Policy-Maker at EU Universities Network Summit

In November 2018, a regional delegation from Coventry & Warwickshire and the wider West Midlands travelled to Paris to attend a EU Universities Network Summit. The EU Universities Network had been founded in the wake of the EU Exit vote to ensure strategic relationships across European universities continued and strengthened. The visit was hosted by the L’ Universitie of Paris Seine and delegations travelled from the West Midlands with the University of Warwick, from Belgium with Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), and from Slovenia with the University of Ljubljana.  

 

The summit was the result of an alliance between the first three universities formed in March 2018 at the Shard in London and the University of Ljubljana was formally welcomed as the fourth member at the event. It was a huge honour for me to be part of the West Midlands delegation as it cemented my role as policy-maker for the region. I took part in the Inclusive Growth and the Development of Cities panel where we discussed the importance of using academic expertise in economics, business management, and social sciences as well as transport and infrastructure engineering to shape our cities of the future.  

 

We shared five main threads o In how to shape future regional policy for inclusive growth: 

  1. Move from traditional measures of growth including job creation and productivity to measuring prosperity and the inequality ‘gaps’ in health and wealth 
  2. Establish a West Midlands Inclusive Growth Commission and designate city regions like Coventry as Inclusive Growth Corridors 
  3. Bring in the expertise and experience of young people to ensure optimum decision-making impact through our diverse population 
  4. Maximise the impact of investment by combining public and private funds 
  5. Create ‘open door’ universities that allow for the development of practical applications for inclusive growth 

 

We got to see an ‘open door’ university in action as we travelled round L’ Universitie of Paris Seine and my favourite part of the trip was our visit to the Fab Lab in the centre of the university campus. I arrived with pre-conceptions about what a Fab Lab (or digital fabrication laboratory) was: space that had a lot of things to play with but not much focus on output. Play is crucial to learning so I didn’t think this was the wrong purpose but definitely a missed opportunity to finish the process and turn creativity into tangible benefit. However, the Fab Lab in Paris changed my mind. What I saw was multi-disciplinary graduates and post-graduates coming together to solve real world problems forming companies around next generation products and services as they did so 

 

One of the best examples I saw was a company called INSTAR Robotics who were developina range of autonomous robots for the agricultural industry. The company had formed around post-graduate skills in mechanical engineering, AI, computer programming, and commercial expertise. What captivated me was the ability this group had to come together, develop and test a prototype , and make global business connections all in the Fab Lab space with the facilities made available thereOur tour guide made a point pf explaining to us the importance of the Fab Lab’s location at the heart of the campus. It was the area with the highest footfall for the university and the building itself was made of glass to showcase what went on inside. When I spoke to the INSTAR Robotics team they explained they all came to the Fab Lab independently with the desire to solve challenges and create new products. The Fab Lab environment drew them as the place where that kind of magic could and would happen. I came back determined to bring that way of operating back to Coventry and Warwickshire.  

As I write this more than two years on, it gives me a chance to reflect on what has come to pass. We are moving from the traditional measures of growth to looking at prosperity and inequality: ‘levelling up’ our regional and national economy. We have established West Midlands Commissions to address key aspects of inclusive growth: I am proud to sit on the West Midlands Digital Inclusion Coalition and there is also the Leadership Commission addressing the issue of diversity in our leadership. The West Midlands also has a Young Combined Authority who recently set out their vision for the region tackling digital, skills, environment, transport, housing, culture, and inclusive communities – https://www.wmca.org.uk/news/young-people-launch-a-vision-for-the-future-of-the-region/. The key moving forward is to ensure these young people, and more like them, remain engaged and involved in the delivery and measurement processes as well.  

 

We have great examples of private and public investment coming together for maximum impact including the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre (UKBIC) and the Gigafactory. However, there is more scope to expand this method to smaller projects too and I am looking at how we might capture regional appetite for social value investment in our eco-system. Interestingly, I have been playing with calling this co-investment pot the region’s ‘Future Fabric Fund’ and, back in our Inclsuive Growth discussions, we discussed the role of open door universities in the ‘fabrique des territoires’ (roughly translated as ‘the making of places’). And the open door university vision is something I feel we have not yet fully succeeded in. There are university-led programmes that seek to connect businesses with our regional academic expertise; but I don’t feel we have done enough to make our universities and research institutions open to all  especially our citizensWe have national centres of excellence across our sector strengths but are these places where real people can bring different ideas and skillsets together to solve challenges? I know they can be 

Working together we can make Coventry & Warwickshire a Fab Lab at a regional scale. A place at the heart of the country with the highest footfall made of glass so everyone can see what magic is happening inside.