Innovation-fuelled, Sustainable, Inclusive Growth

ISIGrowth is ground-breaking on several levels - theoretical, methodological, policy-focused, and in its use of engagement with stakeholders to both gather and disseminate knowledge.

The great recession (2008-13) has highlighted the long-term structural imbalances that have accumulated over thirty years in Europe, as well as the ineffectiveness of standard policy instruments to put EU economies back on steady growth paths. Given this context, the project will study the non-linear relationships between innovation, employment dynamics, inequality, environmental sustainability, structural change, globalization of production and growth. The aim is to develop inclusive and sustainable policy scenarios, alternatives to the current emphasis on austerity, and challenge the types of ‘financialization’ that many economies have faced over the last decades.

The project also aims to deliver a coherent policy toolkit to achieve the Europe 2020 objectives of smart, sustainable and inclusive growth. It will combine frontier empirical analysis with micro-macro models that take into account the complexity and systemic nature of innovation, inequality, and economic growth. In a world of highly globalised, financialised and interconnected economies, policy measures will be studied in the way that they interact in shaping different possible growth paths.  Working from the premise that the economy and its main underlying domains such as technologies, agents, social relations and institutions should be studied by considering their complex system nature, the researchers will use tools from complexity theory, such as agent-based modeling.

The project is coordinated by Professor Giovanni Dosi, a world-renowned scholar in evolutionary economics, at Sant’Anna Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Pisa. The partnership builds on a collaboration begun in a previous EU FP-7 funded project coordinated by Professor Mazzucato, Finance, Innovation and Growth (FINNOV).

Further reading

Details of the project, its partners, publications and events, can be found on the ISIGrowth website.

Horizon 2020: The EU framework programme for research and innovation.