From Hype to Hope:
How Networked Neighbourhoods can make innovation work for everyone
To be effective, innovation must work for everyone. Yet, more than three decades into the digital revolution, the opportunities and benefits that technologies bring are still not equitably shared.
The UK’s innovation future does not have to trickle down from “supercharged high potential clusters”, it can also grow from the neighbourhood scale up.
This Green Paper, commissioned by Phoenix Court, explores how a neighbourhood-scale approach to innovation and technology diffusion, that starts with building stronger relationships between people, can inspire a culture shift across the UK that makes innovation work for everyone.
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From Hype to Hope: How Networked Neighbourhoods can make innovation work for everyone is available to download as a PDF.
Innovation starts with the confidence to have a go, to explore, to make something new or take something else apart and show it to your friends, or ask for help and support.
It is possible to rapidly spark a culture of inclusive innovation across the UK, that begins in neighbourhoods and forms a golden network of locally rooted community incubator organisations, supported by long-term investment and clear success measures. As well as creating new innovation potential, this will strengthen social bonds and help build better places to live.
Networked Neighbourhoods are hyper-local innovation zones – open, place-based networks in which a wide range of people have the opportunity to build relationships and use innovation to create social and economic benefit, solve problems, grow businesses, and acquire new skills.
Connected Organisations are community incubators that serve as “beneficial attractors” in Networked Neighbourhoods. They actively deliver benefits such as fostering relationships, teaching new skills, creating pathways to new opportunities, and distributing funds. Connected organisations take a range of forms and include libraries, media centres, volunteer communities, membership organisations, innovation hubs, and co-working spaces.
“Start with the thesis of being a good neighbour”
Rather than assuming the benefits of R&D will organically trickle down to people and places, this paper proposes an ecosystem approach to innovation - one in which resilient networks of local innovators are built from the neighbourhood up, building a network of connected people and places across the UK.
Our recommendations
This Green Paper aims to spark an alternative, additive approach to innovation across the UK. We propose an “act-analyse-invest-repeat” approach that defines a new set of success measures for inclusive growth and builds the resilience and capabilities of new and existing innovation networks.
1. Five years’ core funding to 25 existing Connected Organisations outside of the Greater Southeast, supported by Neighbourhood Investment Funds.
2. Invest in fast followers to rapidly build a network of Networked Neighbourhoods across the UK.
3. Create regionally managed inclusive investment funds that can receive, invest and distribute different kinds of capital and grant funding from a range of sources, including central, national and local governments; public and philanthropic funders including the National Lottery Community Fund; and venture capital.
4. Define success for inclusive growth, using data from the “what works” experiment set out above
Help us rethink innovation
We have shared questions throughout the paper — and we need your help to answer them. From sustainable approaches to finance and investment to rethinking the UK innovation theory of change, we want to build a strong case that innovation is not just an elite activity — it can and should work for everyone, building a stronger, more resilient society that works for all of us. Email hello@careful.industries with your ideas.