Peter Swann, Emeritus Professor - Research

Current Research Activities
One stream of research asks, how does innovation create wealth? A traditional story is that innovation creates wealth by enhancing productivity, but careful examination of a wide range of innovations finds that this is not the most important mechanism by which innovation creates wealth. Indeed, the most benign effects of innovation on wealth often operate through very different mechanisms.

A second stream of work looks at how various parts of the publicly funded industrial infrastructure can help innovation. In particular, I have examined the role of the national measurement system and the public standards infrastructure in supporting innovation. This work finds that open measurement technologies facilitate the division of labour and innovation, and that standards frequently enable innovation even if they also impose constraints on the innovator.

My most recent work is starting to look at different models of university-business interaction, their advantages and problems. This work suggests that simple models of "technology transfer" and "customer-contractor" relationships are generally not the most effective designs for such interaction.