The UK can no longer afford to ride on the coat tails of other countries innovation successes. It’s time we put the elbow grease in to building our own capability.
London’s growth in the last 20 years has been driven by very successfully applying other technologies like the internet, cloud, mobile, and blockchain to our services sectors. In that time, London has taken technologies largely developed in the US and applied them at scale.
Now, London is going from taker to maker – it has the opportunity to become an originator at the frontier of innovation, as well as continuing to receive innovation from other countries.
Frontier innovation is about going way out into the wild, unexplored land, the ‘frontier’ to engineer breakthroughs based on brand-new science. Technologies like AI, quantum or CRISPR can all be considered within the field/domain.
And as the world rushes to harness frontier innovation, ironically people are still the most important piece to the puzzle. It just so happens that the UK and London in particular sits atop a powder keg of talent, research, and bold ideas.
This talent is needed more than ever to develop never before seen ways of improving health, addressing the climate emergency, and solving more of our most pressing issues.
Life sciences, climate technologies, and artificial intelligence (AI) – are all hungry for it. But those graduates and entrepreneurs budding with incredible ideas need a helping hand. We must work to uplift the brilliant initiatives coming out of our best universities and research institutions, to nurture and grow them.
Programmes like the Frontier Innovation Fellowship delivered by Grow London for example, rounds up the most promising minds from across the UK in a bid to do exactly this. Ten individuals selected for their game changing ideas and given the framework they need to build the technology we desperately need.
The Royal Academy of Engineering also runs an extensive programme of grants and prizes for engineers at every career stage in the UK. It also runs a series of fellowships that support aspiring and current world-leading individuals who are delivering high-quality engineering research.
To add to its globally leading universities, London’s competitive advantages in frontier innovation also include its deep and diverse talent pool; access to global capital; a large market for innovation; and a culture of entrepreneurship.
Gatherings of the most forward-thinking minds in arenas like Grow Summit taking place in London this week, are also hugely influential on building the rails on which frontier innovation can run.
Grow Summit brings together our global innovation ecosystem every year for three high-impact events. The event is designed to unlock the business growth challenges faced by scaleups, fuel collaboration, and discuss the future impact of the emerging technologies that have potential to change the world.
London is already the leading city in Europe for life sciences and artificial intelligence with enormous potential to play a leading role in these areas globally. Now, London has the opportunity to take the many brilliant discoveries and inventions it births forward and develop them to effect positive, impactful development.
Janet Coyle is managing director of Grow London at London & Partners
