Show Notes 233: Can Cambridge and Manchester Build a Better Innovation Economy?
What does it take to build a world class innovation ecosystem? More than brilliant research, ambitious founders and a fresh strategy. It takes connections that help ideas, capital and talent move where they can make the biggest difference.
In this episode of the Cambridge Tech Podcast, Faye Holland and James Parton introduce a candid panel from the Cambridge x Manchester Partnership Innovation Summit. The partnership brings the two cities together to accelerate growth, help companies scale and make sure the benefits of innovation reach more communities.
Chaired by Fiona Tuck of Metro Dynamics, the discussion brings together Professor Dame Jessica Corner of Research England, Harriet Gordon of No. 10 North, Dom Hallas of Startup Coalition and Steven Lynch of the British Chambers of Commerce. Their challenge: identify what Britain needs to compete globally and turn innovation into lasting economic value.
In this episode
Collaboration beyond city limits. Corner describes the partnership as an experiment in connecting innovation ecosystems that are not neighbours. Its potential lies in bringing universities, businesses, investors and local authorities together, then learning what other places can replicate.
What founders actually need. Hallas puts the essentials plainly: talented people, money and a regulatory environment that lets companies build. Sales skills and investment terms matter too. Support should solve real problems without adding unnecessary complexity.
Capital across the journey. Hallas argues that the UK needs investment at every stage, from early ideas to established companies ready to scale. He also makes the case for more UK pension capital to reach British businesses.
Think global from the start. Lynch argues that international trade should be embedded in business planning, not treated as an afterthought. Established smaller businesses have an important role in adopting technology, joining supply chains and reaching new markets.
Make growth tangible. Gordon asks how innovation can translate into outcomes people recognise, from faster cancer diagnoses to better apprenticeship opportunities. Devolution, she argues, must change how decisions are made, not simply where they are made.
Build the foundations. Housing, lab space, energy, water and transport can all constrain growth. The panel also calls for stronger links between research, manufacturing, supply chains and local economies, so more value stays in the places that help create it.
Quotes to take away
“Britain doesn't need another strategy. We need more delivery.” Harriet Gordon
“They need talented people who they can work with to build something.” Dom Hallas
“You cannot separate innovation from international trade.” Steven Lynch
“We haven't yet joined our UK wide innovation ecosystem.” Professor Dame Jessica Corner
Expect a frank conversation about founder support, patient capital, practical collaboration and the infrastructure needed to turn ambition into action. Listen to the episode for the full discussion, and subscribe to the Cambridge Tech Podcast for more ideas from the people building the UK’s technology future.
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Episode Transcript
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Welcome to the Cambridge Tech Podcast. Talking all things technology from the heart of the UK's tech capital. Here are your hosts, Fay Holland and James Parton.
I'm Stake. And I'm James.
So Faye, this week's episode is from the recent innovation summit with the Cambridge Manchester Partnership. So before we dive into that, let's just explain what the partnership is. Super. Thank you for that. So the partnership is the UK's first cross-city innovation partnership that basically puts together Cambridge and Manchester to see if we can achieve more for the UK than if we acted alone. And our mission is quite a significant one. It's can we together supercharge innovation-led growth in the UK? Okay, interesting. So what does that look like? You know, what actual objectives of the partnership?
We've got three really chunky objectives. The first is to unlock economic growth. And this is done in multiple ways. So we want to, first of all, get both ecosystems working well and working well together. And then we've got to pick some very specific projects that drive additionality. So the one plus one has got to equal much more than two. And helping our talent move easily between both of those cities. So just providing... More access to what resources and tools and people are available in both cities. So that's the first objective. The second objective is to build for global growth. And there are two ways we're going to do this. The first way is to pick a handful of startups and to help them scale. Can we have some interventions that help them to scale quicker? And the second one is building a proposition that makes Cambridge and Manchester the obvious destination for global organizations wanting to land in the UK. And then the third one, which kind of underpins everything, is around good growth. And we've talked about this many times on the podcast. And it's about making sure that the benefits of innovation and entrepreneurship reach all communities, not just those of us that are lucky enough to sit in that community already.
Yeah, there's a lot there. You've been operational for eight months now and things seem to be going well.
Yeah, it is. The momentum behind the partnership and the appetite for it is really significant. I think there's a big shift nationally to work better together. I always say this thing that we should be behaving more like a US state than a set of individual UK postcodes. And when you look at it, we know Cambridge has got a brilliant story. So does Manchester. So if we can build a replicable model that other cities can then use, actually supercharging innovation-led growth in the UK becomes quite possible. So it's been a whirlwind of a few months. It's great actually to be able to talk about it a little bit on the podcast. But the good thing is we had our summit a couple of weeks ago up in Manchester. It was our first one. And we got to really tell the story there and convene some really super interesting people.
Yeah, so what are we going to hear in today's episode?
So we've actually picked one of the sessions, which was a panel where we asked some of the key influential individuals what they thought we were missing to be globally competitive. What else, intervention-wise, do they think that we need to be able to supercharge innovation-led growth in the UK?
