Blog posts

UK HealthTech Roadshow Unites Industry, Academia, and Government to Shape MedTech’s Future

The government has placed growth at the heart of its mission and in June of this year published its Industrial Strategy. One important issue raised by the Industrial Strategy is the need to better understand the relationship between national sector strategies and the regional areas where firms are located.

The high-level Sector Plans identified the most important city regions and clusters for the given sector. In addition, regional authorities are developing ambitious Local Growth Plans which are supposed to dovetail with the Industrial Strategy Sector Plans. These local plans need to tackle the critical issues that are constraining growth across sectors including poor transport connections, skills shortages and housing.

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Using Sector Evidence and Expertise to Improve Medical Technology Regulations, Achieve Better Health Outcomes, and Grow the Economy: CSEP and the UK’s Life Sciences Sector Industrial Strategy

The Centre for Sectoral Economic Performance (CSEP) is a new institute based at Imperial College and funded by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation. CSEP strives to contribute to the UK’s Economic Growth by employing rigorous academic research, the latest scientific and engineering knowledge with bottom-up business informed analysis to create innovative, meaningful and actionable sector strategies to create growth in jobs and economic value add.

CSEP analysis has shown that the UK’s HealthTech sector is one of the country’s hidden gems. The UK HealthTech Sector contributes £13.5 Billion of Gross Value Add (GVA) to the UK economy annually and, since 2016 has grown at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19%. Wages, turnover and exports associated with the sector have also grown over the 2016-2020 period at CAGR’s in the 14-19% range. Working in partnership with the Association of British HealthTech Industry (ABHI) and the broader HealthTech businesses community, an industry led strategy to further grow the sector has been created. The sector strategy contains a 6-point delivery plan, with clear actions, timelines and goals that ABHI with CSEP support have been executing this year. Roadshows have been held up and down and across the country to share the strategy and to seek further refinements and guidance from the sector.

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From biopharma innovation to biopharma impact: Can the UK compete globally in 2025?

Author: Professor James Barlow

In 2024, the UK dropped out of the top ten countries in global manufacturing rankings.[i] The decline reflects long-standing structural weaknesses that stretch back decades, including a lack of coherent industrial strategy and inconsistent policies, inadequate adoption of innovation and productivity-enhancing practices, and insufficient investment in workforce training. These have left many of our manufacturing industries without a solid foundation for global competition. Compounding these challenges, geopolitical shifts have also led to other countries overtaking the UK – Russia’s surge in defence industry spending, a manufacturing boom in Mexico spurred by Chinese investment seeking to bypass US tariffs, and Taiwan’s continued dominance in semiconductor production.

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Supporting the UK’s strengths in aerospace will unlock growth

Author: Professor Rafael Palacios

The UK is one of five countries in the world with the capability to build its own aeroplanes. As an island nation we rely on aerospace more than other countries. So aviation technology here has always developed at pace. We have the third largest sector in the OECD by market share, after the US and France and a healthy pipeline of startup ranging from nanosatellites to large lighter-than-air vehicles. And the operations of companies like Rolls Royce, BAE Systems and Airbus stand as symbols of the sector’s future potential.

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Partnerships between universities and industry will make UK AI a success

Author: Dr. Juan Bernabé-Moreno, Director of Scientific Research in Europe, IBM

As IBM’s Director of Scientific Research in Europe, I know what a huge opportunity the AI Revolution represents for the UK economy. But translating that potential into economic growth and scientific progress requires close collaboration between technology companies and universities. That’s why I was delighted last month to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between IBM and Imperial College London, committing us to work together over the coming years on the application of AI technologies to global problems including climate change.

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Unleashing the Potential of UK MedTech

Authors: Professor James Moore Jr, Yunus Kutlu

We have no shortage of innovative ideas or talented people in MedTech in this country. But in my eleven years as a professor of medical device design at Imperial, I’ve seen countless good ideas go to waste. At the Centre for Sectoral Economic Performance, we are investigating why this is and what industry, government and academia can do to change it.

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Making Britain a global leader in telecoms regulation

Authors: Professor Eric Yeatman, Professor Chris Tucci & Dr Marika Iivari.

Telecoms is vital national infrastructure that allows us to communicate with people virtually anywhere, whether we are on the go, at home, or at work. In Britain, the industry is well-established and a handful of major players dominate the market. The sector employs 200,000 people, double that of Germany, and provides £38 billion in GVA to the UK economy annually.[1] The industry is also changing with the arrival of 5G and ultimately 6G and the convergence of telecoms with technology such as AI. This presents an opportunity to make the British economy more productive and competitive. But we can only grasp it with the right environment for telecoms companies to succeed.

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