How does the North win? What comes next..

Thank you!

We ran an experimental event last week on the subject of “How Does North England Win”.

It was a diverse group of people, made up of people and organisations that we have worked and collaborated with over the past ten years, we had many perspectives and were hosted at the fantastic new offices of Arup in Wellington Place in Leeds.

In short, the experiment worked - people came, high quality conversations were had, optimism and positivity flowed, action was agreed and energy generated.

Most importantly we agreed to do How Does North England Win (With Data) Part II in Manchester, sometime in June 24.

It was not designed to be a fully formed conference or workshop, more a way for us to think out loud about a subject. We convened fellow travelers with a passion for North England, impatient with the status quo but with an optimistic outlook.

The talks, slides and provocations are all at the event web page here.

Because we are non-aligned and independent, we are able to convene across many domains and geographies and perhaps most importantly, because we have a track record of high quality events and work people came, joined in and openly contributed - the most common comment I had at the event was - “this is such an amazing group of people - you’ve done a fantastic job getting them together”

It is important to think about and understand our perspective - we are an independent, self funded, non-profit company based in Leeds doing work across the UK to Innovate with Data. We want North England to reach its potential and when we look at the data we see no reason we can’t match our comparator places across Northern Europe - but we need to want to do it and commit equivalent investment and ambition that places such as Scotland / Ireland / The Netherlands / Poland/ East Germany have made over the past 30 years.

We have decided over the past few years to focus on the economy in its broadest sense, setting ourselves the question: how do we win?

Well, in the session we created amazingly ambitious content and possible actions in our open collaboration document, which we will develop further across our activities.

So what do we think? In essence, in my view the outputs of the session fell into three parts:

Hard Power

A demand that devolution of ‘hard power’ happens quicker and that we collaborate wildly across North England, where we know we can make a difference, but we let each other get on and win where they can. Powers relating, for example to - Transport, Inward Investment, Energy, Skills, Innovation Funding should be devolved ASAP with clear expectation of collaboration across North England - Tom Riordon gave the example of Rail North as a success - we should learn and use that example.

Data is fundamental to this ambition and should be considered as infrastructure. The data should be easily available about what matters and also to let us review and make in-flight adaptations to our work and provide information at any point in time.

We know what to do - collating an “Evidence Base” is not required, we need real-time data, let's get on with doing whats required and the data can catch up.

Soft Power

A demand that Devolution of soft power is just as important: We need to set a clear expectation that National Institutions must exist effectively in North England and that means that power (funding and decision makers ) must exist here too.

Taking control using our soft power: North England’s assets of sport, culture, music, history, landscape and its dynamic private sector businesses and leaders (I could go on and on 🙂) give us so many competitive advantages, but we fail to reach our economic potential - we need to recognise / measure and demand that our soft power is amplified to make sure that that we win.

Losing

It was interesting to hear what people didn’t want to see more of or spend time doing or working on. There were many examples given where the impact of a potential intervention or investment by the public sector was diluted and the opportunity for the private sector to lean-in and leverage its time, investment and know-how was lost.

The reasons given for that were very broad but in simple terms it was:

• “power (soft & hard) needs to reside closer to the places it was being wielded”
• “ on too many occasions Central Government hadn’t kept its promises” and
• not all places need the same things at the same time and New National Institutions fit for a devolved 21st Century could and should be created across North England.

In simple terms, we should not repeat the mistakes and failures for North England of the recent past and we should also call out failures of our own and be honest with each other when we don't quite make it work.

I can only comment effectively in the domain of Data & Tech, but from the top of my head we can think about Tech City & Tech North, ODI HQ, ODI Nodes, Digital Catapult Centres (Bradford & Sunderland), Turing Institute, Ada Lovelace Institute, Office of AI, ARIA etc - all centralised, all with a London HQ address, which have failed or not made an impact in North England, because they were or are arguably run for the benefit of the organisation itself not North England.

What to do next

A number of people suggested that we create more Open Innovations across North England, whilst this of course is flattering - we are a product of Leeds and the people who founded the organisation, I have written about this before at this blog - in 2018.

Federated across the cities of the North with funding for each city, each independently deciding what to do, many parts loosely joined, with aligned interest and shared assets.

This point is perhaps the most important in my opinion on how to successfully stimulate and deliver innovation activity. So we are going to take our own advice and do the next smallest step to make progress, collaborate wildly and help where we can.

Hopefully everyone who came will want to stay involved and we will see you all in Manchester in June.

Very Best

Paul