Has the
Dods Innovation Panelbeen useful to you as an MP?
At a time when we are embarked on the really important project of rebalancing the British economy and putting in place a framework to support manufacturing and regional economic growth, the chance to meet regularly with the leaders of regional manufacturing businesses is invaluable.
I have come to Parliament from a 15-year career starting small businesses, technology businesses, in Cambridge and the Eastern region. The Panel gives me the chance to sit down with the chemical industry, aerospace, automotive leaders and share perspectives on what needs to be common for a modern industrial strategy, and what needs to be very sector specific.
How does your role as the Government’s life sciences adviser inform your constituency work?
I come here with an industry perspective having worked in the life sciences, which I am defining in my work as the Government’s life sciences adviser as the appliance of the science of life, bioscience, in food, medicine and energy, three huge markets. This is directly relevant to my constituency which is something of a rural backwater, but is halfway between Cambridge and Norwich.
Norwich Research Park is Europe’s premier life science research cluster, with more than 2,500 research scientists working in agri, food, nutrition science, tech, energy and bioscience. Part of my work locally and on behalf of Government has been with the manufacturing aspects, which we are losing the value of. My constituency has got old agricultural engineering firms that in the post war period made tractors, harvesters and trailers.
In East Anglia one of the problems is that we have great science in the parks but when we come to put inventions into boxes, to go to mass scale manufacturing, that is the point at which many of the companies I used to form would sell out and go to Germany or America because they had that manufacturing capacity. One of the things we can do and are beginning to do much better is capture the value through advanced smart engineering.
How do we use the Government to support innovation in Britain?
We have become one of the worst markets for the adoption of innovation. There is a company in my constituency called Water Mist - they are on the A11 corridor, a traditional metal-bashing corridor, now part of the Lotus advanced engineering cluster. Water Mist makes world-class, award-winning, very high-end fire control equipment for use in prisons. That is advanced manufacturing. One thing we could be doing better to help them is procurement in Government and that is one of the great challenges. The UK is a world-leader in science but how do you get that down the chain into manufacturing?
How can the NHS support British innovation in pharmaceuticals?
Our reformed NHS must be much more conducive to early adoption of innovation. The pharmaceutical industry has to reinvent itself to the reality that it can’t afford to spend 20 years and half a billion developing a drug that claims to work on everybody that we cannot afford to buy. The genomics increasingly tells us that we don’t want one drug for everybody; we need different drugs for different patient groups. The NHS is the biggest powerhouse of personalised and targeted medicine, but our procurement system in healthcare is very obstructive of the adoption of innovation. The Government is rightly targeting that.
How important is clustering in driving innovation?
The cluster question is absolutely key. We know that the cluster effect is crucial in terms of inward investment and competitive advantage. For all the theories about clusters, and there are lots, I like this one: the best definition of a cluster is a low-risk place for people to do high-risk things. The reason Cambridge is a biomedical cluster in the way that Norwich isn’t yet is that wherever you are in the world, to move your family to Cambridge and put them into schools there, and get a house there is not a high-risk decision, because if the first company you join does not work, there are hundreds of others. That is why the Scottish Central Belt, despite brilliant science, isn’t yet a global cluster of crucial mass, because moving there is still a high-risk decision.
We ought to think about the human aspect of clustering and that is where fast transport links make a big difference, and why HS2 and a high-speed rail network over the next 50 or 100 years is crucial. If you can cut the journey time from London to Scotland and make it easier for people to fly to regional airports you begin to spread that ‘cluster effect’.
Does manufacturing have an image problem?
If you take Cambridge, the question we should be asking is given that Kings Lynn, Norwich, Ipswich and Yarmouth are traditional centres of engineering – marine engineering, fuel, and haulage – why aren’t we drawing on those skills? The clever start-up out of Cambridge is not finding those skills on its doorstep when it goes to production.
Part of what the Government’s industrial strategy is all about it is partly changing the way people think and work and changing the culture so that we celebrate smart manufacturing. That word implies to people blue overalls, greasy hands and somebody with a HND or a technical qualification. The truth is our engineers are world-class and very high technology specialists, and we need to raise the way we think about and promote manufacturing.
How does aspiration affect the choices young people make?
There is an awful lot to do to really change the culture so that teachers in British schools are genuinely preparing young people, and training older workers, to seize these opportunities. We still have a culture in this country that gives the impression that what you really should aspire to is media, law celebrity, high finance, glamorous professions and maybe ‘get rich quick’ entrepreneurship. We are not very good at celebrating all the benefits that come from having a skill and being part of a long-term supply chain you can be proud of.
What action is being taken to change that culture in schools?
Let’s take Norfolk as an example. We have this extraordinary opportunity to lead the next global industrial revolution in bioscience – food, medicine and energy. But this is a county that is third from the bottom of the education league tables, with a traditional educational culture of acceptance of mediocrity and at times failure.
Norfolk doesn’t have a developed enough sense of itself as a hub of science and technology, and as a consequence struggles to inspire and then equip and train the next generation to be ready to seize these opportunities. There is some really good stuff going on. The academy programme is dramatically raising the standards and culture of education in Norfolk. We are launching 40,000 new apprenticeships in rural technology and rural agri-tech.
If we are really serious about unlocking innovation and making Britain a genuinely rebalanced economy, then the skills bit is the most important and the hardest bit of all.