Manufacturing is showing signs of returning to the UK, a phenomenon referred to as onshoring with a prime example being Raspberry Pi’s decision to move some manufacturing from China to Wales.
A recent report on the topic by Cambridge University’s Dr Finbarr Livesey, ‘Made at home, owning abroad,’ [pdf] lays out the case for nurturing this nascent trend, which it says could help deliver up to 200,000 new jobs to the UK.
The focus of the report is mid-sized businesses, the one’s which are small and agile enough to restructure, yet large enough to invest in new production methods. While these companies do need support, so do the startups coming in behind with yet more innovative production methods that will also enable a new dynamic for manufacturing in the UK.
In the first quarter of 2013 several projects emerged in a number of areas that demonstrate the UK is still at the cutting edge (ahem) of manufacturing. These aren’t just research projects in isolation either, the £1.7m ‘metal bashing’ work of Dr Allwood has £1.2m worth of support from Firth Rixson, Jaguar/Land Rover and Siemens and is closely tied to current industry solutions.
Smaller companies are beginning to receive some support though – one of the purposes of the Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Large Area Electronics (LEA) will be to help young companies with a strong capability in one particular area meet potential partners who can help them build the kind of complete market systems demanded by end users.
With the ‘centre’ based initiatives there’s also a very deliberate strategy that gives Cambridge’s startups a strong home advantage for although they always involve global collaborators, a cursory glance of the partners for both the LEA and Cambridge Graphene Centres produces names such as Tonejet, Aixtron, Novalia, Pragmatic Printing, Eight19 and Plastic Logic and shows that the first beneficiaries are most often local.
This article first appeared in the Cambridge Tech Quarter.
Source Article from http://www.cabume.co.uk/the-cluster/cambridges-home-advantage-in-manufacturing-revival.html
