Tech and Innovation Summit 2026

Registration and Networking

Opening remarks

Keynote speaker

Few countries the this size of the UK produce as much original research, and few are as good at letting the companies that should follow slip away.

This panel gets into why: the tech-transfer terms that put founders off, the shortage of patient capital, and what it takes for a university or institute to back a spin-out properly rather than hold on too tight.

Coffee break

Keynote

A leading UK founder walks us through how they have built and scaled a deep-tech company from the UK, sharing insights into the capital, talent and infrastructure calls that made the difference, and the ones they would make differently.

For decades the UK has designed things and then paid other countries to make them. The new government has put reindustrialisation at the centre of its plans, with money and attention pushed out to the nations and regions.

From robotics and physical AI to low-earth-orbit compute and semiconductors, this panel asks what it would actually take to build our most important technologies here: the sites and grid connections, the supply chains, and the skilled people across every part of the UK.

Networking Lunch

A view from government on turning the UK's scientific strength into companies, revenue and jobs in every part of the country.

Good technology does not sell itself, and in this country the first serious customer is very often the state.

This panel looks at the machinery that gets emerging tech to market here: public procurement as a first order, and the funding and demand signals that turn a pilot into revenue. When should government buy, when should it put real money behind a company, and when is the most useful thing it can do simply to clear the path and step aside?

Every industrial strategy runs into the same argument in the end.

One side says a serious country picks a handful of technologies and companies and gets behind them, with procurement and public money, and that the UK's timidity is exactly why it keeps losing. The other says this is not the role for government, who instead should set fair conditions that enable UK companies of all sizes working across a range of technologies to flourish, before getting out of the way.

In this debate, we aim to get to the heart of why this matters, what we’re currently doing, and what we should do next.

Coffee break

Regulation is either the reason a company deploys in the UK first or the reason it goes somewhere easier.

This conversation looks at how faster, smarter rules, and bodies like the Regulatory Innovation Office, could make the UK the best place in the world to test and roll out new technology, from drones and robotics to engineering biology, and how to get there without a bonfire of the protections that are there for good reason.

Plenty of UK technology gets as far as a promising trial and no further. The value is captured in the leap after that: getting proven technology into everyday use at scale, in hospitals, factories, high streets and skies, and in every region rather than a lucky few.

Hear from speakers already deploying at scale as they share what it takes to get transformative tech into the places in every region, and what still stands in the way.

When a UK company is bought by an American giant, the founders win, the investors win, and the proceeds often fund the next wave of start-ups. So who cares where the head office ends up? Plenty of people, as it turns out.

One side will argue that a sale is a success, and that fretting about sovereignty just starves founders of buyers and capital. The other argues that ownership is control, of the jobs, the tax, the supply chain and the strategic capability, and that a country which sells every champion it builds is running hard just to stand still.

The aim of this debate is to explore whether it matters, for the UK's economic and strategic interests, that successful British companies end up owned by foreign acquirers, or whether a sale should simply be seen as a marker of success regardless of who ends up owning it.

Closing remarks

Networking drinks