And they were great. There were so many soundbites that came from this panel. There was no fluff, and they were all very frank.
Excellent. That's a great scene setter. So let's listen in.
The panel was chaired by Fiona Tuck of Metro Dynamics and included Harriet Gordon, who is the Deputy Director of Number 10 North, Professor Dane Jessica Corner, who's the Executive Chair of Research England, Dom Hallis from the Startup Coalition, and Steve Lynch, who's Director of International Trade at the British Chambers of Commerce.
So first, Harriet, would you like to join us?
Harriet is Deputy Director for Good Growth at Number 10 North. So obviously a very busy woman right now. And she's working really hard to make sure that DevoLision does deliver growth at every postcode, which I'm sure you can ask her about in the lunchtime slot.
Next, we've got Dom Hallis, who is Executive Director of the Startup Coalition on a mission to make sure that Britain is the best place in the world to build and scale a tech company. And then we've got Steve Lynch, who is Director of International Trade for the Chambers of Commerce. His job today is making sure we think outside the room. Cambridge and Manchester are not the only places in the UK, although obviously we all love them very much and fondly. And there are lots of countries out there in the world.
And then last, but definitely not least, Professor Dame Jessica Corner at Research England and UKRI, who is absolutely on a mission to make sure that we can invest in places to drive innovation that delivers us economic growth.
So welcome, everyone. And let's have a round of applause for our talented So we've been given on the face of it a deceptively simple question to talk about and discuss this morning, which is what does a world-class innovation ecosystem really require? Emphasis on the really fair, we got that. And what's Britain still missing?
Now, I think our starting assumption for this is not that we need any more stuff. The answer to that question is not stuff. We've got world-class research institutes. We've got investors. We've got innovative businesses. Sure, we have constraints, transport, which we heard earlier in that four-hour drive, infrastructure, utilities, housing are all a challenge for us, capital, which we'll come to. But actually, the harder version of this question that Faye has set us is how do we make sure we're using those assets that we have? How do we make sure we're using the stuff systematically, consistently in order to get us to economic growth. And obviously, what better place to start than the Cambridge and Manchester Partnership, because they are explicitly about adding something new to the ecosystem.
So Jessica, I'm going to come to you first. You backed the Cambridge Manchester Partnership. It exists. It exists thanks to you. And you clearly think you're onto something because last week you launched the Future of Sustainable Collaboration Fund. So you're coming back for more. What have you already seen that suggests that this type of collaboration is genuinely adding something new?
Yeah, maybe it would be good just to step back a little bit because actually it was an idea that came from here jointly with Cambridge. It was being put around and there was quite a lot of, first of all, scepticism about it in that There isn't actually, somebody may come back and say there is evidence, there isn't actually evidence necessarily from around the world to say, if you join up to innovation ecosystems that don't have an immediate geographical connection with each other, they're not co-located, they can't feed off each other in that way. Actually, what is the evidence that actually doing this would make a difference? So that's one thing. How and would it? The first thing is to say it's really good, given that we all need to do different things to try some experiments. And this is a very interesting proposal to do this. And you can see the energy that it's beginning to generate. The second thing I would say is that the UK is a very small country and compared to very, very effective innovation ecosystems, if you take California or the Boston innovation system or wherever, we treat ourselves as multiple individual innovation ecosystems. And yet we're tiny. How many times would the UK fit into California, for example? So it is the missing thing is that we don't, we haven't yet joined our UK wide innovation ecosystem. We're not treating it as a connected whole. And we know that there are all sorts of things stuck in various places. So capital is stuck in the already very well resourced and very well functioning ecosystems. It's not really available in other parts of the country to drive the system. We're not thinking about where manufacturing or supply chains could locate. And they're not available in the very high functioning, hot ecosystems that we have in the country. So there's lots of things we need to do to join it up, actually. So what's very interesting about this is an experiment in doing that and what happens if you do. And the energy that is already being generated by it is palpable. So when you say what has caught my attention was one, yeah, great experiment, and two, to see in the space of a year how far it's come and how much energy it is generating. So if we can do that, we should be able to replicate that. Interesting. And on that, on the energy and on the partners, do you think there are already some wider lessons coming out for universities from this?
It was started with the university partnership, but it's spread out.
Is there already things that you think the wider university land needs to hear so far?
Yeah, I think one thing is that although it has the core has been two universities talking to each other and getting this thing going. I think the thing that it isn't, it really is just that. It's the authorities, it's the businesses, it's the investor community, it's all the ingredients that need to happen to make innovation really work. You may know that we've launched an opportunity for other parts of the country to put in proposals for collaborative ventures that might mirror or be somewhat different from the Cambridge Manchester one. It isn't, if they come forward just saying it's two universities talking to each other, they do that all the time. I'm not interested.
LAUGHTER It's got to be something much more than that. And all of the players creating a system of energy between them, I think.
