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Northern Powerhouse Analysis Report Calls for Collaboration

CITIE consortium report shows the potential for innovation in the Northern Powerhouse.

The City Initiatives for Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CITIE) consortium earlier this week published its Northern Powerhouse Analysis report, as part of the latest series of its regional reports.

CITIE, formed of a partnership between Nesta, Accenture, and Future Cities Catapult, explores the progress of the various city regions of the Northern powerhouse, looking at successes and areas for improvement.

The report also makes a series of policy recommendations to enable innovation and entrepreneurship in the Northern Powerhouse, drawing on examples of global best practice as inspiration.

The key findings are:

  • Collaboration between six city regions in North of England could create location as attractive to tech business and entrepreneurs as San Francisco or Berlin.
  • Northern city regions should work at keeping hold of graduate talent, forging closer links with start-ups and planning for the arrival of driverless cars.
  • Northern city regions need to take their own strengths - top universities, quality of life and good business networks - and build on those, rather than trying to emulate London.

Eddie Copland, Director of Government Innovation at Nesta, stated that the region represents “a large and growing economy worth £289 billion in gross value added (GVA)” and encourages a collaborative effort to create a single digital economy for the greater Northern Powerhouse.

Main traits of the most successful Northern Powerhouse city regions are identified as:

  1. A clear mandate to lead on innovation.
    The critical mass of combined authorities is generating increased leadership capacity and acumen towards innovation and entrepreneurship.
  2. A willingness to collaborate.
    Leading city regions engage with entrepreneurs, universities, and their regional and global peers, to share, learn, and jointly develop solutions.
  3. They actively curate the marketplace.
    Providing start-ups and innovators with the platform, workspace, data, and financial support to develop commercially valuable products and services.

Greater Manchester performed particularly well in this report. Among other factors, CITIE attribute this to the long history of cooperation between its councils through the Greater Manchester Combined Authority. This cooperation will continue with the upcoming launch of a regional data sharing and interoperability strategy, GM-Connect.

The GM-connect platform will give public agencies access to each other’s data, and allows individuals to manage their own publicly available information through a citizen-facing portal. Manchester will be the third stop for techUK’s Big Data roadshow in October.

Other examples of strong measures already undertaken include Liverpool’s support for small businesses entering the local government supply chain and Leeds’s commitment to open data.

Policy recommendations from the report:

  1. Undertake collective analysis of emerging business models.
  2. Conduct a regulatory review to harmonise across boundaries.
  3. Increase international exposure of the Northern Powerhouse.
  4. Expand international transport linkages to enable global business connections.
  5. Design a Northern Powerhouse challenge prize series.
  6. Strengthen links between the city and entrepreneurs.
  7. Establish career pathways to encourage graduates to stay.
  8. Equip young people with digital skills and cultivate a culture of entrepreneurialism.
  9. Support venture capital trade missions to connect startups.
  10. Establish city-wide Internet of Things platforms to stimulate digital infrastructure innovation.
  11. Increase cycling with bike-sharing and citizen engagement.
  12. Formalise CDO and/or CIO roles in combined authorities.
  13. Develop digital strategies for city regions.
  14. Use digital technologies to engage citizens in decision making and problem solving.
  15. Establish offices of data analytics.
  16. Make all city procurement contracts ‘open by default’.

 

Channel website: http://www.techuk.org/

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