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Innovation framework

The vision and priorities of the Leeds City Region innovation framework - innovation for everyone.

What is innovation?

An unhelpful word which many people struggle to identify with.

Suggestions from the West Yorkshire Innovation Network:

“Having impact by putting ideas into practice”
“Achieving impact by implementing new ideas”
“The commercialisation of ideas and knowledge by businesses”
“Introducing new products process or services to effect positive change in a business”
“Helping develop behaviour change across the SME community”
“The art or science of translating existing inventions or new ideas into practical products processes and services”
“Growing your business by doing things differently"
“A means to an end – not the end itself”

We asked businesses and citizens across West Yorkshire to tell us five words that best describe what innovation meant to them. These were the top 5 responses:

Creativity
New
Change
Improvement
Collaboration

Our vision

Our vision for innovation for the Leeds City Region is:

A place that is globally recognised for developing an open, inclusive, thriving and coherent innovation ecosystem, where SMEs, budding entrepreneurs and individuals are inspired to innovate, and can easily navigate the support landscape and connect and collaborate with others to create new and better solutions for business growth and societal good.

Our innovation focus

Based on the evidence, our focus is twofold.

We must support our leading frontier businesses (and more cautious innovators) to ‘do more’ innovation, particularly more radical, Research & Development led innovation.
At the same time as supporting this ‘radical innovation’, it is essential that we support the broader diffusion of ideas and technology into our micro dominant business base, within both our urban and rural settings, to further drive-up innovative activity, behaviours and productivity in the wider business base, and support our net zero ambitions.
And across these, we need to support greater diversity in innovation – across individuals, businesses and society, supporting innovative behaviours and activities across the region.

For all of these:

We must focus on supply and demand side issues to make a step change in progress that is needed. We may not have a large original equipment manufacturer to drive innovation through the supply chain, we do have significant public sector health assets, whose purchasing and procurement power we will work to leverage.
We must also retain a focus on innovation for good, solving the most pressing societal challenges.

The ambitions that follow are based on the evidence, and an attempt to tackle long standing structural issues. These will only be realised by joined up strategic investment and interventions across a range of partners.

This framework is therefore the beginning of a journey to achieve a common set of ambitions.