Innovation

Through targetted and scalable innovation funds complementing much larger scale national and private investment, Liverpool City Region is backing innovators with great ideas and world-class products – turning them into high-growth businesses that offer quality jobs and add to UK plc’s bottom line.

To reach its target, the UK needs a small number of places to step up and significantly out-perform the average.

We are that place. We are coordinated, committed, energised, and have an ambition that can directly contribute to driving UK productivity and delivering the Government’s levelling up, Global Britain and scientific superpower agendas.

And we can achieve this through a long-term programme of high-impact R&D projects created in partnership with the Government, industry, and research institutions.

We are THE PLACE that can demonstrate the assets, commitment, expertise, and the ecosystem. We can demonstrate sustained world-leading innovation – because we’ve been doing it for more than a century and we’re still doing it.

Now it’s time for both the Government and industry to co-invest in our vision and help us invent the future. Let’s make a better world…because it makes business sense.

The UK has a vision – one that’s shared by the Liverpool City Region – to be a science superpower driven by innovation.

The UK’s ambition is for Research and Development to account for 2.4% of UK GDP by 2027 but our ambition goes much further. We have a goal for R&D spending to reach 5% of GVA by 2030 – nearly double the UK target.

And our ambition is not a pipe dream: it’s borne out of a £2bn pipeline of projects and a further £725m of projects already underway that are mainly rooted in Liverpool City Region’s distinctive, world-leading strengths in infection control and health/life sciences, materials chemistry, AI solutions, and net-zero innovation.

It’s founded on one of the most highly developed approaches to innovation in the UK – spread across the city region and clustered around established internationally significant science and industrial assets, plus new, emerging innovation capabilities.

Through the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine led iiCON programme, the University of Liverpool’s Materials Innovation Factory, and the Hartree National Centre for Digital Innovation, we have the global assets to shape the future.

Add to that, major investment potential, track record, close partnership, an entrepreneurial approach, and a business ecosystem tailored to innovation, we can deliver results for UK plc – as well as the Liverpool City Region.

And it’s driven by political leadership that knows actions speak louder than words.

The LCR’s high level Innovation Board was established in 2014, making it the first dedicated sub-regional body of its kind in the UK.

Its overarching purpose is to provide strategic leadership for the LCR innovation agenda, and drive the translation of knowledge and ideas, raise productivity, maximise investment, inspire and enhance skills, attract/retain talent, and accelerate growth and international competitiveness across all sectors of the LCR economy. Specifically, the Board’s explicit primary objective is to realise the LCR headline ambition of securing annual R&D investment equal to 5% of GVA by 2030.

There is an explicit emphasis on maximising the LCR’s demonstrable, distinctive assets, capabilities and competitive strengths, and its focus is on the science, technology, research & development, and commercialisation aspects of the innovation spectrum.

The Board is facilitated by the Combined Authority, convenes senior representatives from industry, LCR HEIs and other anchor institutions, our two leading science campuses, plus UKRI bodies Innovate UK, EPSRC, and STFC, and chaired by Dr. Jon Hague – Unilever’s Vice President Science & Technology for Homecare – reflecting the Board’s primary focus on commercialisation.