Northern Powerhouse ‘must not try to emulate London’
CITIES in the Northern Powerhouse must “define their own destiny” rather than trying to emulate London in order to stand the best chance of attracting investment and jobs.
That’s according to research released by Nesta, Accenture and Future Cities Catapult.
CITIE: The Northern Powerhouse Analysis is the latest in a series of reports designed to help policymakers in cities create the best environment for innovative businesses to thrive.
According to the report, cities in the North should focus on their unique offer – top universities, quality of life and good business networks – while also adopting best practice from other similarly sized cities with successful entrepreneurial scenes such as Oslo, Tel Aviv and Boston.
The report assesses the entrepreneurial ecosystem in six city and combined authority regions in the North of England: Greater Manchester Combined Authority Region, Hull City Region, Liverpool Combined Authority Region, North East Combined Authority Region (incorporating Newcastle and Sunderland), Sheffield City Region Combined Authority and West Yorkshire Combined Authority (incorporating Leeds and Bradford).
It identifies a range of strong measures already undertaken by city governments in the North – including Liverpool’s support for small businesses entering the local government supply chain and Leeds’s commitment to open data.
It also makes recommendations for how leaders in newly, or soon-to-be devolved metro governments can further boost innovation and attract entrepreneurs.
The research finds that greater collaboration between city regions and combined authorities could see a collective Northern Powerhouse region join the top tier of global destinations for tech business and entrepreneurism, competing with the capital.
When performance across all assessed city regions were combined, the results rival top performers in the previous 2015 CITIE global analysis, alongside cities like San Francisco, Berlin and London.
Eddie Copeland, director of government innovation at Nesta, said: “Taken as a region, the cities that make up the Northern Powerhouse represent a large and growing economy worth £289 billion in gross value added (GVA).
“This report serves as a timely resource to help inform their thinking. While the specific recommendations are directed to individual city regions, the report highlights the benefits that greater collaboration could bring in expanding the level of innovation, investment and sharing of best practice.”
Scott Cain, chief business officer at Future Cities Catapult, said: “From our work with cities around the world, we know real results need knowledge sharing, partnerships and the creation of ecosystems where business and people thrive.The framework in the CITIE project provides a springboard from which cities can do just that. The powerful visualisations of urban data it offers can help unlock the information cities already collect and turn it in to useful tools to inform better decision making at scale. We hope that this new analysis of northern cities will guide city administrations towards fruitful conversations about their strengths and relative weaknesses as they experience increased devolution, allowing them to explore new opportunities for innovation.”
