FST JOURNAL

Summary:

• Innovate UK published a Plan for Action for UK Business Innovation (2021-25) (Innovate UK strategy) and there is a strong alignment there to the aspirations of the industrial green paper
• Our national ecosystem is a super-cluster on the Global Stage so it is incumbent as a national funder to make sure that we are boosting all of the critical component parts and investing in our regional capabilities
• We need to make sure that there is a series of commitments to connect national to local. We cannot have the disconnect
• Innovate UK has put a lot of energy into connecting what we do nationally to what is happening locally, and driving local outcomes
• The new industrial strategy is a real opportunity to take advantage of the leadership capacity we have seen across the UK- Metro mayors, devolved governments and wider ambitious local growth plans.

I am not going to take a position on devolution. This is because I work for Innovate UK, one of the nine councils of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). We deliver to government policy, and it is for ministers and policymakers to decide on devolution priorities. However, I would say that the ‘genie's out of the bag’. I think the arguments have been successfully made that we have one of the most concentrated, centralised Research and Development systems in Europe and maybe we need to do something about that polarisation. For me, this is about exploring how we at Innovate UK as a national body and a national funder, support that agenda.

At Innovate UK we published a Plan for Action for Business Innovation (2021-25) and that is our strategy. At the top level we have got three major strategic priorities. They are the ‘Domains’ that we support in terms of the sectors and the challenge areas which are Net Zero, Health and Life Sciences (and Agri-food) and Digital and Technologies. You will find a strong alignment there to the industrial green paper that has just been launched. There is ‘Place’ – and this is my leadership responsibility, and there are our ‘Products and Services’, how we evolve the support we bring to all the brilliant businesses and all the brilliant innovators who are across the UK. Making sure we have that right customer journey, so we are giving the right support from start up all the way through to the scale up needs of those businesses. And that's not just about what we do by ourselves. That's how we work with other partners and other parts of government.

The significance of place

Why am I passionate about place? Well, first, I was born just outside of Slough in the South of England, but as a young bioscientist working for (a then) government agency of MAFF (DEFRA), I was relocated to North Yorkshire in the 1990s as part of a relocation exercise. It was also at a time we were coming out of recession with new government infrastructure projects helping reboot the construction sector and a great opportunity to build new headquarters and opportunities in the North of England. So that took me North just outside of York where I have been for the last 30 years. So you see, the whole regional agenda really means something to me. I was relocated to be part of a bioscience cluster in North Yorkshire and given the opportunity to be part of and contribute to growth in that community. The whole essence of working in a cluster is that if my job goes today, there are other opportunities locally, a thriving ecosystem. This whole agenda really resonates with me. It is very personal.

Going back to our plan for action and strategy, the first thing I would say is that we are a very different organisation now than we were three years ago, and very much different from 10 years ago. Just before I joined Innovate UK, there was a government review of the Technology Strategy Board in 2013, before we got rebranded. The review was extremely positive but it noted we were ‘place blind’. I would like to think that we are not place blind anymore. In our plan for action, we laid down three priorities for what we are going to do, to advance our place agenda. 

Firstly, as a geography the UK is relatively small on the global stage, right? Our national ecosystem is a global cluster. If you are operating in Silicon Valley and looking for opportunities in the UK, you are not looking at just Liverpool City region, you are looking at the whole of the UK. So it is incumbent as a national funder, to look at our national ecosystem and make sure that we are boosting all the component parts, investing in our regional capabilities, and bringing it together as a coherent ecosystem that is globally competitive. This means that I work with my colleagues across those national domain teams to be thinking about place and not just driving the usual national competitions. We are committed to thinking about our national programmes differently and connecting national to local. We cannot have that otherwise disconnect. 

Thinking about the local opportunities to connect to, we now have investment zones, we have freeports. The much anticipated devolution bill is almost certainly likely to give greater local powers around areas such as Net Zero and the green economy and skills. How can we in the Research and Development system have any impact on place if we cannot connect to these things that will be happening locally?

At Innovate UK, we made a big commitment to put energy into connecting what we do nationally to what is happening locally, and to drive greater local outcomes. In 2020/21, we published about 55% of our funding went outside the Greater South East, which was not bad considering about 45% of the Research and Development business, and intensive business population sits outside the Greater South East. In the last couple of years, we have pushed that to 66% of our funding. That latter number hasn’t been released yet, but has been validated, and shows a major shift of investment in that respect.

Another reflection is that we are a national body, but we have got deep local reach. I spoke about the fact I live and work in North Yorkshire. Most of our frontline innovation staff are field-based. We have got innovation experts all across the UK with a further 400 innovation Business Growth specialists locally embedded and operating as a regional resource in partnership with both the university sector and local authorities. We have got a fantastic Catapult network. These are strategic assets set up deliberately within an Innovation Cluster Geography and distributed all across the UK. 

However, it is too easy to focus on just the funding or what we mobilize in terms of place programmes. Whilst these Place Programmes are major seed funding to build local capacity, we need to be much more ambitious than just thinking about local programme support. In addition to local capacity building, we need regions to be able to be nationally competitive so that they can compete for a greater share of the national funding that is available. 

That is how we have been using our targeted programmes and we have got a plethora of schemes reflecting the fact that all places are different. If you compare Liverpool City region to North Yorkshire, they are very different places - different levels of business innovation maturity, different levels of Officer capability within the combined authorities, and different university capabilities. We cannot just run the same programme in each place. So we have a range of tools like the Innovate UK Launchpads, which are deliberately targeted to stimulate SME capability in places that may be a little less mature, all the way through to the innovation accelerators, where we have got bigger, bolder pots of money to drive those more mature ecosystems.

Co- creation

Going beyond the funding, what is really unique about the programmes is the way that we are starting to design them. Co creation is the word I want you to take away. It is not about us as a national body implementing place-based programmes to a Place. It is about working in partnership with local leadership to make sure that we understand the local needs and the local ambitions and work together to align and unlock them. That’s the approach we took both with our 11 Launchpads and the three Innovation Accelerators in Greater Manchester, the West Midlands and Glasgow City Region.

We need a paradigm shift within the national R&D system. We need to make sure that when we are thinking forward to things like the new industrial strategy how do we harness the local growth plans coming through. How do we wire up those new national programmes so that they don't just deliver that national outcome but also drive the local economic growth that we're collectively looking for? In the Innovate UK Local action plans that we have launched, (the first one being here in Liverpool City), we worked together with local leadership to identify the strengths of the place. We also highlighted where we are already making significant investment. Then we set out how we will work in partnership to further unlock those local opportunities. So far, we have eight action plans across the UK, including working with Combined Authorities, and in the case of Wales, working with a devolved government.  

I think the most important part of the levelling up white paper of 2022 when it comes to the R&D place mission is the new objective that UKRI was given to take place, a strategic objective. For this to work its way through takes time - time to build local relationships, time to learn to do things differently and time to build trust. However, I am optimistic because I think we have built some deep and meaningful relationships, particularly in the last couple of years. I am so excited with the prospect of a new industrial strategy because I think this is a real opportunity to take advantage of the innovation leadership capacity we have seen across the UK, whether it be Metro mayors, devolved governments, or other ambitious local growth plans, and an opportunity to harness those ‘big plays’  such as investment zones. There is a real opportunity to make the totality greater than the sum of the parts.