Tag Archives: Coventry

The Grant Delusion: Why Government Should Commission, Not Compete, in UK Innovation

David Richards MBE is right, the UK’s innovation economy has become addicted to grants, not growth. But the problem isn’t funding itself; it’s design. Innovate UK and its peers were meant to bridge the early-stage gap between research and market, but instead became destinations in their own right. Government now competes with, rather than commissions, the innovators it should empower. The fix is simple: commission outcomes, not applications; fund practitioners, not paperwork.

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Cyber, Growth, and Regional Futures: A Comparative Synthesis of Six 2025 Reports: From Fragmentation to Framework

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2025 has been a year of noise, policy papers, strategies, and growth plans, each declaring the next leap for UK cyber and regional innovation. But noise isn’t movement. Across six flagship reports, DSIT’s Cyber Growth Action Plan, WMCA’s Futures and Growth Plans, the Tech Nation 2025 report, the Midlands Engine Cyber & Defence report, and DSIT’s Cyber Skills 2025, the pattern repeats: good intent, weak execution, no continuity. Together, they map £77 billion in Gross Value Added (GVA), 143,000 cyber professionals, and £17 billion in projected uplift, but no coherent operating model. This paper builds one: treating cyber as economic infrastructure and the West Midlands as the proof-of-concept for a practitioner-led, resilient growth framework.

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West Midlands Cyber Hub Diaries: Day One (Or Perhaps Day Sixty)

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The West Midlands Cyber Hub marks a long-held ambition to give the region a central home for cyber. Building on the rebooted West Midlands Cyber Working Group (WM CWG), the Hub is designed to strengthen community coherence, increase investment, and connect students, SMEs, enterprises, and universities in a neutral space. Supported by DSIT, Innovate UK, Aston University, TechWM, and the Innovation Alliance for the West Midlands, the Hub will open its first phase at Enterprise Wharf in Birmingham, forming the core of a hub-and-spoke model across the region. The project team, led by Sevgi Aksoy and I (Wayne Horkan), with Rebecca Robinson as PM, is preparing for a pre-launch event on 30th September 2025.

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