INNOVATION: THE GRAND CHALLENGE - Imperial College London

IPGC: THE INNOVATION AND PRODUCTIVITY GRAND CHALLENGE
The Innovation and Productivity Grand Challenge (IPGC) is a major research project which
has been funded by the two UK research funders – the Engineering and Physical Science
Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council – since 2006.
Made up of a network of five UK universities – Cambridge, Cranfield, Imperial College,
Liverpool and Loughborough, working together with the ESRC/EPSRC’s Advanced Institute
for Management Research (AIM), the Innovation and Productivity Grand Challenge explores
the implications of the changing 21st-century context of networked, global and increasingly
open innovation, in a world in which knowledge flows become as important as knowledge
creation.
IPGC's work explores four major themes:
• How the current system works and its strengths and weaknesses.
• How new firms form from new knowledge.
• How infrastructures can catalyse or enable innovation from knowledge.
• How existing firms sustain and grow through taking in new knowledge.
The challenge is to make UK plc more competitive by helping to make the process of
converting knowledge into innovation more effective.
The contents of this publication are the copyright of the authors and the Partnership Universities.