World-leading clusters won’t make for an innovation nation without better connectivity
Why research and innovation policy needs closer alignment with transport and infrastructure policy
Andy Burnham wants a “globally significant cluster in every region and nation” and has committed £1bn of UKRI funding to build them.
It’s a good headline – but where should that investment go? Which technologies and places have the greatest potential? And should funding be concentrated in existing centres of excellence or spread more evenly across the country?
These are legitimate questions. But they risk overlooking a more fundamental one: how well are our research strengths connected, and how will people in one cluster reach another?
The UK has no shortage of world-class research, as the Prime Minister noted at the recent Innovation Nation summit:
“We’ve got the assets, we’ve got the talent, we’ve got the ideas and the ambition, but here’s the crux of it… we are not making the most of them yet.”
The challenge is that the country’s research assets too often operate as individual nodes rather than as an integrated national system. In his recent speech the Prime Minister held up three partnerships between clusters as models: Greater Manchester with Cambridge, Liverpool with Oxford, and Imperial with Warwick. But the first two pairings sit more than three hours apart by train, with a change in London or Birmingham, while Imperial and Warwick are just over an hour apart on a direct line from Euston.
If we want a genuinely national research and innovation system that supports growth, we need to recognise the importance of physical connectivity. Connectivity needs to be viewed as innovation infrastructure that allows researchers, entrepreneurs, investors and skilled workers to move easily between places.
The persistence of proximity
Researchers can of course collaborate online. Video conferencing is ubiquitous, data can be shared instantly, and teams increasingly work across institutions and countries without needing to meet physically. Yet the evidence suggests that physical proximity remains critically important, particularly for the most productive forms of research and innovation collaboration.
The pandemic provided a large-scale natural experiment. Existing collaborations generally survived the shift to remote working – but forming new relationships proved much harder. Research found that networks became more siloed and that opportunities for new connections declined. Other studies point the same way. When high speed rail connects new Chinese city pairs, co-patenting between them rose. Similarly, scientific collaboration in the USA rose by 30 to 50 per cent when low-cost airlines linked two city pairs.
This matters because much of what drives innovation cannot easily be codified or transferred digitally. The tacit knowledge exchanged through repeated interaction, informal conversations, laboratory visits and shared problem-solving, plus the serendipitous opportunities that arise from all these points of contact, remain central to how discoveries are made and translated into practical applications.
Escaping a sterile debate
Much of the UK's recent research policy discussion has been trapped in a binary argument between concentrating investment in the strongest institutions and regions and distributing it more widely.
The Prime Minister has now chosen a side, stating the ambition for a globally significant cluster in every region and nation. But that creates a new risk. Clusters judged only on their own growth and local outcomes may chase the same sectors and compete for the same talent. A connectivity lens suggests instead that a harder challenge is enabling those clusters to work together.
Research excellence increasingly emerges through networks that combine complementary capabilities across institutions and sectors. The critical question is therefore whether researchers, businesses and investors can access those capabilities easily enough to create value collectively. Investment decisions should be assessed not only for the excellence of individual institutions or facilities but also for their contribution to wider national capability.
The UK Government asks national research institutes to coordinate through the new National Research Organisations Group – but it asks regions to bid separately for the Local Innovation Partnerships Fund. We incentivise research institutes to integrate but places to compete.
The UK possesses an often-overlooked competitive advantage. Compared with many countries, our geography is relatively compact. Major research centres are located within a few hours of one another. In principle, this should make it easier to combine expertise, facilities and capital across different locations.
Yet reliability, frequency, network design and journey times often make collaboration more difficult than it should be. A researcher in Liverpool visiting colleagues in Leeds faces almost half a day of travel each way. Manchester to Southampton takes over four hours by rail, almost as long as a trip to Munich. Northern universities often find it easier to work with London institutions than with each other due to poor connectivity. The result is a national research system shaped as much by transport infrastructure as by research strategy.
Research and innovation policy needs closer alignment with transport and infrastructure policy. Decisions about rail links, major transport projects and regional connectivity are rarely considered through a research and innovation lens. Yet they can have profound effects on collaboration, knowledge exchange and economic growth. The Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Technology should be a formal consultee on decisions about rail transport, and transport appraisal should count research and innovation among its benefits.
Research funders should place greater emphasis on the connective tissue of the system. Investment in laboratories and facilities matters. But so do the networks, mobility schemes, coordination mechanisms and shared platforms that enable researchers and organisations to work together effectively. The £1bn UKRI cluster programme should include a network contribution test, asking each bid what capability it adds or connects to elsewhere in the UK.
Place-based funding should encourage complementary strengths and interdependence rather than promoting regional self-sufficiency. No region can excel in everything. The objective should be to ensure that distinctive strengths across the country connect into something greater than the sum of their parts. A portion of the Local Innovation Partnership Fund should be reserved for bids that link regions.
Beyond islands of excellence
The UK's research ecosystem is often described as world-leading. In many areas, that is undoubtedly true. But excellence alone is not enough. If research creates the knowledge, connectivity is what allows that knowledge to move, combine and generate impact.
As the government seeks to harness research and innovation as a driver of economic growth, resilience and international competitiveness, attention must shift from individual institutions towards the relationships between them.
The Prime Minister recognised this when he set out his ambition for “more collaboration between clusters in a way Britain has never managed before.” If regional clusters are to become more than the sum of their parts, the links between them matter as much as the assets within them.
The UK's future advantage may not come from creating ever-stronger regional centres of excellence. It might instead be based on connecting the strengths we already possess more effectively. This requires a renewed focus on the physical and institutional connections that allow clusters to function as a coherent national ecosystem. Connectivity should be seen not as an adjunct to research and innovation policy, but as one of its foundations.
The challenge now is to ensure that cluster policy is matched by connectivity policy. The greater prize lies in connecting complementary strengths across the country so that the UK functions as an integrated innovation system rather than a collection of separate local successes. In a networked economy, connection may be the most important capability of all.
Sarah Chaytor is Director of Research Policy and Strategy and Joint Chief of Staff at University College London. Geraint Rees is Vice Provost for Research, Innovation and Global Engagement at University College London.