scotland, England, and the United States provided cases that indicate the global significance of infrastructural provision to stimulate new regional futures. They also suggest that more needs to be accomplished by both researchers and policy makers to understand the clusters themselves, and about the communities that constitute (and will be influenced by) the new regional innovation systems presently under development. Integrating equity and cultural considerations into infrastructure planning for both social and material infrastructure systems that support innovation policy has the potential to shape who benefits from emerging regional trajectories.