Inside the UK’s Silicon Valley 

Andrew Williamson, managing partner of Cambridge Innovation Capital, talks to PMP about growing the UK’s preeminent science and technology innovation ecosystem and creating commercial opportunities.

The UK can justly claim to produce world-class science and technology – but the path to commercialisation has not always been smooth. The prospects for the country’s future growth now rest heavily on converting the academic research emanating from the ‘Golden Triangle’ – Cambridge, Oxford and London – into economic opportunities.

Cambridge was ranked the top science and technology cluster by intensity for the third successive year, in the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Global Innovation Index 2024, beating Silicon Valley into a close second. The University of Cambridge reports it contributes nearly £30 billion to the UK economy annually, including over £23 billion from commercialisation and innovation activities. It commissioned a report last year that estimated the combined value of its tech ecosystem at $191 billion (£147 billion).

Andrew Williamson is at the centre of this activity. The managing partner of Cambridge Innovation Capital (CIC) recently co-chaired the UK government’s independent review of university spin-out companies and chaired the BVCA’s venture capital committee. After completing his PhD in Cambridge, Williamson studied at Berkeley and spent his career in the US, mostly in Silicon Valley, before returning to take his first job in the UK. CIC occupies a unique place within the ecosystem, with a propriety agreement with the University of Cambridge.

The Cambridge ecosystem has two core strengths for potential commercialisation. The first pillar is deep tech, including the areas of artificial intelligence, semiconductors, quantum computing and robotics. The second is life sciences, which includes the development of therapeutic drugs, gene therapies, diagnostics and medical devices. “Cambridge is the best place in Europe for all these sectors,” says Williamson. “It provides a rich vein of investment opportunities.”

Commercialising science

The Cambridge ecosystem inevitably draws comparison to how Silicon Valley grew up around Stanford University, gaining momentum over the 1970s and 1980s. “The US has lent into technology-enabled economic growth since the Second World War,” says Williamson. “There’s been more of a culture of early-stage start-ups in the US – we’re about 20 years behind.”

The UK started commercialising science later with an identifiable Golden Triangle emerging around 2000. Williamson says this has produced a clear change in mindset among recent generations of graduates.

“As a student in the 1990s, there was limited amount of commercialisation activity in the UK, and people maybe even saw it as tainting the purity of fundamental science. Now all the best graduates of the current generation want to work in our startups and spin-ups. Those are the coolest jobs and regarded as ‘the thing to do’,” he says.

He adds the “vast majority” of academics under 50 want to see the impact of their research achieved through commercialisation. Beyond writing academic papers and presenting at conferences, this means seeing real-life products cure diseases, accelerate computing or address climate change.

Says Williamson: “There are so many possibilities from science, but you must commercialise and do it at scale to have an impact. The UK has now fully bought into that, and obviously it aligns perfectly with the national agenda around technology-enabled economic growth and the ‘science superpower’ agenda.”

While former prime minister Rishi Sunak’s earlier Silicon Valley career aligned his outlook with the sector, the impetus has transferred intact to the new Labour government. “Almost completely,” says Williamson. “It’s very interesting. At the end of January, there were big announcements from [chancellor] Rachel Reeves about doubling the growth rate and size of the Oxford-Cambridge Growth Corridor, the Silicon Valley of Europe.”

Science minister Patrick Valance has been appointed as the Oxford-Cambridge Innovation Champion to support new investment into research parks and transportation. “It really sets the table for us to then turbocharge growth on top of that infrastructure. There’s no daylight between the new government and the last one for this growth agenda. We have a pretty supportive fiscal environment compared to the US,” he says.