We can go one step further and ask whether this long-tailed distribution of board connectivity has any systematic relationship with the long tail of companies’ productivity performance. Controlling for other firmspecific factors, such as their size and sector, it appears that it does. Indeed, this relationship is both statistically significant and economically meaningful (Table 3). As a thought-experiment, imagine comparing two otherwise-identical companies except for their degree of board connectivity. One company has a board whose members are in the upper decile of the connectivity distribution; it is one of the “in-crowd”. Another has a board drawn from the lowest connectivity decile; it is one of the majority in the “out-crowd”. Average annual productivity growth for the in-crowd company is around 1 percentage point higher than for the out-crowd company. I am indebted to the doyen of monetary and financial economics, Professor Charles Goodhart, for many things. But among them is the following, the only corporate governance joke I know. Question: what is the difference between a shopping trolley and a non-executive director of a company? Answer: a shopping trolley has a mind of its own. The evidence here rejects the null hypothesis in Charles’s joke. It is unclear whether, for Facebook fanatics and Twitter addicts, higher numbers of friends and followers translates into higher levels of productivity and well-being. My casual empiricism suggests, sometimes, it might not. But for companies, the empirical evidence suggests connections do matter. For companies’ productivity, connectivity counts. Indeed, it may help account for the UK’s long tail.
You could think of this as a new piece of critical national infrastructure – a publically-available digital platform for diffusing new processes and practices across the UK company sector, enhancing technological trickle-down to the furthest reaches of the long tail. (b) Supporting Technology Transfer  A second area where progress could be made in creating an improved diffusion infrastructure is by harnessing the UK’s university network. The UK’s top-ranked universities are already playing a crucial role  56  Baldwin (2016). 21  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  21  in establishing the UK as an international innovation hub. Their business parks serve as crucibles of creativity. They are an important reason why the UK ranks so highly on innovation and start-ups. The question, raised in a speech of mine last month, is whether the UK’s other universities could serve as spokes for these hubs, helping diffuse innovation more broadly across sectors and regions. In principle, using the university network in this way has advantages. Unlike the Catapults, these institutional spokes do not need to be created anew. And the universities already have extensive regional and sectoral reach. Clearly, this would require a fairly significant repurposing of universities. Any new activities would also need adequate financing. But neither of these problems seems insurmountable. And looking ahead, it seems likely universities will need to rethink their purpose and focus, in the light of profound shifts in the future of work and the skills demands of students.