Last September, Dr Phillip Budden told Milton Keynes Tech Week that having the ingredients for an innovation ecosystem isn't the hard part - getting them to work together is. Ten months on, a partnership across the Oxford-Cambridge corridor is finding out what that actually takes.
When Dr Budden spoke at the opening of Milton Keynes Tech Week last September, he drew a star on the screen. Five points: entrepreneurs, corporates, risk capital, universities, government. His argument, shaped by years of research at MIT Sloan alongside Professor Fiona Murray, was that these are the important parts of any functioning innovation ecosystem. Boston has them. Cambridge has them. Milton Keynes, he suggested, has them too.
I wrote about Budden's framework at the time, in a piece about creative destruction and the economics of innovation-driven growth. But there was a line from his talk that I keep coming back to. Having the five points of the star doesn't make you an ecosystem. What makes you an ecosystem is whether those groups actually work together. And "work together" means more than attending each other's events and saying warm things on LinkedIn.
What it means in practice is people from different institutions, with different funding cycles and reporting lines, speaking entirely different professional languages, sitting in the same room and deciding that the thing they share matters more than the things that divide them. It means pooling resources and committing to outcomes that none of them could deliver alone. It means someone being willing to do the connecting work that nobody else has time for. That is what Protospace has been doing for the past year.
We've been working with partners across the corridor from Milton Keynes through Silverstone and Westcott to Cranfield on a bid to UKRI's Local Innovation Partnerships Fund. LIPF is a £500 million programme designed to unlock innovation-led economic growth through place-based partnerships structured around the triple helix model of university, industry, and government. It is, in other words, exactly the kind of framework Phil Budden was describing.
We call it the Innovation Circuit, and the name is deliberate. The corridor from Milton Keynes through Silverstone and Westcott to Cranfield contains three technology clusters that would each anchor a regional innovation strategy on their own. Together, they sit within 30 miles of each other.
At Silverstone, the high-performance engineering cluster has grown into one of Europe's most concentrated innovation ecosystems. Over 150 companies in belong to the Silverstone Technology Cluster, part of a wider Silverstone economy that generates £4.9 billion in turnover, with businesses spending 14-25% of revenue on R&D. At Westcott, the space and propulsion cluster is centred on the National Space Propulsion Test Facility and a £20 million Space Hub that opened earlier this year. And running between them, connecting into Milton Keynes, is the corridor's connected and autonomous systems capability: Silverstone Circuit, MUEAVI, and Millbrook Proving Ground, all already running real-world trials.
I can't share the specifics of what's in our LIPF portfolio. UKRI keeps that confidential during assessment, and we're respecting the process. But the partnership is broad. Milton Keynes City Council, West Northamptonshire Council, and Buckinghamshire Council on the local authority side. Cranfield University and the Open University bringing research depth and international reach. The Silverstone Technology Cluster, Silverstone Park, the Westcott Space Cluster, Buckinghamshire Business First, MK College Group, and many others.
None of this happened quickly. The first conversations were exploratory, and the partnership took shape over months of meetings where the shared ambition gradually became clearer than the institutional differences.
Budden's framework helps explain why that patience matters. Ecosystems break down when one stakeholder group dominates. A university-led initiative that treats business as a passive beneficiary tends to produce research that nobody commercialises; a council-led one that treats research as a compliance exercise tends to produce strategies that nobody implements. Co-design, where everyone has something at stake and no single organisation owns the answer, is what actually works.
That has been the operating principle from the start. The councils bring local intelligence and democratic accountability. The universities bring research depth and international networks. Businesses bring market knowledge and the commercial discipline that stops things drifting into abstraction. Protospace sits between them, keeping the conversation going, making sure the proposal reflects what the corridor actually needs rather than what any one partner finds most convenient.
On the subject of pulling things together: Milton Keynes Tech Week returns this October. Delivered by Protospace, MKTW 2026 runs from 12 to 16 October, and this year we're introducing an official conference on Thursday 15th. In 2025, more than 23,000 people joined us across 30-plus events, with coverage reaching an audience of 3.37 million. Many of the organisations now involved in the LIPF work were in the room last year. Relationships that become formal partnerships tend to start with people who already know each other, and Tech Week is where a lot of those introductions happen.
If you're a business, institution, or community group with something to say about technology or innovation, we'd like you to host an event as part of the official programme. There's no cost. Details and submissions are open at miltonkeynestechweek.com. We're also talking to partners and sponsors; all proceeds go back into the ecosystem through Protospace CIC.
MKTW and LIPF come from the same instinct. Both are exercises in pulling together. The week makes the ecosystem visible. The rest of the year, we do the less visible work of making it function.