Andrew Borland says innovation needs leadership, and Northern business leaders must champion innovation policy to turn research excellence into real growth.
Leadership bridges innovation and economic growth. Research excellence alone cannot prevent stagnation or unlock new industries. Strong leadership from private enterprise, entrepreneurs, and determined individuals is essential.
The UK is a global powerhouse in research. Approximately 17% of the Global Top 100 universities are British. We punch well above our weight. UK research universities, attract talent, money, and collaborators from around the globe., building world-class Innovation Districts.
However, our business and economy are becoming less innovative, productive, and successful. The number of UK businesses in the global top 2,000 investing in R&D has nearly halved. (Cambridge Innovation Report 2025). We are the world’s 11th largest manufacturer but are unlikely to catch up in leveraging value from technologies like batteries, semiconductor manufacturing, and photovoltaics.
How can we excel in the fundamental research that underpins so much of this and realise so little of the commercial opportunities that follow, from making it and supplying services with it in our region’s businesses?
The missing ingredient is leadership.
Politicians, policymakers, and even the public have conflated research & development with innovation and commercial success. That’s a problem because great research leadership is not the same as great business leadership or great government leadership. We need all three.
University research heavyweights excel in their industry, securing funding for world-class research and attracting the best and brightest young students and researchers from around the world. These should be the engines of commercial success, business growth, and economic prosperity, but like all engines, they need a drivetrain to transmit the energy of research excellence into regional economic traction.
Civic universities were founded by industrialists to serve local companies, communities, and the country. Today, they continue to excel in their industry, securing funding for world-class research and attracting the best and brightest young students and researchers from around the world.
Businesses need to help lead the innovation agenda, bringing together government, universities, and private enterprise to re-focus innovation, turning not just research, but new ideas into growing businesses with commercial offerings that people will pay for.
Regional business owners and leaders who generate wealth should become prominent clients and partners, receiving research, development, and technical support, advice, and bright talent from their universities, to help them unlock today’s challenges and opportunities.
That’s a start; the bigger challenge is a new long-term strategy for private-sector growth. A strategy not focused on technologies that are in vogue right now (renewables, AI, batteries, EVs, etc) but focuses on what might be next: synthetic biology, programmable materials, and quantum technologies (not just computers). This will be the stuff that is still in the lab and on the drawing board, but will also be big in 2045 and beyond. Value that is in the research pipeline today, that we must capture with local companies for tomorrow.
This isn’t about reforming innovation; it’s about rediscovering what the Victorians and founders of the civic universities of the north did so well.
Novel started to bring together business owners and leaders with their counterparts from universities and local government from across the Liverpool City Region. Not to provide a leadership programme, but an innovation programme for private sector leaders to create a new network and a generation of private sector leaders engaged with regional innovation R&D policy.
For more information on the Novel community: contact@itsnovel.org
