We explore the causal links between service firms' knowledge investments, their innovation outputs and business growth based on a bespoke survey of around 1100 UK service businesses. We combine the activity based approach of the innovation value chain with firms' external links at each stage of the innovation process. This introduces the notion of 'encoding' relationships through which learning improves the effectiveness of firms' innovation processes. Our econometric results emphasise the importance of openness in the initial, exploratory phase of the innovation process and the significance of team working in later stages of the process. In-house design capacity is strongly linked to a firm's ability to absorb external knowledge for innovation. Business growth is related directly to both the extent of firms' service innovation as well as the diversity of innovation reflecting marketing, strategic and business process change. Links to customers are important in the exploratory stage of the innovation process, but encoding linkages with private and public research organisations are more important in developing innovation outputs.

The COVID-19 pandemic closed university campuses forcing rapid improvisation and adoption of online teaching. This paper explores the experience of converting three modules from proximate to online learning delivery in March and May 2020. This process was facilitated by reflective practice to support a process of improvisation as a buffering response to the pandemic. This paper distinguishes between the development of Distance Learning programmes compared to rapid adoption of online learning. Shifting to complete online teaching involves a process by which the lecturer's role transitions towards the curation of online and offline student experiences. This includes facilitating and blending extensive and intensive online learning experiences. Extensive involves the selection and curation of online learning support bundles. This requires the creation of learning roadmaps to facilitate student learning. Intensive revolves around online engagement between academics and students and takes two forms: shallow as involving a limited dialogue with students and deep which involves a co-creation process between students and lecturers. Online learning provides opportunities to adapt learning experiences in real-time. The paper evaluates the shift to online practice from the students' and academics' perspectives.

Future scenarios provide challenging, plausible and relevant stories about how the future could unfold. Urban Futures (UF) research has identified a substantial set (>450) of seemingly disparate scenarios published over the period 1997-2011 and within this research, a sub-set of >160 scenarios has been identified (and categorized) based on their narratives according to the structure first proposed by the Global Scenario Group (GSG) in 1997; three world types (Business as Usual, Barbarization, and Great Transitions) and six scenarios, two for each world type (Policy Reform-PR, Market Forces-MF, Breakdown-B, Fortress World-FW, Eco-Communalism-EC and New Sustainability Paradigm-NSP). It is suggested that four of these scenario archetypes (MF, PR, NSP and FW) are sufficiently distinct to facilitate active stakeholder engagement in futures thinking. Moreover they are accompanied by a well-established, internally consistent set of narratives that provide a deeper understanding of the key fundamental drivers (e.g., STEEP-Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental and Political) that could bring about realistic world changes through a push or a pull effect. This is testament to the original concept of the GSG scenarios and their development and refinement over a 16 year period.

What is built and where it is built is largely determined by the activities and perceptions of global investment capital. Comparatively limited work has been undertaken into the property markets of regional cities as well as into the process of building obsolescence, refurbishment and valorisation. This paper explores the dynamics of the property development process in relation to land rent theory in marginal development locations. It argues that the debate over land rent theory, between academics who want to retain the canonical dogma and those who focus on landownership, is misplaced. What is required is a combination of these approaches. Increasingly, what is built and where it is built reflects the varied nature of property interests, as well as the actions of the local and national state. The argument is supported by a case study of Nottingham's office market.

There is an important shift away from production that is dependent upon material resources to production that utilises knowledge as the key source of competitiveness and innovation. Urban areas are key locations for a process that is also changing the way in which goods and services are consumed. The decade of the 1990s was a period of innovation and revitalisation in economic geography; it was also a time when economic geographers began again to explore old concepts in different ways-for example, new industrial spaces-intent on explaining the changing economic landscapes of capitalism. There is a real danger, however, that for economic geography the first decade of the 21st century will be a period of repetition and extension rather than one of development. This paper reviews aspects of the debate about the distinction between service and manufacturing activities and suggests that it needs to be reconsidered in relation to on-going and important changes in the production process that are as important for cities as they are for the economy as a whole.