North West Business of Lancashire Conference

Sponsored by Lancashire Enterprise Partnership

Speakers
– Shru Morris, chief executive, Napthens
– Sam Tinsley, managing director, Cutting Edge Services Ltd
– Andy Schofield, manufacturing & materials technology director, BAE Systems Air
– Dr Kirsty Hewitson, VP of Innovation at National Nuclear Laboratory
– Andy Walker, head of business growth, Economic Development Service, Lancashire County Council
– Melissa Conlon, commercial director, AMRC North West
– Prof. Sue Smith, director, Centre for SME Development

Overview
With a new innovation plan for Lancashire, how can the region utilise its strengths to innovate, create opportunities and fuel the innovation drive? Lancashire’s aim for 2030 is to have re-positioned itself as a globally connected and resilient innovation ecosystem.

The opportunities in Lancashire will come from leveraging opportunities from its strengths in innovation. Lancashire’s strengths are in R&D, advanced manufacturing, aerospace, energy, and health – but these need to be developed and worked harder.  How do we maintain Lancashire’s world class prominence in key sectors? How do we develop supply chain capability and capacity, servicing these sectors and where can we identify inter-dependencies with other regions? We will hear from the architects of Lancashire’s new innovation plan.

Lancashire is to begin to embrace a new innovation plan. But what do we do after the plan and where can we begin to create opportunities? You cannot innovate without changing your way of thinking. Lancashire is doing this with the introduction of Failure Labs. Often a good idea won’t get off the ground because people are scared to fail. Failure Labs help pave the way for change by crushing the isolation and stigma around failure. Failure then takes its rightful place as the crucial first step to the next big thing. We will look not only at new tech, but how older tech can embrace the new and the supply chains connected to the key sectors.

What fuels innovation? From financial services to agile property leases to universities pioneering spin-outs, we look at the environment need to commercialise innovation.

Lancashire will innovate through excellence, collaboration and resilience, feeding through to great commercialisation, entrepreneurship and competitiveness.  What collaboration and partnerships can we identify?

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