Angus Vantoch-Wood

Currently, I am an Associate Research Fellow working within the renewable energy department at the university specifically focusing upon the EU Marine Energy in Far Peripheral and Island Communities project (MERiFIC ). My core focus within this project is within the marine policy work package in which I am currently employed on several deliverables aimed at increasing and spreading best-practice in relation to marine renewable energy policies for the sector. Specifically, this includes reviewing the current legal, regulatory and policy systems affecting the sector within the South West, reviewing the wider set of industrial development and innovation policy options available to policy makers and conducting stakeholder research and feedback regarding perceptions of policy, support options and barriers to market entry.

I am also in the process of finishing off my PhD thesis: Quantifying Methods for an Innovation Systems Analysis of the UK Wave Energy Sector. Within this research, I have examined currently established proxy indicators for sectoral growth and success within the sector (such as patents, bibliometrics, financing and employment statistics) as well as created my own using measures using the growing field of Social Network Analysis, all within the framework of a technological innovation systems analysis.

I have conducted extensive interviews with most of the key stakeholder groups within the UK to get both; a strong quantitative evidence set of indicators as well as a deep qualitative understanding of the emerging industry. From this information I have also created a network ‘map’ of interactions within the sector to provide three further groups of measures: Firstly actor based measures of innovation such as; centrality, brokerage power and embeddedness (that can themselves be thought of as proxy indicators for influence, prominence, relational power and ‘market positioning’). Secondly, group based metrics quantifying how much interaction is occurring within established groups (i.e. between public sector bodies within England), between stakeholder groups, (i.e. between device developers and universities) and within specific knowledge bases (i.e. within Scotland environmental research communities). Finally, whole-network (market) measures have been created providing information on the whole UK market such as the overall cohesion between actors, ‘clique-ness’, homophily, clustering and overall density (to name a few).

These news sets of metrics establish proxy indicators that are more informal and transmutable in nature between different actor types than current ‘status-quo’ measures (such as patents etc.) and thus provide insight into a range of specific innovative environments (such as where outputs are not measured by current indicators as in informal innovation or within niche markets such as wave energy in which many indicators are simply too ‘coarse’). Since all metrics of innovation provide varying degrees of innovative ‘accuracy’ (for varying types of knowledge base or innovative activity) and especially in representation to emerging niche markets such as the wave energy industry, I have worked to establish how these compare against both each against interview responses and against policy maker perspectives (such as government roadmaps etc).