What Cardiff can learn from Manchester on innovation

The city’s innovation assets are geographically fragmented, institutionally divided, and too often marketed independently.

Economic development often assumes that naming something is the same as creating it, and we’ve often seen buildings become innovation centres, loose collections of organisations described as ecosystems, and, increasingly, any cluster of offices, laboratories, and public-sector institutions described as an innovation district.

But a genuine innovation district is far more demanding, as it is not simply a place where research happens, nor an incubator surrounded by apartments and coffee shops. It is a concentrated part of a city where universities, hospitals, investors, established companies, entrepreneurs, and start-ups are brought together in a way that encourages ideas, people, and capital to flow among them.

And whilst Manchester has one, Cardiff disappointingly does not.

With Andy Burnham taking his place as the new Prime Minister, it is worth noting that part of Manchester’s success as an economic hotspot stems from the ongoing development of the Oxford Road Corridor and the ambitious Sister innovation district being created on land previously occupied by the University of Manchester.

Sister is a £1.7bn development spread over 15 years, with plans for laboratories, offices, start-up space, homes, shops, restaurants and public areas. It is expected to accommodate businesses from their earliest stages through to becoming significant employers, rather than serving as an incubator from which successful companies are eventually forced to leave.

This is not simply another property development with the word innovation attached to it, but an attempt to build an economic system within a physical place. It also sits within a wider corridor that already brings together two universities, major hospitals, science parks, cultural institutions, tens of thousands of students, and more than 100,000 workers.

The critical point is not that each of these organisations exists because Cardiff also has universities, hospitals, research centres, and talented graduates, but that Manchester has spent years connecting them to make a real difference to the local economy.

It would be easy to attribute this entirely to the Prime Minister’s previous role, but much of the foundation predates his election as mayor, with Manchester’s universities, local government, health institutions and private investors collaborating for years.

That said, Mr Burnham has strengthened that model, given it a powerful public voice, and linked it to wider priorities such as transport, skills and devolved decision-making.

More importantly, the innovation district is the product of patient civic leadership, institutional cooperation and a willingness to think beyond individual projects and political cycles.

That is where Cardiff has fallen behind. Our capital city does not lack innovation assets. Cardiff University has its innovation campus and the Sbarc/Spark building, and it has recognised strengths in creative industries, financial technology, cyber security and life sciences.

The wider city region includes the compound semiconductor cluster around Newport, one of the most significant concentrations of expertise of its kind in Europe.

Yet these remain separate pieces of an unfinished jigsaw, with Cardiff developing projects rather than a place, programmes rather than a system, and partnerships rather than a single organisation with the authority and resources to deliver.

Unlike those of Manchester and other successful innovation districts, the city’s innovation assets are geographically fragmented, institutionally divided, and too often marketed independently.

Manchester’s great advantage is not merely scale but alignment and its universities, local government and private investors have been prepared to work together and use land, capital and institutional influence collectively.

Specialist property developers have been brought in to provide the laboratories, flexible workspaces and scale-up accommodation that the conventional commercial market will rarely build on its own.

There is also an acceptance that innovation districts require long-term investment and cannot be created through a three-year funding programme, launched at a ministerial event and then quietly set aside by the next initiative.

This raises an obvious question, namely why Cardiff, the capital city of a nation with control over economic development, planning, skills and many aspects of transport, has not developed something comparable?

Part of the answer lies in a historic lack of ambition around place-based innovation, and Cardiff’s major regeneration projects have largely prioritised government offices, corporate occupiers, housing, retail and major events.

Yes, Central Square has been transformed, but it was not conceived with entrepreneurship, laboratories, or high-growth businesses in mind.

Yet an opportunity now exists to create an innovation district around Cardiff Central, Central Quay, and the land south of the railway station. It is the most accessible location in Wales, close to the commercial centre and able to connect with specialist sites elsewhere in Cardiff and Newport.

The existing university campus, Heath Park, Cardiff Edge and the semiconductor cluster would remain important nodes, but there must be one recognisable heart of the system that should contain affordable space for start-ups, laboratories and prototyping facilities, access to investors, support for university spinouts and, crucially, premises for businesses to occupy as they grow.

That last point matters because Manchester has not solved everything, and like most UK cities, it remains better at producing start-ups than at retaining companies that require substantial growth capital.

Yes, some successful founders will still move to London or overseas to finance the next stage of their development, but Cardiff should learn from that weakness as well as Manchester’s strengths, because a genuine innovation district must not simply help people start businesses but must give them a reason to remain, grow and build significant companies in Wales.

Manchester has not discovered a magic formula, but it has shown what happens when political leadership, universities, property, investment, and entrepreneurship are treated as parts of the same strategy. More importantly, Cardiff could do the same with the right political will and economic vision.