Demand for High-Skilled Labor Rising
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has recently released an excellent overview of major themes relevant to workforce training and innovation. It’s goal is to provide a concise critical overview of the major themes in the literature on the role of workforce skills in innovation in OECD countries. Topics include: the evolution of academic programming to meet labour market needs; the importance of training innovation-related competencies and the role of innovation intermediaries in the overall economy. Major findings include:
- The predominant form of innovation in firms is incremental, and this points to the central role of the broader workforce in the generation, adaptation and diffusion of technical and organisational change.
- Achieving high academic standards within a country for the largest proportion of school students not only supports high participation in post school education and training but creates a workforce with greater potential to engage productively with innovation.
- The extent to which a firm’s workforce actively engages in innovation is strongly determined by particular work organisation practices.
- There are large differences across advanced nations in workforce skill formation systems, especially for vocational skills. These differences in the quantity and quality of workforce skills are a major factor in determining the observed patterns of innovation and key aspects of economic performance.
The report includes some useful data on innovation expenditures by industry and which are recruiting skills for innovation– finding that a majority of firms are not actively engaged in innovation. It shows that there are very large variations across industries and other business characteristics, such as firm size and ownership structure, in the propensity and intensity of innovation.
A key message to emerge is that as the demand for high-skilled labor is rising; firms that train and promote education of their work forces have clear competitive advantages. But there is no ‘one size fits all’ model for undertaking innovation or for the type of skills required for successful innovation.
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