Developing an economic assessment for internationalising the UK National Centre for Ageing

The National Centre For Ageing (NIC-A) is a new centre of excellence focused on advancing UK’s already leading position in ageing issues. Based at the University of Newcastle, it works closely with the Medical Research Council, UK Research and Investment, and InnovateUK to push forward ageing policy, practice and programmes. NIC-A’s early successes include its VOICE initiative (designed to give senior members of society greater influence in innovation and product development relating to ageing) and raising the profile of the Ageing sector as a major new market for product and service providers.

Ageing is, of course, a worldwide issue and the confluence of this with NIC-A’s UK-leading position in the policy area presented the opportunity, in October 2019, for Steer Economic Development to develop a substantive ‘think piece’ on the role that the organisation might play in driving knowledge transfer with other international jurisdictions. Linking with the growing emphasis being given to ‘Global Britain’ and the ‘Contact Point’ model developed under Horizon 2020, our paper proposed an organisational agenda of how NIC-A’s could start to spin out and embed expertise internationally.

Our report coincided with NIC-A’s success in securing InnovateUK funding to take its knowledge and service set to mainland China. We have just been appointed, following a competitive process, to support the monitoring and evaluation of this new programme.