Put Silicon Valley and Boston on the back burner. Pharmaceuticals hotbed Basel and the Austrian state of Styria with its high-tech steel and paper industries are among the models that policymakers should learn from to spread the benefits of innovation to the ¡°masses¡±, according to a professor¡¯s new book, partly inspired by divisions in his hometown of Oxford.

, by Neil Lee, professor of economic geography at the London School of Economics ¨C recently included by the?Financial Times?among its??¨C offers a message on how universities can help create good jobs for their regions.

The book emerged from his research on ¡°levelling up¡± in the UK and ¡°how you can use innovation to reduce spatial inequality¡±, Professor Lee told?Times Higher Education. It also responds to an argument made by some academics who study innovation that ¡°inequality is the price you have to pay to have a highly innovative economy¡±.

But, he said, that view relies on a?Silicon Valley-focused view of innovation?where ¡°we don¡¯t look at the places that are also highly successful, where they do have these mechanisms which can make sure the gains from innovation are broadly shared¡±.

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The book consists of case studies of four nations ¨C Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan and Austria ¨C based on interviews with policymakers and business leaders, as well as data analysis.

One place Professor Lee visited was Leoben, deep in the southern Austrian state of Styria, a city traditionally focused on steel and mining, with its Montanuniversit?t Leoben, a small technical university ¨C a city that, he writes, ¡°should be the archetype of industrial decline¡±, but is far from it.

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Part of the reason why, the book argues, ¡°is that between 1998 and 2016, Austria saw the largest increase in R&D intensity of any OECD economy bar South Korea¡±, with much of that growth occurring in industries such as steel, rather than tech.

Styria doesn¡¯t come up with the stuff on your iPhone, but it does, Professor Lee explains, produce machines that remove bad grain from production using light sensors and puffs of pressurised air; it produces the world¡¯s longest train rails, which save assembly costs; and it produces high-quality paper. All this makes the state ¡°a good example of the Austrian advances in normally low-innovation industries¡±.

Across all his case studies, Professor Lee saw locally focused universities of applied sciences ¨C alongside strong vocational education and institutions that diffuse innovation into the average firm ¨C as a key part of the equation. Such universities are ¡°not necessarily [doing] world-leading blue-sky research¡±, he said, but do help make firms highly innovative via ¡°marginal incremental improvements by applying other existing technologies¡­to their own production processes¡±, with that local role for universities ¡°often crucial in terms of creating good jobs¡±.

A key element, he argued, is in fostering innovation that creates not just high-skilled jobs, but medium-skilled jobs.

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Professor Lee, an economist at Lancaster University¡¯s Work Foundation thinktank before becoming an academic, described his hometown of Oxford, where he still lives, as ¡°part of the inspiration¡± for the book. While he has friends in Oxford ¡°who are star scientists and their lives are great¡±, soaring house prices and a ¡°hollowed out labour market¡± around the university-driven innovation economy mean life is not so great for some of the people he went to school with.

He contrasted that with the Swiss city of Basel, a pharmaceuticals centre that, judged on patents per capita, is ¡°the most innovative place on earth¡±.

¡°In Basel, the problem is partly solved by the vocational education system. I talked to pharmaceutical firms and the first thing they would say is, ¡®We¡¯re not just here because of the star scientists; we¡¯re here because we have people who can run the tests and do good things in labs.¡¯¡±

Meanwhile, the city of Oxford, he said, ¡°goes on about how innovative and how important it is in the world ¨C but actually the benefits really don¡¯t translate to the average person¡±.

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Professor Lee hoped the book¡¯s message would reach policymakers in nations such as the UK, US or Canada ¨C highlighting the relevance of Styria¡¯s high-tech steel industry for a region like south Wales, afflicted by continuing job losses in steel ¨C though he acknowledged that the Silicon Valley brand retains a powerful pull.

¡°The interesting challenge for a book like this is people say, ¡®Well it¡¯s very hard to learn these policy lessons from somewhere like Switzerland,¡¯¡± he said.

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¡°I would argue it¡¯s equally hard, if not more so, to learn these policy lessons from somewhere like the Bay Area [tech sector] which developed 50 years ago.¡±

john.morgan@timeshighereducation.com