Absolutely. And obviously key players in there are the founders. And we've just heard those six fabulous presentations. Well done, founders. My voting was aligned and different on different questions. So I was pleased to see that. But Dom, help us look at this from the founders' perspective. People might have seen Dom's Rebuild Britain letter, which has got 300 odd signatories, I think as well, really making the case for creating and scaling and retaining more world-leading British business here. Where do these systems, and I think it's really important that we think about this as systems, we talk often about an ecosystem singular, but we heard this morning about the go-to-market ecosystem, the investment ecosystem, the innovation ecosystem, it's not one thing. Where are the systems most often failing between having a genuinely good innovation and having something that is commercially successful and ready to go to market?
Yeah, so I think those different ecosystems as you characterise it is really important because one of the things I think is often the assumption and frankly too often the assumption in the way we talk about this in policy terms, and I spend most of my time sat between business and government, is that business skills aren't relevant. Because we basically think that, oh, there's some innovation comes out of thin air and then miraculously you'll have an amazing business. And it turns out that stuff like being able to sell things matters. It turns out that understanding investment terms and having investment ecosystems, not just that will deploy capital, but they'll deploy capital in terms that actually work for people who are trying to build a business in the long run matter. Bio has come back to what fundamentally do the founders need and how can the kind of policy landscape and the way we think about it help. It's three things. Basically, they need talented people who they can work with to build something. So whether that's skills policy, whether that's immigration policy, whatever it is to get great talent into companies. They need money, and that can come in loads of different forms. It can come from the research base and things like that. It can come from investment in BC and all that sort of space. It can come from R&D support in terms of tax system and things like that. Or it can come from sales and procurement. And then they need an enabling regulatory environment. And I think the key is that actually too often when we think about the support and the ecosystem for businesses, we're always piling on because we want more and more stuff to help. So it's new programs, new this, new that. And actually, sometimes I think it's important to think about how we take stuff away and let them actually build things. And so supporting when it's needed, but frankly, not necessarily overbearing.
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. You mentioned the money. I thought you'd go harder on that, to be honest, in your response there. The question I've got for you on the point of capital, which I think we see a flip-flop argument on this. We don't have enough. There isn't enough. We need more. And then we have other companies that are raising here. What is the capital issue? Is it supply? Is it demand? And I think the kind of principle that we often work with is capital doesn't create good opportunities. Good opportunities attract capital. But where should we be pointing on this? Yeah, so look, the first thing to say on capital is the UK is actually doing really well. So if you look in 2014, the UK overall probably raised about 4 billion in venture capital, in tech companies. And last year, I think we did that in three different months. Like this, this sort of sheer scale of uplift is remarkable. And crucially, I think it's really important to say, though, obviously you do get a concentration of the tech sector and certainly venture backed sector in London. Actually, if you look at both Cambridge and Manchester, but more generally UK cities, actually also doing comparably well on European metrics, right? Because we're so typically framed around the idea of, oh, we have this like steep regional inequality in the UK and the way which we think about the economy. We actually miss that basically in this case, even though there is an inequality, it's because London is so far ahead comparable to other European ecosystems that actually we're also doing pretty bloody well outside of that. But I think that in answer to your question of like, where's the gaps? What do we need on the funding? The answer is all you can eat, right? As in actually we want more early stage money. And I think that the kind of truism and policy now that I hear too often is, oh, we're really good at startups. We're great. We struggle with scale ups. That's bollocks. We need to be good at all of it. Right. And it's like, it's really important. Actually, you can't suddenly be like, oh, we're done with startups now because you have to build a pipeline that flows through. But obviously the late stage capital landscape is not as good as it could be. So we need to push much harder on things like pension fund reform, which the government's doing a lot of already. And make sure that the UK capital goes into these companies. Because so much of the late-stage capital, even if it comes from a UK venture fund, which usually it doesn't, is actually coming downstream from American LPs and LPs from outside the UK. And frankly, both as a sort of person who works in the ecosystem, but also as a person who owns a pension, I would quite like some of that money to be deployed here. So clearly, it's a huge challenge. But actually, we can't lose sight of the fact that we're on a sort of journey and that we're in the J-curve part of that journey. So there's a good chance we can keep it going. Absolutely. Absolutely going to steal money buffet as a thing that we need when we think of this going forward.
So, Steve, we've gone to you up there. Let's widen this out. We said we'd get you to think outside of the UK, but also think about that best broadly. The Chamber's work has recently pointed to this big movable middle of firms that need different type of investment. And they are looking not just in the UK, but outside. But How do we make sure that we do follow through, that when we're thinking about the money buffet, we are also thinking about the wide range of our business activity that we need to be backing and bringing forward?
