Gordon Brown helps organise innovation nation summit in Manchester

Gordon Brown, the former prime minister, is helping to organise a government-backed “innovation nation” summit with chief executives in Manchester on 9 October, as Labour seeks to lift the UK’s competitiveness.
The event is billed as a “landmark gathering to turn ambition into action [with] the country’s most influential CEOs, founders, investors and policymakers”, according to sources familiar with the preparations.
Invited speakers include Dame Kate Bingham, managing partner at SV Health Investors and former head of the UK’s Covid-19 vaccine taskforce, and Kasim Kutay, chief executive of Novo Holdings, the controlling shareholder of the pharmaceutical group Novo Nordisk. Mohamed El-Erian, the economist and former chief executive of the bond investor Pimco, has also been invited.
Lord Darzi of Denham, director of the Institute of Global Health Innovation at Imperial College London and a former minister in Brown’s government, is on the invitation list, as is Sir Paul Nurse, president of the Royal Society and former chief executive of the Francis Crick Institute. A senior government minister is also expected to speak.
The summit’s organisers say it will place “key decisionmakers shoulder to shoulder with our boldest innovators … to influence the agenda, accelerate change and help shape a decade of breakthrough growth.”
They add: “Britain has the science, talent and the ideas to lead the world; what it needs now is the innovation nation plan to match.”
The event is being convened by the Growth and Reform Network, a think tank launched last year that works to unite government, mayors and local leaders in support of “inclusive growth” and public service reform.
The network is led by its executive chairman, Ben Lucas, who previously worked on the Royal Society of Arts city growth commission in 2013, an inquiry into devolution chaired by Lord O’Neill of Gatley, a former chief economist at Goldman Sachs.
O’Neill, who worked with Andy Burnham when he was mayor of Greater Manchester and has informally advised him as prime minister, is understood to have been invited to speak but is unavailable. He has issued a number of public warnings, including that Burnham’s signature pledge to bring “good growth to every postcode” risks wasting taxpayers’ money.
Burnham is seeking to lift the economy through greater devolution and local powers. He has vowed to decentralise power from Westminster to Manchester, where he has set up a Number 10 North to support regions in reforming utilities, reindustrialisation and regeneration.
In his Labour Party conference speech on Tuesday, the prime minister invoked Brown. “I see start-ups and scale-ups pouring out of our world-class universities. I see businesses up and down the country playing their part and ready to do more,” he said. “As Gordon Brown has said, ‘We can be the world’s innovation nation’. And he’s right. We can.”
Successive administrations have sought to unlock capital and deregulate to help promising start-ups scale and remain in the UK rather than moving overseas, especially to the United States.
Investors have continued to raise the issue this year. Ed Bussey, chief executive of Oxford Science Enterprises, said in May that UK pension funds were slow to back British tech scale-ups, with most outside capital for the fund’s portfolio companies coming from American investors.
The Manchester event follows the postponement by the government of a global investment summit scheduled for December in London, according to a report, amid a global bond market rout that has raised UK borrowing costs.
The last international investment summit, held at London Guildhall in October 2024 shortly after Sir Keir Starmer’s government was elected, attracted about £63bn of investment commitments, according to ministers at the time.
The government and the Growth and Reform Network were both approached for comment.

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