Alison Taylor, CEO:

• Accelerating investment is essential to keep Cambridge globally competitive
• Infrastructure and skills gaps threaten East of England growth ambitions
• Stronger UK collaboration needed to retain innovation and support spin‑outs

The emphasis this year across UKREiiF was on ‘pace’: urgency of action and the need to accelerate investment in ‘hot spots’ like Cambridge, to avoid being out-shone by innovation clusters in other parts of the world. 

The quote of the week for me on this point came from Lord Vallance, Minister of State for Science, Research and Innovation, who said through a wry smile: “It’s faster to do things in a dictatorship. That doesn’t mean it’s the way we want to go, but that’s the reality”, to which Shaun Grady, Chair of AstraZeneca UK, responded: “it’s an inside joke at AZ that democracies are hard to work with!”.

Focus was also on the UK becoming better at adopting its own innovations to ensure that spin-outs remain in the UK and aren’t lured away. Government procurement is seen as key to this, as is the role that big business can play in mentoring start-ups and contributing to anchoring and stabilising whole ecosystems. Julia Diez of Railpen, stressed that there are three limiting factors: capital, infrastructure and talent, and all are needed to support thriving ecosystems.

Talking about the ‘jewel in the crown’ that is Cambridge, Kristin-Anne Rutter of Cambridge University Health Partners asserted that “we need to get better at collaborating and telling the story of Cambridge”, while Paul Weston of Prologis said that it is the job of foreign direct investors like Prologis to get “their shoulder behind central government to accelerate progress” with developments like the new hospital at Cambridge Biomedical Campus. 

Transport and infrastructure are critical factors in growth planning and Mayor Paul Bristow talked about plans for the ‘Ely Gateway’, while Nikos Savvas of Eastern Education Group explained how his team is creating its own bus company, with help from the County Council, so that students can access more opportunities. He reminded us that the East of England accounts for 75% of all major infrastructure projects in the UK and ‘the skills list needed for this is vast’, yet apprenticeships are only open to young people who have Maths and English GCSEs, in which there is a 60% failure rate each year.

It is impossible to do UKREiiF justice – there is simply too much going on simultaneously to be able to participate in everything you might want to.  So, even with three of our team present, our focus remained on Cambridge and Peterborough and the conversations around the growth corridor.  A few key takeaways are:

• To retain the best talent in the UK, we must create places where people want to work, live, study, collaborate, socialise, relax – mixed use 
• In parallel we must invest in affordable housing, public infrastructure, transport, water, energy
• Uncertainty is impossible to plan around – we need certainty and clear decision making so that education and industry can plan effectively for the future
• We need solutions to challenges like congestion and transport NOW – stop theorising and get on with it!

Of course, the real highlight of UKREiiF is always how many more people than usual you see and get to spend time with in just 3 days.