Accelerating Greater Manchester’s Growth into a Global AI Superpower
01 Jul 2025
The Turing Innovation Catalyst and its impact
Greater Manchester is becoming a global AI superpower, with the Turing Innovation Catalyst (TIC) playing a pivotal role. TIC is funded by Innovate UK and the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) as part of the Greater Manchester Innovation Accelerator and is incubated within the University. Since launch in 2023 TIC has been working to proactively develop the AI ecosystem in Greater Manchester and has worked with over 170 AI innovators and companies, and over 1,000 skill-seekers through a portfolio of programmes and funded support.
A collaborative approach
TIC has several strands: a venture builder, skills and talent programmes, AI ecosystem development, startup accelerator programme and Collaborative Research and Development (CRD) projects. In March, the IT Services Research Software Engineering (RSE) department played a critical role in guiding companies through the first round of CRD projects. Out of 54 companies that registered, 35 developed project plans, and 22 of these projects with the highest potential were completed. These projects leveraged AI to tackle diverse business challenges, from predictive analytics to natural language processing.
Senior Research Software Engineer, Jonny Taylor, said: “Working with local SMEs has been a rewarding new challenge for both members of the RSE team and the researchers we work with. By bridging the gap between innovation and cutting-edge research, we have helped researchers use their expertise and knowledge to solve real-world problems, as well as learning new technical skills. Not only does this drive innovation within Greater Manchester, but it also generates impact case-studies and partnerships for future industry collaborations for the University.”
Quick and easy access to powerful computing is crucial for running advanced AI models. The Platform Engineering Team supported this by implementing Amazon Sagemaker Studio. This cloud-based tool provided robust computational resources for training complex AI models including on-demand access to Graphics Processing Units (GPU’s) with private storage.
Andrew Proctor, Executive Lead for UK Education at Amazon Web Services, said: “We are delighted to support the University of Manchester and Turing Innovation Catalyst. On-demand access to high-powered compute resources via AWS Cloud will unlock and accelerate innovation across research and industry within Greater Manchester and help address real-world challenges.”
Further impact
TIC has significantly strengthened the region’s innovation ecosystem. By bridging academia and industry, the programme has empowered SMEs to adopt AI as a core operational tool. The CRD project strand attracted significant interest from companies across various sectors, including healthcare, digital marketing, green energy, and scientific research with thirteen companies were referred to the University’s Business Engagement and Knowledge Exchange team to explore further collaboration.
This success has led to additional funding for another year, and the team has already started building a new cohort of companies for groundbreaking CRD projects in TIC's second.