TECH SUMMIT SPEECH
I would like to begin by thanking you all for joining us today.
A special thanks goes to colleagues in Barnsley Council, my officers in the MCA, and the team at Capital Enterprise, and to those who have travelled a long way to be with us.
I understand that we have over a dozen countries represented in this room, and I appreciate the investment of time and effort you have put into making today a success.
Today is an exciting opportunity for our region. This is a chance for us to celebrate our achievements as a region, and your role as the lifeblood of our modern economy.
It is also how we demonstrate our leadership in the country and beyond. Today is a statement of intent; a testament to our ambition for South Yorkshire.
We spend a lot of time in South Yorkshire, rightly, celebrating our heritage. Coal mining; steel making; the railways.
These industries built up our communities, created wealth here, and have left a legacy in our advanced materials, logistics, and green energy sectors. We are home to one of nine Catapult Centres in the UK, and through their research and innovation the AMRC, AWRC, TERC are drawing international attention.
In their time, our historic industries were at the frontier of technology and the global economy. They were beacons of modernity; they provided the path to widespread prosperity.
South Yorkshire is already home to beacons of the digital age, with internationally significant tech firms including WANdisco, ZOO Digital and Sumo Digital.
How do we build on those emerging strengths? Well, we can learn from history to shape our future.
The first and the second industrial revolutions did not happen by accident. They relied on a whole ecosystem – the serendipity of different industries coming together in the same place at the same time; nurturing talent, first as a hobby and then in our new schools and universities; and opening the way for entrepreneurs to do something new, providing them with the land and access to the finance to change South Yorkshire.
The right physical spaces. The public sector and firms giving people the skills they needed for modern industry. Finance for those hoping to innovate. These fundamental steps to deliver an economic revolution have not changed.
We’ve led the world before in South Yorkshire. My ambition is that we lead it again. I’m pleased to say that, thanks to many of you in this room, we already are.
We are getting the right spaces in place across the region. With the Sheffield and South Yorkshire Incubator Accelerator Network (SIAN), we have a varied network of incubators, accelerator programmes, and investors, including Kollider Eagle Lab, Sheffield Technology Park and TEAM SY.
The key to the South Yorkshire’s success is its people. Businesses are benefiting from skilled apprentices, graduates and postgraduates that support the region. We have world class universities, working with businesses at the cutting edge of innovation and change. There are 70,000 applicants to the region’s universities each year, which have a significant global pull - a quarter come from outside the UK.
We continue to innovate in skills. New initiatives - including the Ey Up Digital academy, the AMRC data cloud and Ey Up Data Science Academy partnership, our University Technical Colleges and our further education sector - are pushing boundaries and creating new routes to unlock South Yorkshire’s potential.
I am proud that, today, we will be launching our Tech Welcome Grants programme, supported by the Combined Authority. These grants will cover some of the cost of relocating and creating jobs here in South Yorkshire, specifically in the tech sector.
This is not about poaching wealth creators from elsewhere: our gamble is that the ecosystem we are building here, and the assets we already have in South Yorkshire, will mean those business and people who do relocate will thrive here – creating more value for them, the region, and the UK.
There is lots to be excited about, and we will hear about it today. But this will only succeed if we are ambitious with our assets; realistic about our shortcomings; and committed to a genuine partnership across the public, private and social sectors. We already know where some of those challenges are – especially around early-stage financing, with a lack of an angels network, venture capital and private equity in the region. Other challenges will no doubt emerge as we make progress in the future.
I want to work with you in this room, and all of those across the region to realise our vision. We will learn from the best, borrowing from the MIT-REAP and European learning exchange programmes such as URBACT (welcome to our European partners here today) to co-create, an integrated Action Plan for the development of the tech ecosystem in South Yorkshire.
If we get this right, it is about more than creating new industries. It’s about increasing tech adoption in our traditional industries, creating the conditions that will allow them to thrive in the 21st century. It’s about widening access to higher-paying jobs, so our whole community feel the benefit from the next industrial revolution. It’s about making our communities more liveable, more fun, more dynamic.
This is South Yorkshire’s first tech summit. It will not be our last. If we get it right today, our city region can lead the next century as it did the ones that came before. That is our challenge. Today, we begin to rise to it together.