Innovation in the news: end of the year recap
Welcome back
I hope you had a happy holiday season. While I was on vacation, innovation news never sleeps, so this edition provides a recap of the interesting articles over the last two weeks, results from my survey, and some analysis on Innovation in the News’s first few months.
I also appreciate the constructive feedback from the short end of year survey - if you want to provide feedback you can still access it here. Results from the survey:
The amount of content is about right
People come here for the government announcements, academic papers, and news articles. Company updates and stats/polls/indexes are less useful.
It would be helpful to provide sub-categories for the content - and particularly to flag Canadian content (watch out for the 🍁). If there are ideas on what these categories should be, let me know! Canadian, rest of the world? Government announcements, academic/think tanks, news, stats? Subject of the day - sometimes I try to group things like AI and China and green together but without subheadings…?
Some people want me to add my own colored commentary - I have done this a couple of times but am hesitant a lot. Thanks for the encouragement and something I will consider more in the future!
And one keen statistician is interested in the click through rate and what articles people read the most (see at the end of this edition for this analysis)
Thank you to everyone who took the time to fill out the survey, and for the kind messages. Stay tuned for my favourite articles of the year, coming next week!
Best of luck in 2024,
-Charles
Two week’s worth of top stories
International Productivity Monitor (Centre for the Study of Living Standards and The Productivity Institute)
🍁 'Seized the moment': Watershed year for EVs paving way for billions in new investment - In an end-of-year interview, Minister Champagne talks battery-plant deals, sends message to junior miners looking to China for money (Financial Post)
🍁 What’s Happening: Canadian Competition Policy in 2023 and into 2024 (Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project)
🍁 Government of Canada appoints Mitch Davies to be the new President of the National Research Council of Canada - Mitch and I worked together several times throughout my time at ISED and I am incredibly happy he will be back at the helm of the NRC! (Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada)
🍁 Gross domestic expenditures on research and development, 2021 (final), 2022 (preliminary) and 2023 (intentions) (Statistics Canada)
A Tik-Tok-ing Timebomb: How TikTok’s Global Platform Anomalies Align with the Chinese Communist Party’s Geostrategic Objectives (Network Contagion Research Institute) + a separate study links TikTok Use to Pro-China Views in Taiwan (Newsweek)
The Effect of Antitrust Enforcement on Venture Capital Investments - a reduction in antitrust enforcement causes a significant decrease in VC investments in startups located in the affected areas… negative results are mainly driven by startups in concentrated industries (University of Rochester)
Toyota-owned automaker halts Japan production after admitting it tampered with safety tests for 30 years (CNN)
Industrial Technology Outlook (PitchBook)
Modern industrial policy and the WTO (The Peterson Institute for International Economics)
Brexit inflation: The role of trade policy uncertainty in increasing UK import prices (Centre for Economic Policy Research)
More than 100 lawmakers urge Fed, regulators to revise Basel III tax equity provisions (Renewable Energy World)
Equity implications of net-zero emissions: A multi-model analysis of energy expenditures across income classes under economy-wide deep decarbonization policies - net-zero emissions policies across income classes (Energy and Climate Change)
Innovation-driven inclusive and sustainable growth: challenges and opportunities for Brazil (UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose)
‘Left behind places’: what are they and why do they matter? (Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society)
The Retreat from ‘High Technology’ in Post-War Britain (The English Historical Review)
Improving Regulation for Innovation: Evidence from China’s Pharmaceutical Industry (National Bureau of Economic Research)
Do Firms Mitigate Climate Impact on Employment? Evidence from US Heat Shocks (National Bureau of Economic Research)
38% of VCs disappeared from dealmaking in 2023 (PitchBook)
Mapping the Biggest Tech Talent Hubs in the U.S. and Canada (Visual Capitalist)
Social media companies made $11 billion in US ad revenue from minors, Harvard study finds (The Associated Press)
🍁 CVMA Unveils State of the Canadian Automotive Industry Report (Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers' Association)
Noahpinion was on a real roll the last couple of weeks
Analysis on innovation in the news
As requested by one reader, here is some basic analysis behind the newsletter.
Articles
Substack does not easily let me know what my top links were or top newsletter was but I have done some back of the napkin analysis, and it broadly aligns with my poll.
The most clicked on links were:
Canada’s Innovation Gap: A Warning Sign for Economic Prosperity and National Security - an article that I found had a bit of a click-batey title, and I am unsure if was worth the read. Other ITIF articles were better in my opinion, including its 2023 edition of the Hamilton Index of advanced industries (ITIF, December 18)
The new economics of industrial policy from Réka Juhász, Nathaniel Lane, and Dani Rodrik - a great summary of their longer piece (Centre for Economic Policy Research, December 4)
US draws up plans for new national body to monitor R&D strengths and weaknesses - a really interesting idea that had gone under my radar (Science Business, November 16)
The most opened editions were:
October 25 - which highlighted Germany’s new industrial policy
October 5 - which highlighted the board drama at the Canadian government agency SDTC, but also this article on firm-size wage gaps and hierarchy: evidence from Canada was surprisingly popular
November 24 - where the most popular link was how design thinking has failed to deliver on its promise to solve the world’s thorniest social challenges. It’s a long read but I enjoyed it!
Looking at the most opened link per newsletter by source type:
39% from an academic/think tank
38% a news article
15% a government source
5% stats/index
3% from an industry association
This analysis is based on articles since October 2nd because for a couple of weeks I was using both Substack and email to distribute it.
Subscribers
I currently have 241 subscribers
The subscribers represent 23 countries, 75% from Canada, 12% from the UK, 2% from the US (representing 4 states)
Each newsletter on average is viewed 134 times - this double counts subscribers who open it multiple times
Per newsletter, on average
33% unique subscribers open it
28% unique subscribers ‘engage’ (as defined by Substack to mean click, share, comment or read the post to the bottom)
28% unique subscribers click on a link
Some caveats, I am unsure how well Substack measures these stats when individuals have signed up with certain corporate emails (a large portion of my subscriber base). For instance, I can see some people will be counted to have zero opens but to have clicked multiple links (which I see then does not count in the metrics above), or multiple opens and no links clicked (which makes more sense). This is not universal for the same corporate email addresses.