Breaking down barriers: Powering up investment and innovation to drive growth for LCR’s people and places
On Tuesday 21st April, the Liverpool City Region APPG held an important session in Westminster, focusing on how we can break down the barriers across Liverpool to power up investment and innovation and drive growth for LCR’s people and places.
Chaired by LCR APPG Officer, Lord Hunt of Wirral, the session featured a keynote speech from Alison McGovern MP, Minister for Local Government and Homelessness and MP for Birkenhead, alongside contributions from Chair of the Science, Innovation and Technology Select Committee, Dame Chi Onwurah.
The session focused on how we can go further to unlock investment and power up innovation in the context of the Mayoral 10 year plan for prosperity, regional innovation clusters, life sciences, advanced manufacturing and regeneration.
We were joined by a fantastic panel of industry experts including:
Professor Richard Black, Provost & Deputy Vice-Chancellor, University of Liverpool
Dr Rick Holland, Deputy Director of Place, Innovate UK
Emily Robson, Assistant Chief Executive Officer, Knowledge Quarter Liverpool
Massimo Noro, Business Development Director, UKRI-STFC
Professor Chris White, Chief Advisor, MTC
Our expert panel highlighted the need for increased capital spending on infrastructure to support and grow the LCR innovation and investment ecosystem. They agreed on the need for greater investment visibility, allowing businesses and innovators to unlock greater private investment, highlighting that this could be achieved through the LCR narrative of place. They also maintained the need to increase current R&D and facilities capacity to support businesses through their journey and scale up, helping to retain local talent and knowledge bases.
We were also joined by a number of Liverpool City Region MPs and Peers including:
Lord Birt
Lord Watts
Patrick Hurley MP
Key Messages from the session:
We’re making good progress regionally at being an investor incubator, but there needs to be greater access to private capital investment to help new spin-outs. Ultimately, investment is not currently of the scalable quality which can keep businesses in the Liverpool City Region and other areas after the spin out stage.
Across the Liverpool City Region, we’re good at birthing businesses, but we’re not good at keeping them alive. We have a university spin-out survival rate of 31% compared to 39% nationally - 97% of our businesses are also micro-businesses, so how can we use the innovation to keep them going?
We can struggle to attract further investment due to a lack of scale; we need to make investments in skills, business support and intra-city connectivity to improve this visibility.
We need to find ways of being able to measure the success of our innovation regionally, to ensure we can see what precisely what is working and what could be improved.
The UKRI-funded Local Innovation Partnerships Fund (LIPF) has been great for collaboration, coming back to the Ministers comments, the role of the state is to fund the capital gap and marshall private investment. Previous governments have tried to do this, but it could be ramped up.
Click below to read the session summary in full
