Centre for Sectoral Economic Performance hosts its third annual conference

CSEP hosted its flagship annual conference, convening senior leaders from government, industry, investment and academia to discuss the opportunities and challenges shaping the UK's future economy.

Earlier this week, CSEP hosted its latest annual conference at 170 Queen’s Gate on Imperial College London’s South Kensington Campus, to discuss a number of key issues in economic and business growth.

We were fortunate to have a significant number of fantastic, high-profile speakers from government and senior executives from industry with panels including:

• Delivering the Modern Industrial Strategy
• A Life Sciences Perspective on the Industrial Strategy
• Developing Competitive Advantage
• Delivering Growth Strategies

Throughout the day, a common theme was how confident and optimistic government and industry are about the UK's industrial and innovation prospects. The UK is home to many world-leading, constantly innovating UK-headquartered businesses that have been around for a hundred or several hundred years, like Johnson Matthey and Croda, both of whom were represented on the panel on developing competitive advantage. It also has rapidly growing, disruptive start-ups that are either headquartered or have a significant presence in the UK, largely due to its science capability, in tremendously exciting companies such as PhysicsX and Waymo. So we clearly have immense strengths that we can and should leverage, each of which by themselves are hugely appealing.

However, a common frustration that emerged was the ongoing challenges that many companies are still experiencing in key areas such as procurement and financing, including from government, PuFins, arm's-length bodies, and institutional investors. These are clear opportunities areas and relatively low-hanging fruit to enable a step-change in UK growth and productivity, and they must be addressed.

Nonetheless, as Dame Kate Bingham, Managing Partner at SV Health Investors and former Chair of the Covid-19 Vaccine Taskforce reminded us; when it needs to, the UK can act quickly, decisively, effectively, and do that better than the rest of the world, when it really wants to. As Dame Kate said: small countries like the UK can’t outspend our competitors, so we must out-execute.

On the government side, it was excellent to hear from Dame Clare Barclay, Chair of the Industrial Strategy Advisory Council about how the Council is working with government to monitor and evaluate the delivery of the Modern Industrial Strategy; from Tom Adeyoola, CEO of Innovate UK, on how the UK's public financing for innovation is being reformed to align with the government's priorities; from Noreen Winhall, Commercial Director at the Government Commercial Agency about how the government is using procurement as a tool to stimulate markets and be a first customer for innovative products; and from Dan Cole, Chief Translation Officer at the Advanced Research and Invention Agency, about how ARIA is approaching developing, commercialising and eventually domestically scaling big bets in frontier science such as neurotech.

We also heard from fantastic speakers such as Dan Mahoney, the UK Life Sciences Investment Envoy, Liz Rowsell, CTO at Johnson Matthey; Peter Jenkins, CEO at semiconductor metrology company Infinitesima (and former VP for Marketing at Europe’s most valuable company, ASML); Damian Kelly, CTO at Croda; David Lincoln, Digital Leader at ABB, Jacomo Corbo, CEO and Co-Founder at physical AI start-up PhysicsX; and Ben Loewenstein, Head of Government Affairs, UK and Europe at autonomous car company Waymo.

It was a fantastic day and we appreciate everyone who joined us for it. We’re looking forward to next year’s conference already.

If you’d like to see how we can work together, please get in touch via csepinfo@imperial.ac.uk, and sign up to our newsletter here.