Source Advisors is proud to announce a strategic partnership with the CBI to deliver a major research initiative aimed to advance the understanding of innovation investment in the UK.
Innovation investment: Firm foundations for growth
The project titled “Innovation investment: Firm foundations for growth” will be an extensive, wide-ranging and robust study to set out how and why businesses make innovation investment decisions today. It will ask how they can be supported to invest more in UK innovation to drive long-term economic growth.
Context – years of lag for UK innovation
Both the CBI and Source Advisors believe that increasing business innovation investment will be core to driving long-term economic growth, as well as delivering other key goals or missions such as clean power or improving healthcare. However, the UK lags comparator countries on levels of R&D investment, as well as on technology and innovation adoption.
The environment for innovation investment has changed significantly over the last 5 years due to increasing uncertainty in the external economic, political environment and significant advances in technology development. There is an opportunity to inform and shape effective policymaking for innovation through building this evidence and knowledge base.
Naomi Weir, Technology and Innovation Director, CBI, commented “The importance of business innovation for economic growth can’t be overstated – for example we know that businesses that innovate grow twice as fast as those that don’t. But innovation investment is inherently risky and requires a long-view making it challenging for businesses and policymakers alike. This work will uncover how businesses across sectors, sizes and geographies are making decisions about innovation investment in the current context, providing robust evidence for our ongoing work with policymakers to ensure the UK’s policy environment is a catalyst for business innovation investment – building firm foundations for growth across the UK.”
Luke Hamm added “Headwinds have felt permanent for the UK and our growth has continued to stutter so at the highest level, this needs a reset and the opportunity to put new foundations in that enables growth.”
Aims of the research project
The project aims to understand the factors that influence innovation investment decisions today, including how businesses define their risk appetite, and how decision processes vary across business sector, size, existing levels of innovation and other factors.
The scope of the project includes roundtables with businesses, ministers and academics, as well as a UK wide survey leading to a report that will be the cornerstone of the CBIs innovation policy for the foreseeable future. This research should inform and shape effective policymaking to accelerate business innovation investment in the UK.
Luke added, “This is a critical piece of work that will bring a clear viewpoint of businesses to the table, enabling well informed policy to get the UK back to being a world leader in innovation”
