By Geoff McGimpsey, the owner of Foundry Marketing Partners.
This is the week of the Programme for Government launch and DfE's Three-Year Forward Look and 2024/25 Business Plan. It’s also the week that Mario Draghi produced his report for the EU on The Future of European Competiveness.
Draghi’s report is a very good document of its type, low on impenetrable jargon or academic language, and with few distracting tables and graphs. The conclusions in this document are stark and the report authors clearly don't want anyone to misunderstand the nature of the warning.
We ought to be paying attention here. What ills the EU will likely be transmitted to Northern Ireland, so it's worthwhile considering the report's contents. More than this, many of the lessons (earned through painful experience in the EU) are directly applicable to us in Northern Ireland.
The EU faces a population crisis over the next decade and a half that will impact growth, in an already uneven competition against the US and China. Technology provides a sizable measure of the remedy to this, but consider: no EU company has gone from zero to a market cap over €100 billion within the past 50 years; in the US, all six companies valued above €1 trillion have been created during this time.
And what happens when an EU company finds success? It decamps to the US. Close to 30 per cent (40 of 147 companies) of the unicorns founded in Europe – startups that went on to be valued over $1 billion – relocated their headquarters abroad, with the vast majority moving to the US.
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The EU is "failing to translate innovation into commercialisation, and innovative companies that want to scale up in Europe are hindered at every stage by inconsistent and restrictive regulations," the report says.
"We claim to favour innovation," the report says, "but we continue to add regulatory burdens onto European companies, which are especially costly for SMEs and self-defeating for those in the digital sectors."
Let's bring this back to Northern Ireland. What can we learn from Draghi’s vision for the future of competitiveness?
The report says researchers in Europe are less well integrated into innovation 'clusters' – networks of universities, start-ups, large companies and venture capitalists. This is where Northern Ireland seems to be on point. We're seeing impetus in this area via the Artificial Intelligence Collaboration Centre (AICC), iReach and Momentum One Zero, as well other initiatives surrounding the City Deals and the creation of NI Science and Technology Advisory Network to support innovation investment. These initiatives are filling leadership positions and proactively engaging with industry.
What other lessons can industry and policymakers draw from the report?
There's much more to take away from the report in other areas like Decarbonisation, Green Growth, Industrial Strategy and Transportation. It's certainly one of the most readable and insightful documents I've come across.
Many of the challenges articulated in this report are common to us here. But importantly, I can see that Northern Ireland has been making strong progress of late.
The theme of enhanced collaboration and engagement between universities and business came across strongly in the PfG. In particular, initiatives like the Higher Education Innovation Fund and the £150 million Net Zero Accelerator Fund are well referenced. The PfG also focuses on accelerating transformational projects through cluster development and streamlined City and Growth Deals processes.
On Monday, the Department for the Economy NI Minister Conor Murphy and the PfG hammered home the importance of raising productivity levels here. Conor Murphy himself is an exemplar of productivity - the volume of diary dates, announcements and speeches must have his press office run ragged.
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We are moving from vision and policy to implementation and actuality. We have ideas on the table and policy frameworks (like the Enhanced Investment Zone) removing barriers to growth. We have energetic leadership in place in Stormont and in areas like cyber security, net zero, screen, financial technology, regulatory technology and health and life sciences. For many projects (like AICC), we’ve moved from the build phase to the programming phase. We now have very pertinent and hard-won lessons to draw from the EU at time when the PfG is out for consultation. The potential is there, as the PfG says, to leverage the potential of our high-productivity sectors and ensure "our story continues to be an inspiration to others".
Geoff McGimpsey is founder and director at Foundry Marketing Partners, a firm that specialises in integrating strategic marketing and communications for tech and professional service firms. With over 20 years’ experience in marketing, media, technology and political communications, Geoff focuses on crafting tailored strategies that drive growth and enhance market position.
Connect with Geoff on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/geoffmcgimpsey/
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