Liverpool has the ingredients. How do we connect them for growth?

We recently partnered with ARUP to bring together leaders from across Liverpool’s industry, academia, research, investment and public sector bodies to ask some open ended questions about what the next step is for city. Most importantly: what does Liverpool need to do next to turn its scientific strengths into greater growth? 

It was a wide-ranging conversation, with people looking at the region’s innovation economy from very different perspectives. But there was a shared ambition to build on what Liverpool already has and turn more of its scientific strengths into commercial growth. 

Liverpool certainly has plenty to build from. Its universities, research institutions, established pharmaceutical and industrial businesses, specialist facilities and innovation communities give the City Region many of the ingredients of a leading life sciences destination. 

But as the conversation unfolded, one theme kept coming through in different ways. 

How do we make those strengths easier to connect, so that more innovative businesses can come to Liverpool, find what they need to grow and choose to stay? 

The Materials Innovation Factory (MIF) is a good example of what can happen when research and industry are brought together. 

Having been closely involved in the project, I found it particularly interesting to hear how those using the building now describe its impact. 

Developed through a partnership between the University of Liverpool and Unilever, MIF deliberately brought academic research, industrial expertise and advanced equipment into a shared environment, designed to allow these scientists to cross-pollinate as part of the ‘research motel’ concept.  

That shared environment is creating practical value on both sides. Unilever is able to access specialist university expertise and equipment without having to replicate every capability independently, and the University is able to translate research into industrial applications, develop talent and bring businesses of different sizes into contact with one another. 

The value is in the connections that proximity enables, and not just value in the financial sense but also in the IP that is coming out of that building. 

MIF gives us a useful glimpse of what a connected innovation environment can look like at the scale of an individual facility, but the bigger question is how Liverpool creates that same sense of connection across the wider City Region. 

The ingredients are already distributed across places such as the Knowledge Quarter, Sci-Tech Daresbury and Liverpool’s established research and manufacturing locations. Rather than viewing these simply as separate destinations, the opportunity is to make the route between their different capabilities much easier for businesses to understand and use. 

For an innovative SME considering Liverpool as somewhere to scale, that could be make-or-break. 

This became one of the most interesting tensions in the discussion.

There is already evidence of the opportunity. Businesses and spin-outs emerging from established innovation ecosystems elsewhere in the UK are looking beyond these ‘golden triangle’ locations as they grow, and Liverpool has many of the things that could make it an attractive next destination: talent, research expertise, industrial capability and comparatively significant room for growth.

But companies cannot choose Liverpool simply because the wider ecosystem looks promising. They need to have somewhere suitable to go.

At present, there are gaps in the spaces available to businesses at different points in that growth journey – particularly at the point where an innovative SME is moving beyond its first laboratory or incubator environment but is not yet ready to commit to a major manufacturing facility of its own.

Without the right spaces at the right stages, Liverpool risks stunting its own growth.

This is where the idea of a property ladder becomes important.

Rather than thinking simply about whether Liverpool has enough laboratory space, we need to think about whether it offers a connected range of environments into which companies can access the right resources as they scale: from flexible and shared facilities, through grow-on accommodation and pilot or process space, to environments capable of supporting commercial manufacturing.

The timing matters too. An SME may secure investment, win a contract or reach a technical breakthrough and need space quickly. Specialist development operates on a very different timescale. If the next rung of the ladder is not available when the business needs it, another city or region may be.

And the property ladder cannot operate independently of the wider innovation ecosystem.

Participants repeatedly emphasised that moving from promising research towards production takes more than a larger laboratory. It requires access to process engineering expertise, specialist equipment, appropriate infrastructure, skills and, crucially, funding.

The property ladder matters not only because growing companies need somewhere to go, but because the depth of Liverpool’s SME community and its ability to attract investment are closely connected.

A stronger pipeline of growing businesses helps build the critical mass that attracts investors. Greater access to capital can then help more of those businesses reach their next stage, strengthening the ecosystem further.

But we need to get that cycle moving at greater scale.

LYVA Labs is already working to support young companies in the region, while the roundtable highlighted the need for a longer funding runway and stronger engagement between emerging businesses and industry. The discussion also pointed towards growing connections with innovation and investment networks elsewhere in the UK, including Oxford, and the potential to build stronger relationships with angel investors traditionally concentrated further south.

At the same time, places such as Sci-Tech Daresbury demonstrate how businesses can benefit when research facilities, specialist expertise and room to develop processes sit close together.

The opportunity now is to make that progression visible across Liverpool City Region as a whole.

Could Liverpool map a clear route through its innovation ecosystem – showing a growing company where it could start, what facilities and expertise it could access, where it could move next and how that journey could eventually lead to production?

If businesses can see a credible route to scale in Liverpool, investors can begin to see one too.

That leads to the other major challenge raised around the table: how Liverpool talks about what it already has.

Saying that Liverpool is ‘strong in life sciences’ isn’t enough. The discussion called for a need to call out specific strengths including things like: infection and immunology, vaccines, fermentation, biomanufacturing, materials chemistry, process engineering and advanced computing. And not only to shout about them individually, but also to highlight how those strengths can intersect.

Materials science connects with manufacturing, automation and industrial chemistry. Liverpool’s health and infection research can connect with clinical expertise, digital technologies and routes towards translation. The Hartree Centre was another example brought up – connecting scientific research with advanced computing, modelling and AI.

Those combinations tell a much richer story than a broad claim about having a strong life sciences sector.

Liverpool is not starting from scratch. The City Region’s Health and Life Sciences Cluster Board has already set out a strategic direction. The question raised through the discussion was how that thinking becomes a proposition that is simple, tangible and visible to people outside the region.

Could an investor quickly understand Liverpool’s strongest specialisms, the organisations behind them, the facilities available and the route a business could take through them?

And could a company see not only why it should come to Liverpool, but how it could grow here?

That property ladder therefore becomes part of the investment proposition itself: evidence that Liverpool can offer not just individual assets, but a route through them.

Making that route work – and making it visible – is not something any one organisation or profession can deliver alone.

For the property and design sector, there is a role in understanding how specialist spaces can support businesses throughout their development, and how different facilities can complement one another across the region.

For universities, established businesses, skills providers and research institutions, there is an opportunity to strengthen the relationships that help emerging companies access expertise, equipment and talent.

For investors, industry networks and city leadership, there is a shared challenge in communicating Liverpool’s proposition and making the route into its innovation ecosystem easier to navigate.

The opportunity is to make those efforts feel like one journey.

If a growing science business or investor looked at Liverpool tomorrow, could we show them not simply what already exists, but a clear route through it?

Liverpool has many of the pieces in place. The opportunity now is to make that route easier to see, easier to use and harder to overlook.