Institute for Science, Innovation and Society

The Institute for Science, Innovation and Society (InSIS) researches and informs key contemporary and emerging issues and processes of social, scientific, and technological change. We combine the highest standards of scholarship and relevance to pursue and disseminate timely research in the UK and worldwide. We collaborate with leading thinkers around the world and welcome them to Oxford as visiting researchers. We nurture early career researchers through research fellowships in our various programmes. InSIS is based at Oxford University’s School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, one of the world’s largest and most vibrant centres for teaching and research in the field. As an interdisciplinary institute, InSIS welcomes the participation of researchers from all departments of the University of Oxford in its research programmes and outreach activities. James Simmie (Department of Planning, Oxford Brookes University) develops an evolutionary economics approach to adaptation and change in urban economies. Abstract: In this lecture, James Simmie develops one of the evolutionary economics approaches to understanding adaptation and change in the economic trajectories of urban economies. Neo-classical equilibrist versions of resilience and adaptation are rejected in favour of an evolutionary perspective. He argues in particular for an explanation based on why and how local economies adapt through time both to continual mutations and to periodic gales of creative destruction. Simmie focuses on the extent to which the “panarchy” conceptual framework can suggest testable hypotheses concerning urban and regional resilience. He explores some of these by examining the long-term economic development of two illustrative city-regional economies and one regional economy. These are Cambridge, Swansea and the West Midlands. The findings suggest that adaptive capacity and resilience are built up over years and decades. They are dependent on the generation of endogenous new knowledge, the co-evolution of facilitating institutions and cultures and the conscious decisions of firms and public authorities.