Source · Select Committees · Science, Innovation and Technology Committee
Recommendation 3
3
Accepted
The Government should establish a national framework for cluster development that embeds regional Key Performance...
Recommendation
The Government should establish a national framework for cluster development that embeds regional Key Performance Indicators and tracks cluster lifecycles. As part of this, it should develop regional economic profiles that line up clusters with key sources of economic activity, such as original equipment manufacturers, major education and health facilities, government and defence facilities, and their supply chains, with an analysis of opportunities for supporting innovation and diffusion. As part of this framework the Government should define its role in supporting the development of regional clusters, versus that of the private sector. (Recommendation, Paragraph 13)
Government Response Summary
The government agrees with the recommendation and states it is already acting on it by supporting university collaborations, such as the Cambridge-Manchester partnership with £4.8 million, and exploring further partnerships in regions like the Northern Growth Corridor to drive regional growth and spin-out development.
Government Response
Accepted
HM Government
Accepted
The government agrees with this recommendation and is already acting on it. We agree that collaboration between universities in the Greater South East and institutions across the UK can support spin-outs to scale and drive regional growth. We also agree with the Committee that the Cambridge-Manchester partnership demonstrates how this can work in practice. Through Research England, £4.8 million is being provided over three years to support this partnership. The university-led collaboration is testing new approaches to place-to-place innovation working, sharing commercialisation expertise and supporting start-ups and scale-ups to attract investment and create high- value jobs. DSIT and UKRI will continue to work closely with this partnership, gathering learnings that could be used to build other cross-regional partnerships. UKRI funding programmes provide routes for universities to identify and develop similar collaborative opportunities. Funding streams such as the Research England Development (RED) and Connecting Capability Fund (CCF) support joint commercialisation capability, while sector-led networks such as TenU and SETSquared help spread effective commercialisation practice across institutions. While support is available, we do not seek to direct specific institution partnerships from the centre. Instead, UKRI works to ensure that funding frameworks and programmes create the environment for universities across the UK to build partnerships to support spin-out growth and wider innovation-led development. For example, the Universities of Oxford and Liverpool have recently launched their own partnership because of the complementarities they identified between their innovation capabilities and relevant local authorities’ collaborative ambitions. Over the next year we will particularly focus on how further partnerships could be used to harness the strengths of other universities in the Northern Growth Corridor. Where these can help deliver our Northern Growth Strategy, we will work with universities to support their development.