The continued success of the Midlands’ most innovative businesses highlights the depth of its emerging tech talent. Firms like Midlands-based Inicio AI – last year’s KPMG UK Tech Innovator competition winner – are specialising in high growth and high innovation business models and exemplifying how the region can lead in pushing the boundaries of tech capability.
The latest edition of KPMG’s 2026 UK Tech Innovator competition is underway, with the shortlists due to be announced soon. The programme, once again, represents a new opportunity for the region’s fast-scaling tech businesses to showcase their potential and secure connections with global expertise and investors. Given the Midlands’ significant pool of innovation businesses, there is every reason to be confident that a regional player could excel, or even win, once again.
Yet success on this stage does not happen in isolation and increasingly depends on the strength of the wider ecosystem supporting these businesses.
This is why the Midlands benefits from world-class university spin-outs, professional services and early-stage investors. The question now is whether our infrastructure and skills can keep pace with our ambitions.
Infrastructure and skills will determine what comes next
If the Midlands is to continue to translate this momentum into sustained long-term growth, the focus needs to lie equally on both potential and delivery.
By better connecting leading research and enterprise hubs like Birmingham Knowledge Quarter with the wider region, it has the potential to create a globally competitive supercluster, one that can attract talent and investment at scale while accelerating cross-sector innovation.
However, that potential will not be realised through proximity alone, and will depend on sustained and coordinated investment in the fundamentals that underpin growth.
Transport is the most visible part of this. Projects such as the Birmingham Eastside Metro expansion can play a transformative role in improving connectivity, making it easier for people to access jobs and for businesses across the connecting towns and cities to tap into a skilled talent pool. That said, without attractive places to live and work, the region risks limiting its own ability to attract and retain talent.
Alongside infrastructure, skills will be just as important. While the Midlands benefits from a strong base of universities and a highly skilled workforce, demand for advanced technical and digital skills is growing quickly. Meeting that demand will require closer collaboration between businesses, educators and policymakers, as well as a more sustained focus on training, reskilling and lifelong learning.
Positive steps are already being taken. The government’s £3,000 grant for firms hiring young people who have been out of work for six months or more is a practical example of how policy can widen access to opportunity while supporting businesses to build future talent pipelines.
It is also important that this growth is not confined to just a handful of locations. There are huge strengths in the Coventry and Warwickshire electrification cluster for example, but this hub has faced challenges in accessing specialist skills partly due to connectivity constraints. By continuing to improve links across the region, this will help to unlock further potential and ensure growth is more evenly distributed across the region.
The final piece of the jigsaw here is scale-up funding – appropriate access to the investment needed to support our innovative start-ups grow into established and profitable organisations. While the government’s recent steps to address our national deficiency are welcome, a consistent and concerted effort will be important to drive prosperity.
Confidence remains strong despite challenges
Even though these structural issues demand attention, business confidence across the Midlands remains high.
Our latest Private Enterprise Barometer shows strong confidence in the West Midlands, with 90% of private businesses optimistic about their growth prospects. That is translating into action, with product and service innovation cited as a leading investment priority for over a third (36%) of businesses in the region, followed closely by investment in digital transformation (35%) and AI (34%).
The region is leaning into change to drive economic growth. Businesses are diversifying their offerings, investing in new capabilities and looking outward, with two-thirds (66%) reporting an increased appetite to expand into new international markets. This reflects clear ambition, supported by established strengths and a growing pipeline of start-ups and scale-ups.
There is real momentum in the region but it’s now time to ensure that the systems supporting that growth can keep pace.
From momentum to long-term impact
The Midlands does not need to prove that it can innovate, the evidence is already there in its businesses, its sectors and its growing international outlook.
What matters now is whether the region can create the conditions for that innovation to scale and endure.
Realising the Midlands’ full potential of the will require a joined-up approach, one that recognises that infrastructure, housing, connectivity and skills are not separate challenges but interdependent parts of the same growth story.
Get that right and the region will continue to shine as one of the UK’s most dynamic centres of innovation.
