Building on the previous session's exploration of the UK's connected innovation corridors, this panel turns the lens outward. Governments worldwide are making deliberate, strategic bets on technology, from Finland's national quantum computing programme to US federal AI investment and Asia's state-backed semiconductor strategies. The question is no longer whether governments should back innovation ecosystems, but how, and whether those approaches are working.

This session brings together leaders from across the globe to compare how different nations are structuring their innovation ambitions and what the results look like on the ground. Across investment, talent, technology, academia, and infrastructure, every ecosystem faces a version of the same core challenges. The value of bringing these perspectives into the same room is not simply to showcase difference, but to surface what is genuinely transferable: the policy decisions, funding models, and institutional relationships that have moved the needle elsewhere and could inform thinking here.

The discussion will ask: where have other governments got things right that the UK and its peers are still working through? What do shared challenges, from talent retention to deep tech commercialisation, look like when viewed through different national contexts? And what concrete lessons can ecosystems take home from each other?