City-REDI, along with Birmingham Business School, hosted the 20th Regional Innovation Policies Conference 2026. The event was funded by the LPIP Hub.
Under the theme of “Navigating Futures with Innovation: Resilient and Resurgent Regions”, over 110 participants from 18 countries had a lively two days on Edgbaston campus.
Dr Chloe Billing reports on the discussions from the conference over the two days in a series of blogs.
Day 1 Welcome Plenary, Regional Innovation Policies Conference 2026, University of Birmingham, 17 September 2026
Keynote: Meric Gertler. Commentators: Jun Du and Rebecca Riley
Opening the Conference
The Regional Innovation Policies Conference 2026 opened at the University of Birmingham with a welcome from the Business School Dean that returned to the civic and place-based purpose on which the University was founded. Hosted by City-REDI and Birmingham Business School, in partnership with the ESRC-funded Local Policy and Innovation Partnership (LPIP) Hub and the Regional Studies Association (RSA), the conference shared a commitment to strengthening the dialogue between research and policy. Delegates were also invited to a special session later that day in memory of Professor Lisa De Propris, a colleague at Birmingham Business School and a member of the organising committee.
Introducing the Plenary, the University’s Deputy Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Regional Engagement noted that innovation policy in England is changing rapidly, while much of the local capacity to deliver it has been stripped out over the last 10 to 15 years. Universities have a growing role in helping local partners fill that gap.
A rupture, not a transition
The keynote was given by Professor Meric Gertler, President Emeritus of the University of Toronto (2013 to 2025) and now Professor in the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and the School of Cities. He framed his talk around Mark Carney’s address to the World Economic Forum in January 2026, in which the Canadian Prime Minister described “a rupture, not a transition”. The post-war rules-based order has weakened, trade agreements have been undermined, and tariffs, reshoring and the weaponisation of trade have become features of a world with three competing great powers. Constraints on the flow of ideas and research partnerships add to this.
Carney’s call for middle powers to act together, because “if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu”, set the tone. Alongside this, a resurgent technology economy is generating extraordinary wealth while widening inequality between and within regions. Meric argued that this makes regional innovation policy more important, not less, particularly for what he called “ordinary regions” outside a small number of global hotspots.
Policy tools for ordinary regions
Meric set out a range of policy levers. Higher education remains the starting point, since graduates are the main channel through which knowledge moves into the economy. Yet funding is under strain across Anglo-American systems, where it is increasingly treated as a cost rather than an investment. At the same time, geopolitical instability is creating new opportunities to attract researchers, with countries including Canada launching programmes to recruit scientists from the United States.
Capturing the benefits of research locally depends on the absorptive capacity of firms and the ability of places to help start-ups scale. Entrepreneurship programmes have multiplied, but few places have the receptor capacity to retain growing firms. Drawing on Dan Breznitz’s “Innovation in Real Places”, he showed that start-ups from universities in the Bay Area, Boston or Tel Aviv tend to stay, while those from strong universities elsewhere often move away.
He gave particular weight to technology diffusion. Helping existing firms adopt platform technologies such as AI and robotics, an updated form of industrial extension, offers a much broader geography of prosperity than frontier innovation, provided it is matched by investment in skills.
Rethinking finance
The dominant venture capital model, Meric argued, deepens spatial inequality. Investors often require firms to relocate nearby, stripping them from their origin regions, and the model is impatient and tolerant of high failure rates. Private equity is more problematic still, with Maryann Feldman and Martin Kenney documenting how non-local firms extract value from local assets and leave places worse off.
As alternatives, he pointed to debt-based and bank finance traditions in Northern Europe, to university innovation funds with local mandates, and to public pension and sovereign funds, whose assets have grown substantially since 2000. Drawing on Mariana Mazzucato’s “The Common Good Economy”, he highlighted Copenhagen’s City and Port Development Corporation and the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ). CDPQ has outperformed its benchmarks while holding around a fifth of its assets in Quebec and funding projects such as Montreal’s new electric light rail network. He concluded that the goal should not be to replicate Silicon Valley but to find a more inclusive, multidimensional model suited to each place.
Responses from Rebecca Riley and Jun Du
Professor Rebecca Riley (City-REDI) drew on her work with the LPIP Hub supporting the design of the Local Innovation Partnerships Fund, with DSIT nationally and the West Midlands Combined Authority regionally. A central problem is language. Local government uses innovation to mean economic development, while UKRI and universities tend to mean commercialisation, and central government moves between definitions. Business is often missing from the discussion. She also warned that universities seeking alternative funding are not always asking where investment comes from or whether its benefits will be retained locally.
Professor Jun Du (The Productivity Institute, University of Manchester) observed that economic shocks are decided nationally and internationally but absorbed regionally, yet regions rarely feature in national trade policy debates. Researchers should move beyond diagnosis to what works. She agreed on the importance of diffusion over searching for champions, and noted that Canada’s recent investment commitments came mainly from domestic sources, suggesting that resilience rests on confidence built in regions.
Discussion
Questions from the floor challenged universities’ focus on a Silicon Valley model of commercialisation, emphasised the value of incremental innovation for ordinary regions, and questioned whether Toronto is truly an ordinary region. Meric agreed on each point, noting that Toronto has long struggled to retain the value of its research. Others called for new metrics, with Rebecca noting that Treasury models centred on inward investment have contributed to underinvestment in ordinary regions. Jun suggested the world is not post-rules so much as renegotiating them, since most global trade still follows WTO rules. Meric closed by highlighting a larger role for the state as a source of capital and a partner in managing risk.
This blog was written by Dr Chloe Billing, Research Fellow, City-REDI.
Find out more about the Local Policy Innovation Partnership Hub.
Disclaimer:
The views expressed in this analysis post are those of the author and not necessarily those of the LPIP Hub, City-REDI or the University of Birmingham.