A new report out today commissioned by Tech North and published by the RSA in partnership with the Impact Hub, shows just how much potential there is.
The Northern tech sector is booming. Jobs in Northern tech are increasing 10 times faster than jobs in non-digital sectors, and the productivity of digital workers is 53 percent higher than the productivity of non-digital workers. Manchester has a world-class digital marketing cluster, healthtech has become a strong suit for Leeds, and Liverpool is building a reputation for expertise in the Internet of Things says the authors and yet there is much more that can be done.
Raising productivity to the national average for tech workers would result in a £5.7 billion increase in GVA (gross value added) for the Northern economy. And increasing the rate of digital self-employment to the national average would give rise to over 9,700 more tech founders in the region.
The report highlights several existing examples of local collaboration. In manufacturing, Manchester-based tech company 2M Automation worked with the Nissan car plant in Sunderland to improve operations on its machine conveying system. While in the field of health, Yorkshire-based company Immedicare created a telecare service that links care homes in Airedale with clinicians in the nearby hospital.
The digital economy is a source of prosperity for the North. The report’s analysis shows that digital jobs in the region are increasing at ten times the rate of jobs in non-digital sectors, and that the productivity of digital workers is 53 percent higher than that of non-digital workers.
This in turn has fed into higher earnings, with digital workers in the North being paid an average of £16 per hour compared with £10 per hour for their counterparts elsewhere in the economy. If there was ever a sector that could make real the aspirations for a private sector-led and innovation-focused Northern Powerhouse, the digital economy is it.
The authors suggest a number of ways that this could be achieved including the introduction of Tech Taster vouchers as a way of allowing businesses to get a taste of what tech could do for their operations and establishing a Digital Powerhouse that collates private and public sector contracts in one place, establishing a Northern hub of commercial opportunities.
The Championing of the tech co-operative model where co-operatives should be promoted in the North as a means of helping tech firms band together and achieve economies of scale and making the North a testbed for experimental tech: Northern tech clusters should look at ways they could become proving grounds for experimental technologies (e.g., the use of robotics in social care or blockchain technology in the welfare system).
