Ewan Kirk: Yorkshire 'can create own Golden Triangle with manufacturing focus', says top Cambridge entrepreneur

He has been calling on the Government to look at ways to expand the so-called Golden Triangle, the area of the south-east covering Oxford, Cambridge and London and referring to science, technology and innovation businesses linked to the area’s leading universities.

He said spreading its positive influence across the country could be assisted by the Government doing more to encourage the private sector to engage with a wider range of universities and help them develop spin-out companies.

Speaking to The Yorkshire Post, Dr Kirk said different regions of the country should look to specialise in specific fields – with Yorkshire having a positive opportunity in the area of high value manufacturing.

The term refers to businesses which use technological innovation to create products, services and production processes with potentially high commercial value.

A national network of research centres called the High Value Manufacturing Catapult already has the University of Sheffield’s Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre as a key member.

Dr Kirk said: "Everyone aspires to be the Golden Triangle. The Golden Triangle works partly because everything is close.

"If you want to start a life sciences business, you probably want to be in and around Cambridge because you have got the biomedical campus, you’ve got great research companies and the university.

"The thing that places like Yorkshire need to do is find ‘that thing’. It seems that thing primarily for Yorkshire is high value manufacturing.

"In the past, the Midlands and Yorkshire were the home of manufacturing and where a lot of innovation happened 100 years ago.

"But it can do it again by kickstarting that and taking advantage of the network effects.

"Yorkshire has some fantastic universities and York as a city is basically Cambridge but a little bit further north. Sheffield is a great centre for manufacturing.”

Dr Kirk added that existing Golden Triangle organisations have a responsibility to help other regions create and establish innovative businesses to help the nation’s economy grow.

Deeptech Labs is already working with Northern Gritstone, which invests in promising science and technology businesses in the North. The organisations have started running courses to help early-stage spinout companies linked to the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and Manchester to develop their businesses.

Dr Kirk said: “Some of the companies coming out of there are extraordinarily interesting companies.

"The concern for Yorkshire is somebody comes up with a great idea, starts a small company and then they move down South. In some cases, businesses have to be proximate to London to grow – it would be hard to start a hedge fund in Doncaster.

"But it would be good if these innovative businesses could stay in Yorkshire, grow in Yorkshire and be seen as Yorkshire champions.

"Doing that requires everything from infrastructure to generating talent and generating entrepreneurial talent is a really hard thing to do.

"Part of my job as the Royal Society’s entrepreneur in residence at Cambridge University is to teach mathematicians to be a little bit more entrepreneurial.

"It is about giving people the skills to identify a good opportunity and take the next steps.

"We are running courses twice a year with Northern Gritstone. One of the things I love is I see their initial pitches and then 12 weeks later we bring a whole bunch of venture capitalists up and they pitch at a demo day. To see the difference in how they understand what they have to do, how they present themselves and think about the market opportunity is really fantastic.

"It is a start. Rather than the Golden Triangle being this Bermuda Triangle where things go in and never come out, firms in the Golden Triangle should explicitly push out to the regions and support businesses there.

"Government has its role and funding local investment where investment is managed locally is something Government can do and it is not that expensive. It is tens of millions rather than billions and can have a really transformative effect in the economy of Yorkshire and anywhere else that happens.

"What Northern Gritstone was finding was companies were sort of stalling a bit and once they got started there was nowhere to go.

"Deeptech Labs is designed to get those deep technology businesses over that hump. These are the innovative companies of the future.”

Local entrepreneurs have role to play

​Successful Yorkshire businesspeople should consider becoming angel investors to help fund the local companies of the future, Dr Ewan Kirk suggested.

He said: "If you are already a business person, find somebody else and pay it forward. I spend a lot of my time mentoring start-up businesses and budding entrepreneurs. I don’t need to do it, I don’t get paid but I do it because it is important. When I was starting my businesses, people helped me.

"Start an angel investor group if you have made a bit of money, you could make a Yorkshire angels group or join a local network and work with early-stage start-ups.”