City-REDI/WMREDI Round Up – July 2023

Media engagements

• Matt Lyons was quoted in a Guardian article about the Commonwealth Games “‘Birmingham could pull it off’: city considers hosting Commonwealth Games again”.

Awards/ Funding

• The Railway Group in the School of Engineering recently won £30 Million in funding from Research England. City-REDI helped develop the supporting business case for the bid.
• Rebecca Riley won the Birmingham Business School Research Impact Award.

Local and Central Government

• Simon Collinson was quoted in Parliamentary Briefing on UK Research and Development Policy.

Reports / publications released

• The Impact of University STEM Assets – A Systematic Review of the Empirical Evidence – Article in PLOS One by Chloe Billing Et al.
• STEM Assets in the West Midlands Innovation Landscape: STEAMhouse – WMREDI Briefing by Julianne Schwarz.

Events – presenting work / speaking engagements

• On 16^th June, Annum Rafique presented at the Regional Studies Association Conference in Ljubljana, Slovenia, on: Understanding the role of university-based assets on innovation in the SMEs: A case of Tyseley Energy Park (TEP).
• On 19^th June, Rebecca Riley was a UPEN conference panel member: Local, Regional and Devolved Policy Engagement.
• Des McNulty (Glasgow University), Sara Hassan and Hannes Read presented at the MetroLab Summit on 26^th – 28^th June in Portland, Oregon, USA about the role of civic universities, place-based impact and community engagement.
• On 4^th July, Rebecca Riley was invited to be part of the RSA UK Urban Futures Expert Roundtable: Building a Regenerative Economy.
• On 5^th July, Anne Green hosted a Workshop at The Exchange on ‘Looking beyond growth: exploring the transformative potential of alternative economic development approaches’ as part of a Royal Society of Edinburgh Workshop award in conjunction with David Waite (University of Glasgow) and Rich Crisp (Sheffield Hallam University).
• On the 5^th July, Charlotte Hoole presented the following paper at the Regional Science Association International – British and Irish Section Annual Conference in Newcastle: ‘Covid-19 recovery planning in city-regions: Soft spaces of governance in action’ (Charlotte Hoole, Abigail Taylor, Anne Green).
• On 6^th July, Matt Lyons presented at the 49th RSAI-BIS conference at Newcastle University. The presentation was entitled “Can R&D policy help rebalance the UK economy?”.
• On 12^th July, WMREDI held the Accelerating Innovation, delivering growth: lessons from the three pilots round table.
• On 17^th July, Rebecca Riley and Professor Richard Black attended the launch of the Birmingham Anchor Network Leadership Meeting and signing of a memorandum of understanding at Aston University.
• On 18^th July , Rebecca Riley presented at the tenth meeting of the UPEN Regional and devolved administrations group on LPIP Hub.