With a new government at Westminster focused on economic growth, devolution, and local empowerment, a fresh report from the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) highlights the critical role universities can play in these areas.
The report, Stronger Together: Challenges of Devolved Regional Economic Development (HEPI Report 178), written by Alistair Lomax, explores how universities and university groupings can collaborate to drive regional economic development.
The report emphasises the importance of collective university action and collaboration with regional partnerships, businesses, and local governments. These collaborations are seen as pivotal to the UK’s science and technology agenda, driving innovation and investment in regional economies. It draws attention to examples from England, as well as international models, that offer valuable insights into how universities can integrate more deeply into regional economic strategies.
The report also highlights how universities have already formed productive alliances with regional bodies, not through government strategy, but through a shared belief in the power of partnership.
Professor Dame Karen Holford, Vice-Chancellor and CEO, Cranfield University, which is the host institution for the Arc Universities group, and Chair of Midlands Innovation, said:
UK universities play a critical role in regional economic growth acting as magnets for investment and innovation. When we join forces and work together around our areas of expertise in technology, research, and skills we can speak with one voice and forge strong regional alliances with business and local authorities. With the arrival of a new Government, this report is timely and valuable – universities need to be ready to collaborate and contribute to the opportunities that any further regional devolution will bring.
In his Foreword to the Report, Professor Alistair Fitt, Vice-Chancellor of Oxford Brookes University and Chair of the Arc Universities Group, writes:
Collaborating is a key part of what universities do. Universities approach regional collaboration in ways that are consistent with their independent nature: largely self-determined, self-funded, self-organised and self-governed. It is perhaps inevitable that good working arrangements and alliances have formed between university groupings, and others. It is they who will provide the skills base of the future and play a major role with industry in innovation, in stimulating sustainable economic growth and in tackling net zero challenges.
The influence of universities was dramatically underscored during a recent UK conference on industrial strategy, where attendees identified universities as the single most enduring scientific superpower in the country, towering above others in importance.
Read the report here.
For further information, contact Alistair Lomax- [email protected].
