Building Winners: Strengthening the UK Innovation Ecosystem
This project addresses that gap by exploring the structural, institutional, and policy factors shaping the UK’s innovation ecosystem. Through interviews with impactful innovators and innovation support bodies, the research investigates real-world experiences of knowledge exchange, IP management, commercialisation pathways, and government support to develop actionable policy proposals that could build winners, enhancing innovation outcomes across sectors and regions.
Innovation is a key driver of economic growth, productivity, and competitiveness. In the UK, its effective generation, protection, and commercialisation are central to building a more dynamic, inclusive and resilient economy.
Despite extensive quantitative research on innovation metrics, there remains a lack of qualitative insight into how innovation is adopted, protected and commercialised in practice - particularly by those outside traditional innovation hubs.
This research is funded by the Innovation and Research Caucus (IRC).
Meet the Authors
Charlotte Hoole
Charlotte Hoole is a Research Fellow at the City-Region Economic Development Institute (City-REDI). Her research broadly considers the geographical and political economy of local and regional development, governance and policy. Her current work focuses on English devolution and public funding allocation in the UK. Prior to this, she has worked on projects looking at the impact of governance structures in the formulation of place-based policies and central-local relations, and their role in shaping regional disparities.
Dalila Ribaudo
Dalila Ribaudo is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in International Business at Aston Business School. Dalila is an applied economist whose main research interest is to understand the determinants of MNCs' location choices, the impact of Green Technologies in cross-border investments and GVCs, and the driving forces of productivity disparities in regions and urban areas. She has expertise in using micro and macro data at various levels of geographical disaggregation. She held a visiting fellowship at the National Council for Research in Spain. Dalila is growing experience in publishing in international outlets such as Research Policy.
Tasos Kitsos
Tasos is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Economics at the Department of Economics and International Business at Aston University and the regional development theme lead at the Centre for Business Prosperity.
Chloe Billing
Chloe Billings' current research explores the routes to developing a regional innovation ecosystem, to better support the transfer of university technologies into key sectors and help grow our local regional economies.
Part of this involves understanding both the challenges that universities are facing with their technology-transfer mechanisms, as well as, the barriers to innovation amongst local firms (such as skills and other productivity constraints).