Yeah, so I think it's a great question. I think my dad taught me that success comes in overalls, and I actually think innovation also comes in overalls. It's not just the cutting edge businesses that are innovating. What we talk about is this sort of middle, this SME space. So SMEs are the backbone of our economy. And The biggest opportunity is to get the M growing. So that five, 50 million pounds to get them growing. And the quickest route to do that is through international trade. So, you know, there's going to be a big budget coming up. And basically the question is, do we tax more or do we trade more? Businesses cannot carry that burden of trade anymore, of tax anymore. It is really hard just to keep the lights on at the moment. So to tell businesses you actually need to start trading more, that is the opportunity, but it's one of the biggest challenges that they have. We've heard about some of the geopolitical instability that's taking place at the moment. So to start thinking internationally is just, it's almost too much, but we have to. We should and could be doing more. And that's our biggest opportunity as a nation. So we have it that if the UK increased exports by 2%, that's 0.6 to our GDP. When we've got a flatlining 1% GDP, 0.6 is enormous. And again, it's really easy me sitting on stage to a group of businesses saying, "You guys should be doing more internationally." But the truth is we don't lack innovation, we don't lack ambition, but we do lack, I would say, support and delivery. And again, the big question that we're trying to answer, you cannot separate innovation from international trade. That should not be an afterthought in five years. We should really be thinking about embedding it into your businesses from the very outset, because that's the opportunity. And again, devolution, regional growth, absolutely fantastic, fully supportive. That doesn't come about if you don't think globally and understanding that we are now globally competing both for inbound investment and for exports. Absolutely. We need a bit more of circuits upstream thinking when we're planning this through. I like that smile. Got it. There we go. One of the things that we've heard about from the founders this morning and they've talked about as they're building their business and we hear a lot when we're talking to different places is the kind of the availability of talent to support and drive. It's often in startups and it's often in new businesses. How about that movable middle? Often they are a source of talent themselves in a really experienced C-suite that could be working around. But we also hear, how do we get them to move? How do we reach them? They're often outside of the system. They haven't got their passport yet. But how do they get in? What works do you think to get into and help move that potentially productive middle?
So I travel up and down the country and I speak to so many incredible businesses, innovators doing incredible things. And just because they're not at the forefront of technology or smart tech or quantum, they are adopting and adapting AI and technology into their businesses. That have absolutely enormous application. So again, I was with a third generation manufacturing company in Solihull the other day, and they are bringing in technology around manufacturing, which has enormous application, which, you know, the other part of that as well is they just applied for export finance, which has enormous implications on their global growth. So I think to the point around making sure these ecosystems are connected, it's really important that we don't forget about the SMEs that might not be in the tech space or just the pure industrial strategy. There is so much opportunity for these businesses to connect into this ecosystem.
Agreed, agreed. And actually, Jessica, I was going to come to you. I'll come to you, Harry. You're waiting patiently.
Jessica, on that point, where are universities on this? Do they need to be thinking harder about the non-spin-out part of their footprint? How do we get them connecting into that established business base in their place?
Yeah, and universities actually do more in the space of connecting and working with businesses overall than they do with actually producing spin-out companies. It's just we've had an awful lot of attention on spin-out companies for very good reasons. So they do more of it, although the national data for two years running, and I expect it to be for the third year running, actually has shown that collaborative R&D is going down. Having been very productive and so on. And it's going down probably because businesses have not actually got the time, capacity and money to do that. And it is an indicator of something that perhaps we're also talking about the other struggles. So, yeah, very important that universities are leaning into that, opening their doors, opening their facilities. And of course, on the university side, many universities, as we know, are challenged financially and are scaling back activities. It would be a great opportunity risk to our growth plans if that continues and if universities find that they don't really have the time and resources to put this as a huge priority. So we've got to find ways of making sure that they do continue to support them, things like through the higher education innovation funding that gives them a platform for doing that. They are going to have to cost that work at true cost because at the moment, businesses probably get that at quite a discount and it's not as affordable for universities to do. So I'm highlighting pressures. We need to know are there and think about how we support them forward. And then I think it is also about the incentives we put in the system, some of the funding to go through. I'm rethinking some of the incentives in the system that we have for universities from just account what they do as if it's all the same to Can we develop indicators that are showing how that generates value back? And I'm calling it anchoring back, universities are all in anchoring value, which is not just the doing of it. It's the nature, the deliberate approach to do that such that those activities actually strengthen the ecosystem and bring the value in pounds and other activities back into the local economy. That's quite a tough thing to do. You can hear I'm not speaking at the practical end of it. I'm speaking at how do you get a system to move to do this more than it has been. And in particular ways, actually, in the way of anchoring value back rather than it just being a good to do.
