Universities built the Catapults. Now they should release them

The UK’s new prime minister, Andy Burnham, has staked his reputation on place-based reindustrialisation. He wants to build on the manufacturing strengths of towns and cities and turn home-grown start-ups into companies of scale.

Universities are central to that project. And so are the Catapult centres they host. But as someone who has spent most of his career inside them, I think the relationship between the two needs to change.

Twenty-five years ago, precision engineering entrepreneur Adrian Allen and I co-founded the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) with Boeing and the University of Sheffield. We built it at Orgreave, site of the most bitter industrial confrontation in modern British history. It was unpromising ground for a cluster of global manufacturing talent, yet the area is now recognised as one of the most concentrated centres of innovation in the country.

This approach became a template for the Catapult network. Born of the entrepreneur Hermann Hauser’s 2010 review into “the current and future role of technology and innovation centres in the UK”, the network created a national translational research capability at a time when the main barrier to industrial innovation was access to advanced equipment and demonstration facilities.

The AMRC became the northern flagship of the High Value Manufacturing Catapult when it launched in 2011, alongside another six centres covering other areas of national priority. At the time, the great push in aerospace was to machine large, monolithic parts from solid aluminium plate rather than assemble them from many smaller pieces, as previously. That required huge five-axis machine tools that few firms in the supply chain could afford.

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A university-hosted centre was ideally placed to plug that gap. It could buy such tools, often with suppliers, demonstrate them and then develop better machining techniques. Universities could raise capital, hold large estates, recruit engineers and researchers and offer industry a credible, neutral home for collaboration.

Two things have shifted since then, however. The first is the technology. The barriers to industrial innovation are now less about access to machines and more about data: capturing it from the factory floor, analysing it and putting artificial intelligence and machine learning to work on it. We no longer need cathedral-sized halls of machine tools to make the case to industry for a new process or piece of technology. We can build digital twins, fit sensors to a company’s own production equipment, and connect, analyse and improve processes as they run. The Catapult of tomorrow will be knowledge-intensive and asset-light.

The second shift is in the sector’s finances. A large share of English universities are forecasting deficits, and institutions across the UK are cutting courses and posts. In that climate, carrying the estate, depreciation and operating risk of large industrial facilities is a burden that is hard to justify.

These centres sit on university balance sheets but are steered mainly by Innovate UK priorities and industrial income targets. Their staff often occupy an awkward position between academic and commercial career structures, and their leaders answer to vice-chancellors while being judged on outcomes their host institutions do not set. That is not a recipe for clear accountability on either side.

Meanwhile, the Catapult network itself has grown by accretion. What began as a tightly defined model now spans nine centres with increasingly overlapping remits, each chasing centrally dictated funding calls. Some overlap is healthy. But there are legitimate questions about mission creep, duplication and accountability, particularly to the regions the centres are meant to serve.

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So why not sever the link between universities and Catapults, establishing the latter as an entirely independent network?

The obvious objection is that universities would lose something valuable: industrial access, research income, impact case studies for the Research Excellence Framework, a pipeline for doctoral students and a visible contribution to their local economies.

But ownership is not the only way to secure such benefits. An independent network would commission universities as research and development partners. There would be joint appointments, secondments in both directions, shared doctoral training and access to industrial data and test beds.

Universities would keep the relationships and the impact while shedding the capital risk and the governance tensions. They could return their attention to what they do best, fundamental research and teaching, rather than running quasi-commercial operations.

This would not be a leap into the unknown. Hauser’s 2010 report made much of his admiration of Germany’s Fraunhofer Society: a single national organisation of more than 70 research translation institutes, independent of universities yet woven into them, with institute directors typically holding chairs at partner universities. The UK borrowed Fraunhofer’s funding formula – roughly a third core grant, a third competitive research and a third business contracts – but not its institutional architecture.

Now is the time to adopt that architecture, too. The Catapult network’s current five-year, £1.6 billion settlement with Innovate UK runs to March 2028, and the business case for the next one is due next summer, in step with the Spending Review. The coming months, therefore, are the last realistic window to redesign the system. Miss it, and the network rolls over into another like-for-like renewal.

The prime minister should establish a small reindustrialisation task force, led by manufacturers and working alongside mayors, with universities as R&D delivery partners. Its remit should  be to map where capability is genuinely unique across the UK and where it is duplicated, testing the case for consolidating the network into one national body. I believe that it would find the case to be strong.

Centres would be accountable both regionally and nationally. Local industry would set technology road maps that play to the strengths of each regional cluster: advanced metals and defence in one place, offshore energy in another, composites or life sciences elsewhere. But centres would compete as well as collaborate. And they would be judged not against activity but against demanding measures of economic outcomes: start-ups and frontier companies scaled, private investment attracted, productivity improved, exports and high-value jobs created, and strategically important supply-chain capability retained.

Universities can approach the coming review defensively, protecting assets and income streams. Or they can help design what comes next, negotiating the terms of a partnership that secures their research access and impact while freeing them from risks they are poorly placed to carry.

Rewiring is not an admission of failure. The Catapult network is one of the more imaginative pieces of British industrial policy of the past two decades. But a system built for one generation of technology must evolve to exploit the next.

Keith Ridgway is co-founder of the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre with Boeing and is now senior executive in manufacturing at the University of Strathclyde.