GROWTHCOM · GROWTH AND INNOVATION POLICY-MODELLING: APPLYING NEXT GENERATION TOOLS, DATA, AND ECONOMIC COMPLEXITY IDEAS

In the wake of the financial crisis one of the major challenges faced by policymakers in Europe and around the world is re-kindling economic growth and innovation. Recent research portrays economic growth as a process of evolution of ecosystems of technologies and industrial capabilities. This research has also shown a strong relationship between the development of the complexity of economies in a globalized market and overall output growth. ICT based tools, in particular complex systems analysis, simulation, systems science methods, and big data capabilities offer policymakers new opportunities to empirically map technology and capability ecosystems of countries and industrial sectors, analyse their structure, understand their dynamics, measure economic complexity, and design policy interventions more likely to have positive impacts on growth over time. This project proposes to apply ICT tools in this way to yield insights on the industrial competitiveness and fragility of countries, the evolution of technologies and capabilities, the network of products, the adaptability of companies, and the ecology of E-commerce. In particular, E-commerce provides an important example of the active involvement of citizen in terms of their feedbacks on products and companies. The project will be a European and global collaboration amongst a network of researchers highly experienced in these topics. The teams involved represent an interdisciplinary consortium in which various research lines will be integrated in a network of collaborative effort to address challenging problems for a new vision of a data driven fundamental economics in a strongly connected, globalised world. The results of the project will provide a novel basis for economic forecasting and risk analysis for countries, companies and technological sectors, and they will also provide a new perspective for growth and innovation policymaking.