- Yeah, I like that phrase, the anchoring value. And I think going back to the point about the businesses, then it's like that having to understand the lens of value from the business owner's perspective to the place's perspective to the university. Harriet, it's your turn. - Thank you. - So one of the things, taking a step into the Cambridge Manchester collaboration, and Fay has said this morning already, that the partnership deliberately rejects this idea that every place has to contain every part of every bit of an ecosystem. That obviously creates a really interesting tension for government. And we hear this day in, day out in Metro Dynamics, we're devolving more and more power, accountabilities go to places, economic opportunities don't respect boundaries. How do we stop greater devolution inadvertently, encouraging places to compete, when actually it's quite reasonable that mayors have accountability to the people at their places? How do we start trying to square that? Yeah. So I think competition is a good thing, but we don't need it between our places. As people have already said, our competition is Boston, Silicon Valley, Paris. And I think we need to be looking outwards in terms of our competitiveness rather than inwards. I think fundamentally when companies, investors are thinking, where do I want to go? The choice is very rarely going to be, do I want to be in Manchester or Liverpool? It will be, do I want to be in Manchester or Munich? And I think actually, yeah, how do we strengthen our offer is about looking at the UK ecosystem in its totality. We are quite small. That is an advantage in lots of ways because it means that we can make these connections. There are lots of things that we need to do to improve that connectivity and improve that way of operating as an ecosystem. But I do think that is a strength that we can play to rather than something that we should see as an inherent challenge or weakness. On the kind of, how do we get the incentives in the right place? The Cambridge Manchester Partnership is the sort of demonstration that places recognise those opportunities, don't respect those boundaries, and that we need to work together to be able to take advantage of them. I think devolution is actually just about making it a bit easier for places to do. I don't think there is a need to persuade places or people or businesses that there is a kind of evidence to support that and a case for doing so. The challenge has been that we don't have the incentives and the tools aligned in the right places being wielded by the right people at the right level to make that work effectively. I don't think it is just about moving decisions around a system. It's about fundamentally shifting the way that decision making is done and made and the kinds of people who are in the room for that. And I do, I think this is basically an example of how we've done it against the odds. We want to put the odds slightly more in the favor of doing this more and making it more consistent.
- Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's right. And on the point of tools, I think the word that obviously you can't have a conversation about innovation without using is clusters and clustering. And I think on this point about something that we have rather than something that we do, I think one of my pet peeves always is clustering is something that you do. It's not that you point to a group of businesses and say, great, I've got a cluster now. How, in terms of tools, do you see that as something even more important as we go forward to help with that? How are we dissolving administrative boundaries and thinking about where we've got opportunity wherever we find it, but actually in the fact that we are small, we're tiny, we can create those pan-national or pan-regional clusters or clustering that will help us drive that.
Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's incumbent on all of the different bits of the ecosystem to make that work and come around the table and be part of that conversation. I think there's a question about how we get the accountability right. Fundamentally, accountability at all levels is just trying to get the right outcomes and deliver. I think this is all completely aligned with that. And I don't think there's actually a conflict to resolve there. Ultimately, taking advantage of the opportunities means that we can deliver better outcomes for people. For local leaders and how we talk about this stuff, I think one of the things that we can actually do more to help with is how do you translate that into better outcomes for people? So how do you talk about innovation in terms of someone getting a faster cancer diagnosis or someone's child having a better apprenticeship opportunity or something like that. I think making it real for people and helping people understand the advantage and what this actually delivers as benefit for them is quite an important part of making sure that this sticks.
Absolutely. Dom and Steve, both of you, whoever wants to go first can let me know as I finish the question. Is this cooperation? That was a total dodge and he's not even heard the question yet. Bring us back to the founder perspective on this. So when we talk about leadership and we talk about place leadership, we instinctively go to civic leaders, but business leaders are really important leaders in these places. And when we think about their incentives and how they work, from a business perspective, how does this cross-place collaboration look? How does all administrative border conversation look? How are businesses experiencing this? And how do we gear up a collaboration between places to be something that businesses hear and are interested in and engage in?
I think competition between places is fine and normal. As in actually, there's a very familiar term in the startup ecosystem, which is like cooperation. And this idea of actually, you can both collaborate and be competing at the same time. You can have people who are adjacent to what you're doing and ultimately might be going building a product roadmap. That would blend into yours and vice versa. And that's fine. And you're going to be competing and also working together towards the same broad goal for a sector. I think that's totally fine. And I think it's important that we're honest about that. And because that genuinely does drive improvements, right?
We briefly mentioned the spin out stuff. The light that's been shone on that in the past five years has significantly improved the environment in that space, like for people spinning companies out of universities. And it's done so through some slight competition between universities, acknowledging the fact that like, maybe we need to compete to get better and also the pressure from government. And I think that in practice, like when you then think about the sort of what that means from a founder perspective and the way in which they engage in civic life and then build this competition. Like, I think there is this real challenge and tension in that we have to almost acknowledge and understand that for businesses, especially less so in, frankly, in Manchester and Cambridge, but more so when you think about the wider regional ecosystems. If you're building, I always think of it as an amazing company that's been built in Middlesbrough at the moment. It's like a VR startup that works in training settings. And the truth is actually building a sort of 50 person Series B company in Middlesbrough, you're pretty lonely if you don't find some people who are building a Series B company somewhere else. And crucially, it's not actually that useful to connect that person with a Series B company in London because they don't have the same experience. Let's be totally honest. Like talent experience isn't the same, the capital experience is different. All these things are different. And so actually almost proactively realizing where you sit and then what best links are available and the logical thing to then do. Founders have to go out and do that themselves, right? That's a natural consequence. They don't sit there and be like, how do we collaborate? You know what I mean? It's like, they just have to go do it. And I think that we have to start thinking about this stuff in the same way, which is a really rational, cold-minded, okay, cool. We know that we're good at this sector. That's good at the sector. How do we actually work collectively together? How do we make sure that we're building a joint offer because this adds value there and we add value there? And I think that's a natural, in theory, a natural way of operating. And I think the example of what we're talking about today is a really good case.
