There can be few more important or tricky challenges facing the British economy than levelling up the performance of our towns and cities by kickstarting the innovation economy. After years of drift and industrial decline, the very idea that innovation has a role to play in levelling up is a slightly unorthodox one in most of Whitehall and in too many cities and towns. Yet it is almost certainly the case that there can be no long term levelling up without some real progress on this front.
That’s why it was as important as it has been enjoyable to be asked to write the report “Place Matters” that we have launched this month. Funded by Bruntwood SciTech, a Joint Venture between Legal & General and Bruntwood, the aim of the report is to get to the bottom of how more places in Britain can raise their game through innovation and business.
The heart of our argument is that innovation districts matter and that innovation ecosystems matter too. But we argue that it is very hard indeed to develop both successful science parks and the like or to support the networks that nurture them if the places in which they are located are not working well. We talk, therefore, about the power of three: levelling up through innovation is about successful innovation assets, robust innovation ecosystems and successful places too.
Much of the report deals with the ‘how’ of getting more innovation in to business.
Our current national policies focus on the role of Innovate UK and the network of Catapults. These are vitally important. They are the foundation on which we must build. But the German Fraunhofer Institutes on which they are partly modelled spend some ten times the amount of money every year that Catapults do. While money isn’t everything, it is important. Then there is the modus operandi of the Catapults: the role they play on behalf of the nation that funds them. They are all different. Some are better than others. But as I once joked on a conference platform sitting alongside a none-to-pleased BEIS Secretary, Greg Clark, the only small businesses involved in the Sheffield based Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre are the taxi drivers bringing people from the station and the people delivering sandwiches for the lunches there. Like many a joke, this one has a basis in truth. Put it this way: it took too long for the Advanced Manufacturing catapult located at the heart of one of our great engineering cities, Sheffield, to see its role as being important in that city’s economic renewal. Even today, it is hard to argue that Catapults see their role as being central in the role of levelling up across the country through innovation and excellence.
If our report has a central purpose it is to help places start or accelerate their thinking on place based innovation and growth. We will never level up our economy if we fail to do that. The price will continue to be paid in communities across the UK, with lower than desirable levels of output and employment and with vulnerable communities and the vital public services upon which they depend short changed as a result. But we should think much more positively than that. Britain’s fundamental research – including that undertaken the length and breadth of the country – is world leading and much more of it than that is world class. We have world class businesses in many if not most places but a long tail of (sometimes formerly leading) businesses nationwide. If we can develop a more purposeful way of bringing innovation excellence to bear on more businesses, converting ideas and innovation into successful products and services, a much more positive future beckons throughout our country. Getting to that happy point is partly about what the Government chooses to do, but what places do matters too: investing, innovating and showing what can be done with purposeful and long-term leadership.
We hope our report is a positive step in that direction.
This is just the start of the conversation. We would like to know what people think of the report – and in particular the power of three model - and to be a part of the dialogue in cities and towns across the country. Get in touch with us with your thoughts and comments.