Smart thinking: how distinctive North Yorkshire can compete on a global scale

The York, North Yorkshire and East Riding Local Enterprise Partnership is holding a series of workshops with businesses and partners to determine the priorities that will sit at the heart of its forthcoming Local Industrial Strategy. The first, taking place in York next Monday and which is free to attend, will look at how the LEP region can transform to a ‘smart’ region.

In the first of a series of articles in partnership with TheBusinessDesk.com supporting the YNYER LEP’s good growth in distinctive places ambition, John Connolly, managing director of technology incubator C4DI, examines the transformative potential impact of smart technology.

People often ask me, what is smart technology and what difference can it make?

In simple terms, smart technology connects us to information and insight about things that haven’t previously been connected to the internet. Things like farming equipment for example. Bringing smart technology to farming saves time, delivers insight and helps organise activity across wide geographical areas.

Equipment can work on the land, unmanned, creating efficiencies that leave more time to attend to other areas business and open up opportunities for precision and scale.

So of course, when looking at making a region like North Yorkshire more globally competitive, using smart technology in agriculture makes sense. Yet, what makes smart technology so exciting is that it has the potential to be transformative socially as much as it does economically.

Many rural communities currently live at a digital access disadvantage. Without high speed broadband, people and communities miss out on so much, such as products and services that can be found online at much better rates. Dispersed communities can gain so much from smart technology when it comes to health and social care provision.

High speed internet, hand in hand with education and advice on how to use it, could be transformative for rural areas and could come forth from the investment in broadband speeds that are now coming in line with city speeds in towns like Northallerton.

In recent years, the reduction in the cost of smart tech has transformed the market. Health and agri-tech were previously served by big incumbent technology providers at great expense. These days smart tech is powered by cheap hardware, giving rise to a large number of small, specialist tech businesses.

Our business, at C4DI, is to create hubs where these small niche businesses can come together to provide for large businesses across a whole range of technology. A network of specialists with a single, simple and cost-effective offer. For example, we have partnered in a tech innovation hub in Northallerton.

Networks in tech not only give small businesses the opportunity to go knocking on the door of big customers, they also work as a hook to retain or attract large businesses into the area. The network eases procurement of supply chains.

Yet to make this effective at a regional scale, to attract major, global competitors to a specific regional supply chain, our region must follow the practice of specialism and ask, ‘what are we good at?’ We must identify what we have access to that no-one else does? In doing so, the region can offer global investors the opportunity to trial and test things they can’t do elsewhere and accelerate faster.

Arguably, assuming the digital infrastructure is in place, North Yorkshire will only unlock global competition in a smart world, when we embrace smart technology alongside our key assets – our natural infrastructure and a pipeline of talent.

Our region’s Local Industrial Strategy needs something more than just a smart agenda. It needs a smart agenda for communities to develop skills and social connectivity that do away with digital disadvantage once and for all. And it needs a smart agenda in areas that are specific and distinctive, focusing on our rural landscapes and giving us a global advantage, doing smart stuff around technological ideas that can be accelerated a lot quicker because of exactly where we are.

Do you agree? Get involved by registering for the event or by giving your view on the YNYER LEP website.