Gareth Davies
Biography
Gareth graduated in engineering from Swansea University and has a Masters in Innovation from the ISTIA Engineering School in France. Since then, Gareth has completed a PhD in evaluating the effect of the technium initiative in nurturing innovation in South Wales to support development of a regional knowledge economy.
Gareth is currently working as a project manager in the Institute of Innovation at Swansea University. He is involved in a set of projects relating to regional development, with particular regard to the use of European Convergence Funds to achieve regional Lisbon knowledge economy goals. Central to this is the development of innovation as a driver of regional economic growth, across a number of sectors.
Project: Innovation Scorecard
The NESTA Innovation 'Scorecard' project will deliver an integrated framework/scoreboard for the measurement, analysis and support of innovation within a region.
The aim of the project is to craft a framework that will help tailor support to businesses that will maximise their innovation potential, develop effective policy which meets the needs of the region. Working with Technium and its partners, the project will generate metrics for inclusion in the framework and pilot an integrated ‘scorecard’ across a number of sectors. This will build upon best practice in each of the aspects of innovation. The scorecard is intended to overcome limitations of existing approaches to measuring innovation which often fail to identify where innovation occurs. This is often due to over reliance on metrics such as patent numbers, which fail to identify social and wider dimensions of innovation activity.