The £3 billion industry hiding inside your phone, your car, and the NHS

The sensor that fires your car's airbag in a fraction of a second. The microscopic channels that move a single drop of blood across a diagnostic test. The tiny structure that tells your smartphone which way is up. These are microsystems: a family of technologies that the UK is quietly world-class at building, and that almost no one outside the laboratory could name. 

On 17 June, at the Royal Society in London, a new report "The Invisible Frontier: Towards a UK Microsystems Strategy" was launched to put a number, for the first time, on a sector that has powered British technology for decades while going almost entirely unrecognised. The figure is striking: £3.1 billion in annual economic output, more than 15,000 jobs, and a workforce that is 26 per cent more productive than the national average. Yet the report's central warning is sharper still, this is a capability built patiently over decades that, if allowed to erode, would be far harder to rebuild than to lose.

The launch was led by Dr Gerard Cummins, Associate Professor in the School of Engineering at University of Birmingham and Principal Investigator of the EPSRC-funded UK Microsystems Network, before an audience drawn from across the research and policy landscape, including representatives from EPSRC, DSIT, TechUK, and learned bodies such as the Academy of Medical Sciences. Their presence signalled what the report argues explicitly: that the technologies converging on this tiny layer, from AI infrastructure and clean energy to defence and the future of the NHS, make the case for a national microsystems strategy and asks questions of where the UK chooses to compete over the next twenty years.