Cool. Thank you. Yeah, I'll just follow on. So we talk about collaboration and it's yes, but true collaboration is actually very difficult. And devolution does actually mean you are competing. That is the reality of it. And the UK is unbelievably poor. At operating outside of silos. We operate in silos. And so partnerships like this are absolutely critical to understand that we could be the sum of all of our parts. So genuinely, where does Cambridge have strength that Manchester doesn't and vice versa? So say there's groundbreaking research coming out of Cambridge, Cambridge doesn't have the lab space and maybe the advanced manufacturing that Manchester does. There's the opportunity that you are stronger by the sum of all your parts.
To your point around businesses don't really care who they deal with, right? BIST is the new version of the Department of Business and Trade. It was DIT. But the point is a business doesn't care if it's BIST or the Foreign Office or UKRI. They just need support to their problem. And how do we get them to grow on that? So I think that is really important.
So to your point around civic and business duty, I think it's so important the roles that chambers play. And Charlotte sitting over there, who's the CEO of the Cambridge Chamber, she can connect the ecosystem unbelievably well. Which I think is really important. But then the other part of that is, again, it doesn't have to be just cross. What we actually need to do is get it cross borders. So, again, there's major infrastructure projects taking place in the UK at the moment. So Sizeville Sea is a perfect example. Massive prime infrastructure. They need SMEs in their procurement system. The Suffolk Chamber of Commerce is actually leading the procurement of all the SMEs to work into the nuclear power station. And again, we talk about the future, future trade economy and job opportunities. At the moment, that's just a big building site that actually just needs real people from around, not just the Suffolk, but from around the country to engage in that supply chain. So I think there's an enormous role to play between civic and business organisations like a chamber connecting the two into the opportunity because we have to connect our businesses into the genuine opportunities of growth.
Yeah, I agree. It's interesting on these points about the healthy competition. How do we create connections and how do we get, how do we put business in front of that? And I think in the work that we're doing in a lot of places, again, I can't believe we've not said triple helix yet in this, in any of the day to day, but it's all actually about that so much attention is on the academic and the government part of the triple helix and not about how can we have business leading in that front and how are they actually, they're in the right, their frame is to build and to make connections and to compete where it works for the outcome. Yeah, I think what's really important here, and this is where we talk to policymakers about this all the time, is that sometimes the way in which we think about that collaboration is to commit it in terms of programming and policy and structure. But if you're a business, you don't give a toss about any of that. As in, if we're totally honest, what you add to your point, the reality is you don't care which department it comes from or what it is. It's that you're building your business and you're going on that journey. And actually, I think that to some extent it's incumbent on if we want to engage founders in this process, and certainly from our perspective, we definitely want to engage founders. How do we go to their level and understand what journey they're on and be respectful of the fact that if you're coming to an event like this or anything, they're taking their time out of building an actual thing every day they've got to go do to try and work out how to be supportive or build something or collaborate. And what are they trading off against that? What's the cost to them? And how do we make it worth it and engage at their level as well as engaging on the thing that we want to engage on? Absolutely. Can I just add one further point? We just took a group of 15 life science businesses to Singapore on a trade accelerator. I was absolutely blown away by the Singaporean model. Now, granted, it's a city country, but their ecosystem in regards to connecting business into government was hand in glove. And they worked everything from prevention right the way through to treatment. Now again, they are working in 10-15 year cycles. Unfortunately, we're now working in political cycles of two years at best. But the point is, they connected their public and private sector around what is genuinely needed for their population, and then connected the business ecosystem into it, which has had enormous application. And again, I think we're a moment in time now where we have such an opportunity around devolution to collect place into business. That is the opportunity around regional growth. And I go back to, but we have to put global trade and opportunity at the heart of that.
I agree. I'm going to come back to you, Jessica, in a second on the ecosystem question. But actually, first, I just want to go back to you, Harriet. We are steeped in a vertical rewiring of the state's activity. That is literally what we spend our days doing. Do we need to be starting to think about a rewiring of the state horizontally as well in some of this conversation? This is absolutely about how do we we've got a process in front of us now for thinking that through. But is this the way that we need to be thinking of some rewiring as well? I hope that we already are. I think if we're doing it vertically, we will fail because ultimately if the outcome of devolution is that you have a hundred new mini white halls, no one's going to want that. And I think fundamentally rewiring the state as it really does have to be about transforming the way that decisions get made. It's not just about moving decisions around the system. It's not a decision being made here that is now being made here, but the way in which it is made and how that is done stays exactly the same. That is not a good outcome of what we're trying to achieve there. And I think to your point around how you actually have a much closer relationship, much more like the Singapore model between business and place and government and how that gets made. Once you are doing that at a place where it makes sense and you actually can have those people in the room and you have much more that direct understanding of how decisions are going to get made and who needs to be part of that process. That will make better decisions. And I think that is the argument for doing this. But doing it in a top-down way is absolutely not going to get us there. And so I hope that kind of part of the purpose of Number 10 North, as the newest organisation probably by quite some way in this room, is to try and do that in a different way and to try and think about this much more informed, bluntly, by the Prime Minister's experience here and in Manchester and through the Cambridge and Manchester partnership and how those things have informed the way that he thinks about what the UK needs to be able to do this at scale.
