WMG head calls for single innovation body
LEADING industrial figure Lord Kumar Bhattacharyya told the House of Lords yesterday that a new generation of local leadership was required to spark economic renewal in regions like the West Midlands – and proposed the creation of an ‘Innovation Bank’ to kick start enterprise.
Speaking a day after Birmingham MP and junior government minister Sion Simon stood down to campaign for the city to have an elected mayor, Lord Bhattacharya, who heads up the Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG) in Coventry, said: “In an economy as regionalised as ours we need to give power to make decisions at the local level. We need leaders with a real understanding of what is going on in the wider world.”
And, hinting he supported the notion of ‘metro mayors’ who would hold sway over several adjoining local authorities rather than a single city, he said leaders needed the power to deliver national aims in a local way.
“We need to both prioritise our funding and then regionalise the funding structure,” he said.
Lord Bhattacharya, who established WMG 30 years ago as a centre of education and research and development in manufacturing, was speaking in a debate on enterprise and innovation.
He told the Lords that succesive governments had talked up innovation but failed to deliver beyond the rhetoric.The current government was to thank for making British pure research world class, he said, but: “We often don’t take advantage of the commercial opportunties our research gives us.”
“There have been many attempts to bridge that gap,” he said, “but unfortunately the good ideas were not backed up with money and so the fruit withered on the vine.”
There had been no shortage of policy papers on innovation, he said, but the problem was that innovation simply became a buzzword.
The right response should be to extend the success enjoyed by narrow sectors like aerospace and life sciences into new business by integrating government innovation policy with the world of work.
Lord Bhattacharyya called for the creation of a single agency – an ‘innovation bank’ – to encompass the funding of R&D, startups and research – with a simple and quick process behind it.
“Our problem isn’t that we don’t spend enough money – it is that we don’t use that money with a real purpose, with objectives integrated across government for economic impact.”
He proposed that the ‘innovation bank’ would take over the Enterprise Capital Funds, the Higher Education Innovation Fund and the regional venture capital funds.
