If you build the ecosystem the founders will come, guest blog by Jon Hope, CodeBase's chief strategy officer

The Ecosystem Exchange conference in Edinburgh began with a simple provocation: if founders shape the future, who is shaping the ground they build on?

When we launched the event in 2024 with Barclays Eagle Labs and the Edinburgh Futures Institute, that question had no real home. The UK had conferences for startups and investors, but few for the people responsible for creating the conditions that make innovation possible.

Two editions later, the answer is emerging. When ecosystem builders gather with intent, something shifts. A fragmented landscape begins to act like a community. Conversations move from polite abstraction to honest deep dives. Productive friction surfaces faster. Alignment does not mean consensus, but clarity, and clarity is the foundation on which national ambition is built.

The 2025 Ecosystem Exchange underscored a truth many already sensed: the UK cannot wait for a perfect blueprint from elsewhere. The dominant narratives of the United States and China are often misread as inevitabilities, yet their stories are still being written too. If we want a future that works for us, we must write it ourselves. That requires a different kind of ecosystem, one built on trust, mission-driven ambition, and the ability to turn world-class research into real products at real speed.

Across two days of conversation, a pattern emerged around technology. It is no longer a scarce asset. In a world of abundant models, open-source tools and affordable computational power, technology itself has become a commodity. Trust is now the true differentiator. The fundamentals still matter: solve meaningful problems, build products people want, find customers early. But ecosystems will only thrive where institutions earn founder trust through coherence, transparency and delivery.

Nowhere is that opportunity clearer than in our universities. The UK has extraordinary research depth, yet the journey from discovery to deployment remains slow and uneven. We do not lack innovation; we lack translation. The growing conversation around “scale-outs,” ventures built from research with experienced operators embedded from the start, points toward a more ambitious model. It respects academic excellence while accelerating commercial execution. This is not about replacing spinouts but complementing them with structures designed for speed.

What stood out most at this year’s Exchange was the appetite to think bigger. Participants from every region and sector recognised that their challenges rhyme more than they differ. Whether in Scotland, Manchester, Bristol or Oxford, the task ahead is similar: connect what already exists, collapse silos, strengthen incentives and build national pathways founders can actually navigate. Perhaps most importantly, ensure that the public sector acts not only as funder but as early customer, signalling mission and accelerating adoption.

Ecosystems are ultimately human systems. They thrive when people feel connected, supported and seen, and they stagnate when institutions retreat into defensive postures. What we witnessed in Edinburgh was the early shape of a movement: a collective voice determined to design a UK innovation story that is not derivative, but distinct.

The momentum is real. The belief is real. Now comes the work of turning clarity into action.