Solving the UK’s scaling problem through regional innovation clusters

Solving the UK’s scaling problem through regional innovation clusters

The UK must build the infrastructure that allows ideas to mature into world-leading technologies and businesses

Startups excel at creating new technologies, but too many fail before reaching market. Mark Leaver, head of business partnerships and inward investment at MyWorld, explains why regional innovation clusters could be the missing link.

The UK is not short of ambitious technology ideas. Every year startups emerge from universities, labs, and specialist industries, attracting a flurry of early attention and seed funding. However, the next phase of testing concepts, refining prototypes, customer validation, and commercial deployment is far harder to finance and navigate.

Between the initial breakthrough and a product that investors and buyers can trust lies a stretch of development that is often too risky for traditional funding and too early for commercial backing. It’s in this gap where many promising innovations lose momentum.

This is acutely challenging in creative technologies. Companies developing immersive experiences, AI-driven production tools and real-time media platforms are frequently operating in markets that are still taking shape. Success depends not only on brilliant ideas that reshape established workflows, but also on access to industry resources, specialist facilities and real-world environments where those technologies can be tested by the people who will ultimately use them.

This is why regional innovation clusters are attracting renewed attention: they aim to provide the infrastructure, expertise and commercial collaborations that tech startups need during the most fragile stage of growth.

The aim is to successfully embed a culture of R&D in businesses of all sizes, support innovation and the translation of research into viable commercial products, deliver inclusive training and create new partnerships that strengthen the regional creative economy.

Three characteristics make this approach effective.

For MyWorld, a creative technology programme funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), this includes the development of cutting-edge studios for virtual production and immersive content, and a smart cinema for audience experience research, but essentially any model of this kind requires an accessible high-quality testing sandbox for startups to experiment and refine their technical developments.

MyWorld has backed more than 400 businesses, creating hundreds of jobs and leveraging millions in additional regional investment.

One of the most exciting aspects of the programme has been the diversity of projects taking place, with work spanning immersive audio, AI-enabled workflows, gaming, and large-scale experiential media, giving us a unique view of how emerging technologies are shaping content creation.

As the programme’s initial UKRI funding approaches its conclusion in 2027, the challenge is no longer proving whether this model works, but how successful regional innovation clusters can become self-sustaining while continuing to support groundbreaking R&D. Combining commercial partnerships with targeted public investment offers one route to ensuring specialist facilities remain available to the next generation of innovators.

In an increasingly competitive global innovation economy, the UK cannot rely solely on breakthrough ideas. It must also build the infrastructure that allows those ideas to mature into world-leading technologies and businesses.

Sustained, devolved R&D funding is a crucial part of that infrastructure. Designing agile programmes rooted in place ensures maximum return on public investment. It gives innovative SMEs exactly the right the time, space and tools they need to define new markets, develop transformative technologies and ultimately compete on the international stage.

Mark Leaver is head of business partnerships and inward investment at MyWorld