Agreed, agreed. You probably are the newest organisation in the room, though we can probably pull on that if we get Slido going again.
So Jessica, back to your ecosystems, bringing us back to innovation ecosystems. We've made this our ecosystem. We've talked about this point that other places are doing this in a different way. They have a stronger connection between them. We've said about, is it plural rather than singular? Are we overly fluent now in a model of the innovation ecosystem that we've seen for the last 10 years, which is kind of city-based? like the kind of this, the triple helix connection, do we need to increase our fluency in different models? Actually, I think we've got to do both. I think we're not as fluent as we might be in the city model. We know that there are disparities across the country, that they're not all as active as the most active. We've done a lot to look at where are the gaps, where are the capital gaps, where are the innovation, all of those things. And we can see that. So we're only beginning to really say how can we optimise the outcomes, even in our... Tier one and so on cities. So I think there's a lot to do on that actually. And then they've got their surrounding regions that need to somehow coalesce into them and then not be too focused just within the city boundaries itself. But then of course we have coastal regions, we have agricultural regions, rural regions, we have disparate regions that are not don't have cities and don't have combined authorities with who are all quite vocal at the moment saying it's all very well what you're doing but you've left us out and we're going to we don't have the opportunity of devolution is a it's quite a loud voice so yeah we're going to have to be smart about that actually the local innovation partnerships fund which has been doing a lot of this work in this area we did have a an earmarked centers around combined authorities model. And then we also had a competition for the best things to come forward from other parts of the country. And then seven of those got chosen to get their own fund and they're now progressing their work. And in those are some really interesting areas. For example, Lincoln and its agriculture and military strength, which is a small area. It's a very particular geography. They absolutely know what they've got there and they absolutely know what strengths they've got to work with. They've been doing it for quite a long time and they've got brilliant things going on. So yes, great initiatives come forward from other places. I think it's the peripheries that we're going to have to think about. I have to say this, but I was just thinking Number 10 North is our newest spin out in the country, isn't it? so we can do it that is so true and actually i was going to ask you this question jessica but i'll ask you harry but obviously you can i've launched their new collaboration for sustainable futures fund last year it's as jessica said at the start this was an experiment and we can't always wait to see what happens when we experiment what do you want to see come through jessica's new fund well it's not just another man can man sorry wrong way around she's gone not just another cambridge manchester what do you want what kind of things do you think we should be seeing through that next experiment I actually think to the point you were just making, Jessica, about how do we demonstrate the benefits of this approach to the places that don't fit the obvious mould? And actually, as you were talking, I was thinking of the other places around the country where actually what is enabling them to do growth in a way that works for their communities and works for their places is clustering and is that innovation. And it looks different in different places. You say it's agriculture in some places, it's defence in other places. Barrow, I think, is a really good example. How do we tailor our support that it suits the place it's going to rather than having this one size fits all a I think that and being able to demonstrate how innovation is not something only for cities. Innovation is something that will look and feel different in different places, but should be there. And as part of that story and as part of that growth story, I think that will be a really powerful part of it. So no pressure.
Steve, I'm going to come to you and go back to this point about how do we move the movable middle and the productive middle. A lot of these competitions obviously end up with that university collaboration. They're often startup focused. If we're thinking about these new programs, how should they be reaching out to that movable middle of firms that are perhaps not yet engaged, but could be and could be thinking about their next international mission or their next change in order to reach that goal?
Yeah, so two points. One, I just wanted to pick up on that point earlier. So I'm from Cambridge and Cambridge is a phenomenal city and so many incredible things are happening around it. But one thing we also need to be quite clear about is there's not enough houses, there's not enough lab space, there's not enough energy, there's not enough water to actually facilitate that growth. So if we're talking about global competitiveness, moving forward, we need to think about that hard infrastructure. That hard infrastructure gives us the opportunity to be globally competitive. If it doesn't, it will dissipate. We want people to come and live and grow and develop in Cambridge and we said start up to scale up. That's really important. So I think we really need to be thinking about that hard infrastructure. If we're talking about a partnership between Cambridge and Manchester, it can't take four or five hours in a car. We really need that hard infrastructure to drive through that global competitive. And I think that's really important to hammer home as well. I think the other part around the international piece is without getting too macro, but the world is dramatically changing around us. We cannot be stuck in our bubbles. Geopolitical instability is not going to get better. It's going to get worse. And that's going to make international trade harder. Sanctions, tariffs. If you look at every single country now has industrial strategy, which is essentially protectionism. So the days of going over to a country, wrapping it in a British flag and saying, do you want to buy my stuff? It's gone, right? You need to look at the market, What do they need? And then what are we really good at? Now, we are globally competitive in so many industries, and that is our opportunity. And let's be serious about that. Financial professional services, life sciences, deep tech. This is where we are globally competitive and have the opportunity. And we have to link this into government. Government has to be pushing businesses right at the forefront of this and supporting them on that journey because that is our opportunity. And again, we cannot tax more. We need to trade more. That's how we get out of our growth mire, if you will.
