On 9 October, Metro Dynamics worked with partners the Growth and Reform Network and the Future Governance Forum to bring together leaders from government, industry, investment, universities and the UK’s innovation ecosystem for the Innovation Nation Summit in Manchester – focused on one central question: how can the UK turn its extraordinary capacity for invention into growth and opportunity across the country?

Read the full conference paper.

The UK has no shortage of talent, ideas or innovation assets. The challenge is converting them into economic value at greater scale, and ensuring that value translates into stronger businesses, better jobs and higher living standards in places across the country.

That was the starting point for the Innovation Nation Summit, held at Circle Square in Manchester on Friday 9 October.

Convened by the Growth and Reform Network and former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the Summit was developed and delivered by teams from Metro Dynamics, the Growth and Reform Network, the Future Governance Forum and Social, with Bruntwood SciTech hosting the event. It brought together leaders from business, investment, science and technology, universities, national and regional government and innovation organisations from across the UK.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham used the Summit to set a national ambition for the UK to become the world’s leading innovation nation. He also announced that Local Innovation Partnership funding will be devolved to established mayors from 2028, a £1 billion four-year commitment with UKRI to back clusters with the potential to become world-leading, and a stronger focus on collaboration between the UK’s regional clusters.

But becoming an Innovation Nation requires more than individual funding announcements or programmes.

The conference paper prepared ahead of the Summit argues that Britain needs to get better at converting its remarkable scientific, technological and entrepreneurial strengths into productive capacity throughout the economy. It identifies five shifts that, taken together, can underpin an innovation-led reindustrialisation of the UK:

DIFFUSION: from innovation at the frontier to innovation throughout the economy. Innovation cannot belong only to laboratories, spin-outs or a small number of high-growth firms. The productivity prize comes from much wider adoption: established businesses embracing new technology, AI and new processes; public services becoming intelligent customers; and innovation spreading through supply chains and sectors. The goal should be an economy in which many more organisations are innovating, much more of the time.

CLUSTERS: from isolated strengths to globally significant ecosystems. The UK has exceptional capabilities distributed across the country. We need to be braver about identifying and backing the places and clusters where the UK can genuinely lead internationally, while connecting complementary strengths across regional boundaries. Scale does not always mean concentrating everything in one place: partnerships such as Cambridge x Manchester demonstrate the potential to complete, not compete, creating propositions that are greater than the sum of their parts.

SCALE: from starting innovative companies to growing and retaining them. Creating more companies is not enough if the value they create is ultimately realised elsewhere. Firms need the growth capital, customers, commercial and management capability, talent and access to international markets that allow them to scale from the UK. That means looking beyond the traditional innovation funnel and asking whether promising businesses are actually progressing towards customers, investment and sustainable growth.

EXECUTION: from strategies and programmes to outcomes. The UK does not lack strategies, institutions or innovation assets. The next challenge is execution: the leadership, commercial capability, procurement, partnerships and institutional architecture needed to turn those assets into results. We need to become much more interested in innovation throughput – whether ideas and businesses are moving through the system towards customers, investment, productivity and wider economic value – rather than simply counting money allocated, programmes launched or buildings opened.

DYNAMISM: from protecting the status quo to backing the future. Ultimately innovation is about people. Dynamic economies allow new ideas, new businesses and new leaders to break through. The UK needs to make much fuller use of the diversity of talent already here, remain open to talented people from around the world, and create institutions and markets that are willing to embrace disruption rather than protect incumbency. An Innovation Nation must continually renew itself.

Together, these shifts point towards a broader conception of innovation policy. The objective cannot simply be to create more research, more start-ups or even more unicorns. It should be to increase the productive capacity of the whole economy – creating stronger businesses, better jobs, more resilient places and greater opportunity.

As Ben Lucas, Founding Director of Metro Dynamics and Executive Chair of the Growth and Reform Network, put it in opening the Summit, the opportunity is to turn the UK’s “abundance of talent and invention” into an “abundance of growth and opportunity” for people and businesses in every region.

That requires national and local action together. National government has crucial roles in capital markets, regulation, trade, procurement and long-term research investment. But innovation happens in real economies and real places. Devolution creates an opportunity for regional leaders to shape innovation around their distinctive business bases, clusters and capabilities, while connecting those strengths into a genuinely national system.

You can read the full conference paper here.

The Summit was intended as the beginning of that conversation, not its conclusion. A fuller post-Summit report, drawing together the contributions and discussion from the day, is now being prepared. We will update this page with the report when it is published.

For any queries contact Fiona Tuck.