How to make the UK a world leader in key areas by 2020
Friday, 09 April 2010
Ian Brinkley
Category: Knowledge Economy
Today we launch a new paper which sets out a detailed vision of how to make the UK a world leader in key areas by 2020: Innovation, Creativity and Entrepreneurship. In a well attended event kindly held at the headquarters of the IPA, one of the sponsors of our knowledge economy programme, Will Hutton and I talked about the three key aims of the paper.
Firstly, to set out our thinking on what a sustainable UK knowledge economy in 2020 would look like then outline exactly what needs to be done to achieve this.
Secondly, to shift the public debate to focus on where the jobs need to come from.
Thirdly, to provide a challenge to the new government – if they accept our analysis, will they set post-election priorities, practices and policy directions to support the main areas which will provide most of the new jobs?
For a decade we have over-relied on financial services, a property boom, consumer debt, and the public sector to drive growth and jobs. In the coming decade we must replace these with new sources of growth, jobs and innovation where Britain already has some comparative advantage and we have identified four:
- "manu services" (the integration of high value services with manufacturing);
- the low carbon economy;
- creative and cultural services;
- high-tech and business services.
Our presentation (please see related links) conveyed the evidence then set out our vision, outlining potential policy levers in two areas – low carbon and manu-services. Will Hutton, Executive Vice Chair of The Work Foundation and I then answered questions from the invited audience including:
Will Hutton, Executive Vice Chair of The Work Foundation and I then answered questions from the invited audience including:
- What was the role of social entrepreneurs?
- What would a "manu-service" company look like?
- How could the creative and cultural industries be encouraged to grow when most of the businesses in them didn’t want to grow?
- What would the shape of the future workforce look like – would we have more people in less secure forms of employment?
- What would be the policy levers within an ‘innovation eco-system’?
- How can we increase mobility and get markets to work more efficiently?
- What would we like to see happen as a result of the paper being published?
We did our best to answer them – to at least the partial satisfaction of those present. In answer to the last, we concluded that we would like the new government to commit to building a 2020 innovation eco-system – and that we needed help in thinking up a better description than the term, ‘innovation eco-system’.
The next stage is for us to start working up our proposals in more detail – and for that we welcome any comments you may have both on what is in the paper but also on anything missing that you feel should have been addressed.
