Our manufacturing sector still employs over 294,000 workers - far more than either Wales or Scotland - and remains second only to the East Midlands in driving UK plc through stormy economic times.
But there are reasons for concern, not least of which should be our region's chronically low levels of private R & D investment.
This isn't just a recent tightening-of-the-belt contraction, either. Despite Yorkshire & Humber region making up a tenth of England's population, our business R & D investment even in 2008 was the second lowest in the country at a relatively measly £433 million.
This was just 3.1% of national spend on product origination and only under-competed by the North-East, whose firms invested a mere 1.8% in research and innovation.
Compare this with the powerhouses of the East of England's businesses, at 24.8% of total business R & D capital input, the South-East at 23.4% and the North-West at 12.7% and some measure of Yorkshire's innovation decline emerges.
With the EU's Lisbon 2010 targets setting a goal of 3% of GDP for R&D, both our region at 1.2% and the UK 2.1% are seriously lagging behind. Nationally, business expenditure as a proportion of total R&D expenditure, at 68%, is just above the Lisbon target of 67% but, regionally, again Yorkshire and Humber at 44% fall well below. In fact, we underperform the UK and EU15 average in just about all innovation-related factors.
And perhaps most worrying of all, only a third of companies in the region regard creativity and innovation as contributory factors to their business's competitiveness - consistently below the national average - and only 10% of firms have R&D links to universities.
Surveys of firms in the region repeatedly report that higher than the national average of firms expect to invest more in Product and Process Innovation, but actual investment levels remain stubbornly low.
All of this hasn't gone unnoticed by the wider world: an Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) review, having identified a lack of truly world-class innovation infrastructure in the North of England, questioned whether we could compete globally without a significant public investment.
To meet this challenge, Leeds City Region commissioned the Work Foundation to map the existing innovation infrastructure.
Their findings reported considerable strengths in the city region's universities and private companies, but that the resulting economic outputs did not truly reflect these strengths, and in a further study undertaken earlier this year advised closer cooperation between the business and academic sectors.
The abolition of Yorkshire Forward and its replacement with the Local Enterprise Partnerships and tightly focussed Enterprise Zones has also changed the landscape, though pressure on the banks to lend more, more state-sponsored apprenticeships, and the likelihood of Siemens creating thousands of jobs in a turbine manufacturing plant will all clear out a little rust in the local economy, but none of this directly affects our ability to shepherd new products to market.
Nonetheless, there remain grounds for optimism. While UK R & D private business investment rose by an understandably slight 1.6% from 2008 to 2010, our region's surged by 13.4%, albeit from a low base. Employment of R & D full-time workers or equivalents also held steady throughout the period at 7,000.
Academic research and higher education are flourishing: a total of nine universities and three higher-education institutions, together with a regional arm of the Open University, last year produced 10% of England's graduates, offering some very attractive skillsets. Of these 38% qualified in science and technology subjects, 16% in business and administrative studies, 15% in medicine and dentistry (including allied to medicine), and11% in education.
The OECD and Work Foundation conclusions are clear cut, and perhaps not that unexpected. While academic research, teaching and innovation in the region remain vibrant, our business investment shows signs of improvement, but against such a harsh economic backdrop will remain fragile.
Meanwhile, the threats to Yorkshire manufacturing remain very real: as of March this year, 3,000 manufacturing jobs disappeared in the last year across the region. Other partial and full closures have yet to appear on the balance sheets - including 900 jobs losses in September at BAE's military jet manufacturing plant at Brough in East Yorkshire.
Yorkshire Innovation: Academia Healthy, But Business R & D Needs Further Improvement