Absolutely. I think it's this really hard tension, and we see this at the moment, between really the super hard infrastructure, like roads, rail, and then actually the really critical, purposeful, soft infrastructure that we wrap around it. And actually, there is a real lot of work needed at both of those extremes when practically we're in the middle with stuff that we know rather than tackling how we make that work. I just think trade. Should be treated as a national infrastructure. That is so important. It sounds like it's a bit boring, but actually it's the fundamentals of our opportunity moving forward. So trade moving forward, you can take that through to the slum, should be treated as a national infrastructure and we should support it as such. Not an afterthought. Absolutely. Back to the upstream. We're giving our countdown warning. We've got the kind of classic quickfire questions for you at the end. And I'd like you all to complete this sentence for me so you can have a think about this as you're going through. So Britain doesn't need another... X. It needs to get much better at Y. Go on, Harriet. Do you want to get the guys to go first?
No, I'll go first. Britain doesn't need another strategy. We need more delivery. That's why you go first.
What does it need to deliver on first?
So I think that it is very easy to talk ourselves in circles about what devolution means in practice. How can the state get better at doing things? I think we have, as a representative of government, does really like publishing long documents about how to do stuff better. It does. It does. We do actually, though, need to move quite quickly to your point. Like we are behind on these things and the hard infrastructure is an active constraint to innovation at the moment. We need to move more quickly to fix that. We need to stop talking about it and we need to start doing it. Being able to demonstrate that is, I think, a really important part of us being able to signal confidence in the future of the UK economy and how this stuff is going to work in the long term.
Can I just then follow on because that was my point. We've got a trade strategy. You've got to think of something different, Steve. We've got a trade strategy which essentially says what countries to reach. It's not revolutionary. That's generally what it is. We've got an industrial strategy which basically says this is the stuff we're really good at. Right? We've got the industrial strategy. We've got the trade strategy. Let's start using reserves. That is fundamental. Better at trading than not.
Yeah, you should have to. Yeah. Okay, John, beat that. So I had two. I was like, Britain doesn't need another small-scale government program that says it supports founders, but actually goes nowhere. It needs to get much better at actually listening to what people want and then give it to them. And then if you go macro, which I think is what you did, basically, it's like, we definitely don't need another decade of managed decline. We need to actually start taking some risks. Taking some risks.
Jessica, I'm going to give you a different question because I'm kind and they've covered everything else up. But also back to your point about you've got a system view here. There's a kind of this is absolutely we're bouncing between really being in it and then being over it. But you've just launched a new fund. But if I gave you no new funding program, no new institution, no new building, what could we just do differently tomorrow that would materially improve this, the drive towards economic performance?
Yeah, it's slightly esoteric, so forgive me for that. But I think it's moving away. And to this audience, that might not feel quite right. I'm a bit more excited. I'm just going to stay over here. As in universities create spin-out companies. It's not stop doing that. That's all fine.
To deliberately anchoring the value of those into locations, into supply chains, into manufacturing bases, into the equity that stays, that isn't just released early and then those acquisitions happen. So it's fundamentally changing the idea of it's just good enough to do enough of it into it's the nature of the way that we're doing it. And we're talking a lot about the whole end-to-end system of that. For me, I'm very interested in that starts with universities, it starts with authorities, it starts with places. And that end of it needs to be, we need to now start talking about that bit, not just what the British Business Bank or investments or capital investment investors are doing. We need to think about that very early beginning and do it deliberately.
Brilliant, thank you. So we've got literally 10 seconds left for me to wrap up, but I think I'm just going to pick some of my favourite phrases from this. Money buffer, obviously, has come through really wide. I think this really important point about how are we looking at the cultural connections that there are between these different groups. So you mentioned about the Middlesbrough VR company being lonely. I think that's really important when we think about this horizontal point. How do we find those connections where they're meaningful to drive this forward? And I haven't thought of one for the overalls, which disappoints me intensely. But I think that is going to come to you all through a LinkedIn post from me quite soon when I thought that through. Success comes in over. Success comes in overalls. I know I just want to know which ones. That's my key. But I think the other key one that I bring down this idea was that key point about what do we need to do is connect. We need to be able to make sure we've got the relationships around the assets that we have around the things that are there. And we need to make sure we're really focused on the value that we're all trying to create. So thank you for that. And thank you all for being on the show. Today's show was produced by Joe Donaghy of Cambridge TV and supported by our media partner, Business Weekly. The Cambridge Tech Podcast is available on all major podcast platforms and on cambridgetechpodcast.com. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please give it a five-star review. It'll really help others discover the show.
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