INSIGHTS / News

We sat down with Debbie Johnson, Head of Innovation Talent and Skills at Innovate UK, to find out how the organisation is doubling down on support for innovative businesses, and what that means for you as you take your next steps beyond ICURe.

Tell us about your role at Innovate UK. What does it involve in practice?

My role is externally facing; it’s about supporting innovative businesses to grow and scale by making sure they have access to people with the right skills and talent. But it’s also about future-proofing the UK. As frontier technologies emerge, we need to understand the impact on the workforce and translate that into skills programmes. AI is the most obvious example right now, how do we make sure people are equipped to use it in an ethical, responsible, and professional way?

Where do you see the biggest skills gap when it comes to AI adoption in UK businesses?

I think it’s important to separate two things: adoption and frontier. Adoption is about how AI integrates into everybody’s everyday roles, that sits more within general population skills. The government’s AI Opportunities has some great programmes to support. At the frontier, we’re seeing genuinely exciting transformations across sectors. In life sciences, for example, AI intersecting with other frontier technologies can accelerate clinical trials in remarkable ways. But those two tracks need to be understood separately.

Innovate UK has published a new strategy. What’s the key shift?

Historically, we focused on the project. But what we’ve seen is that the UK isn’t always realising the opportunity those projects represent, we haven’t hand-held companies enough through to broad commercialisation and adoption. The new strategy says this isn’t just about the project; it’s about how we realise the success of the company, help it scale and grow, and keep it in the UK. For programmes like ICURe, that’s a massive opportunity.

What are the common skills gaps you see in university spin-outs?

The good news is that universities are producing excellent technical talent, the science and the ideas are genuinely world-class. Where programmes like ICURe add real value is in layering on the commercial and entrepreneurial acumen that helps those ideas find their market. That product-market mindset isn’t always something that comes naturally from a research environment, but it absolutely can be developed, and that’s exactly what ICURe is designed to do.

The same applies to business model evolution. Start-ups that thrive are the ones that ask the right questions at the right time, when to bring in a CEO, when the founder moves into a CTO role, when fractional leaders make more sense than full employment. Getting confident about that journey is a real accelerator.

What support is available through Innovate UK after ICURe?

It depends on alignment. The new prospectus and the UK’s Industrial Strategy have set out where the UK wants to win. Innovate UK is focused on six of the Industrial Strategy sectors (advanced manufacturing, clean energy, create industries, defence, life sciences and digital and technologies) and the frontier technologies within them. At the heart of our new model will be Velocity which supports companies to accelerate their growth journey. Velocity is an account management service designed to stay with high-potential, innovative businesses throughout their innovation journey, from first engagement with Innovate UK to serious capital and beyond.

There’s our Business Growth Service, offering expert support across many disciplines such as HR, IP, regulation, and professionalisation. There’s also our Innovate UK Business Connect programme, which includes networking, events, funding literacy, and sector communities.

Can you tell me more about Business Connect?

It’s a community aligned to the industrial strategy and frontier technologies, with events (many online), access to experts and collaboration-building. It’s a way to understand what public funding looks like, because grant support won’t work for everyone. It costs time to turn your idea into something aligned with a grant opportunity, and sometimes other routes are better. I’d encourage anyone to visit the website, look at what’s there, and connect with the sector experts. For some companies, that landscape itself becomes a place to grow.

What advice would you give to an entrepreneurial lead finishing ICURe?

Get to know your community. It’s an investment of time, but it stops you duplicating things that already exist and creates alignment so your product becomes so much stronger. There’s a whole plethora of public support out there, Knowledge Transfer Partnerships, ICURe, UKRI’S Future Leaders Fellowships- which has a business-facing side. You don’t know what you don’t know, and that’s the biggest challenge. Use the ICURe alumni network, use Business Connect, and keep getting involved in what’s aligned to where your technology is taking you.

Access Innovate UK’s Business Connect website