Realising the Power of Place-Based Community Innovation for the UK

by Rachel Coldicutt

This essay builds on The Case For Community Tech and outlines the role that place-based community innovation can play in the UK’s social and economic recovery. It describes a human-scale approach to technology and frames innovation as regenerative activity that delivers real benefits for everyone in both the short- and long-term.

A group of people in a local neighbourhood

Community tech creates social capital, good jobs, and solutions that meet local people’s needs in cost-effective, useful ways.

As few community organisations deploy or develop cutting-edge new technologies, they are largely unrecognised as innovators - but their technologies reach people and solve problems that new applications of artificial intelligence and quantum computing do not. Cultivating community tech will not just provide invaluable infrastructure for neighbourhoods enduring the cost of living crisis, it will also be important for the UK’s future renewal, prosperity, and sustainability.

This essay unpacks the following recommendations, and sets out the role of community tech in diffusing innovation, increasing skills, solving urgent problems, creating purpose, and bringing people together.

Develop a national network of place-based community tech organisations that shares code, capabilities, and standards, supported by a community of practice
Support UK-focussed, place-based innovation and technology diffusion by building community tech into a refreshed Innovation Strategy
Embed community tech as essential Levelling Up infrastructure.

1. Building a national network of community tech organisations

Our vision is that community tech can eventually grow into a national network of small-scale, place-based initiatives that support one another and grow together by sharing code, capabilities, and standards.

Parts of this network have begun to form organically, but there is a role for government and social investors to collaborate to cultivate and develop it further. Combined with Levelling Up ambitions, this would form the basis of a sustainable, inclusive national innovation ecosystem that would help regeneration to thrive, increase social capital, and facilitate the diffusion of digital skills and technologies.

By working collaboratively, not competitively, these participating community organisations would have an opportunity to develop, invest, and benefit from shared infrastructure that produces multiple local and long-term improvements. Rather than relying on the local presence of big tech companies to create more gig and service economy jobs or on the halo effect of private-sector investment, cultivating a network of community tech organisations would enable increased community ownership, better local jobs, and the prioritisation of value that sticks to places and supports knowledge and skills sharing between communities.

These ambitions are unpacked in more detail in our report The Case for Community Tech. With support from Power to Change, Promising Trouble will begin gathering requirements for the development of a UK community of practice in 2023.

2. A refreshed UK Innovation Strategy

UK government policies tend to position R&D and innovation as something exceptional and transformational, focused on “unleashing the potential” of moonshots and decacorns, and enabling the ideas of “brilliant people” to be rapidly accelerated. Traditional measures of the effectiveness of innovation include the numbers of new patents that are registered, the impact of R&D funding on productivity and profitability, and the importance of British innovation as a measure of our soft power, but they do not dwell so much on the effect of technologies on our everyday lives, or the way in which groundbreaking inventions and discoveries diffuse through the wider technological landscape. While celebrated giant leaps are rightly championed as touchstones of modern progress, they do not represent the whole innovation economy, and their benefits do not automatically trickle down.

To put this in context, it is important to understand that the most well-known moonshots, such as DeepMind’s AlphaFold, are not simply hero projects but superhero projects, and their rarity is one of the things that makes them so exceptional and exciting. But a national approach to innovation cannot just depend on backing the few high-status people and projects on the edge of groundbreaking discovery or boosting private sector investment. As the UK's Council for Science and Technology set out in a letter to the Prime Minister in 2021, moonshot status requires simultaneously meeting a complex set of societal, political, and scientific requirements. Focusing on these exceptional projects might contribute to the UK’s international status as a “science superpower”, but it does not necessarily form the foundations of a beneficial culture of innovation that will lead to systematically – and sustainably – levelling up the country as a whole.

Moreover, invention is not the same as operationalisation. To paraphrase William Gibson, some elements of the future may already be here, but it is extremely difficult to evenly distribute them. If the UK is to be a truly innovative nation, the rewards of that innovation should make a positive difference for everyone across the country.

As the recent UK Government AI Action Plan demonstrates, issues of market readiness including legal and regulatory uncertainty, privacy concerns, public perception, and lack of infrastructural support are just some of the many challenges that can limit the take-up of a new technology. And while new patents might lead to increased market share for their inventors, their overall impact on the UK economy is limited: after all, 1 in 4 businesses have not adopted basic ICT in their management practices, let alone implemented cutting-edge innovations.

Focussing on this kind of transformative, top-down innovation without also cultivating local capacity and developing useful infrastructure risks hollowing out national capacity and making it impossible for “left-behind” neighbourhoods to catch up. Some course correction for this is offered in the Levelling Up white paper, but the proposed adoption of the Medici Method, which relies on spillover from the interplay of academic research and private-sector R&D to transform places, puts significant emphasis on one mode of innovation – a mode that relies to a great extent on happenstance and synchronicity.

Investing in community tech does not take away from the value of these projects, but recognises that a mixed innovation economy is necessary if new technologies and inventions are going to have a positive economic impact beyond existing geographical centres for R&D. This is important for national economic renewal because, as a recent Institute for Government paper sets out, innovation can look very different in different contexts:

There is more to innovation than new ideas. In lowertech sectors such as retail, accommodation and the arts, this will often look less exciting, involving the diffusion of existing ideas and practices (often through better management practices). But it is likely to be especially important for some of the lowest productivity places where these lower-tech sectors are big shares of the economy

Small-scale innovation is by no means a new concept, but it is often deprecated – sometimes for reasons of profitability and efficiency, and other times because it does not seem particularly politically exciting. Writing in 1973, economist E. F. Schumaker called the tendency to be impressed only by big solutions “gigantism”, and he proposed it was both possible and appropriate to work at many scales rather than always defaulting to a “single size”.

Thirty years into the digital revolution, it is apparent that no single model of innovation can deliver everything a healthy, diverse society requires. Supporting a mixed innovation model in which small-scale, locally based innovation thrives is by no means inimical to one that promotes world-changing moonshots; fostering investment in digital public goods does not detract from the potential of world-leading academic or private-sector R&D. Enabling all of these at the same time will create a more dynamic, generative environment that could eventually become self-sustaining.

This is not an either/or argument or a case for limiting ambition, but for cultivating innovation at multiple levels: for nurturing a mixed, distributive economy that gives space for small ideas to grow, and which, to quote Kate Raworth, “disperse(s) and circulate(s) value as it is created” while also empowering more people to take a role in shaping their local social and economic infrastructure. Such a mixed approach is essential not just for addressing issues of income inequality in the UK, but for arriving at useful, applicable methods of innovating for the climate emergency. As Raworth says,

An economy that is regenerative by design is one in which people become full participants in regenerating Earth’s life-giving cycles so that we can thrive within planetary boundaries.

Innovation in this context becomes a challenge for the whole of society, not simply for “the most talented innovators”.

Imposing the same operating model in many different contexts and for many different users is one of the hallmarks of modern corporate digitisation. This has been applied with great success in many industries, but this globalising, homogenising approach is not fit for purpose in every setting. The innovators featured in this collection have all taken adaptive approaches, working with small-scale data to build trustworthy systems that deliver what their stakeholders need.

In Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson uses the word “platform” to describe this kind of symbiotic development. Writing in 2010, before the word became synonymous with Silicon Valley companies, Johnson celebrates the permeability and density of naturally occurring platforms, stating that “Platform building is, by definition, a kind of exercise in emergent behaviour”. What Johnson means by the term “platform” is a multi-purpose organism, created for one purpose but reused for many others. A coral reef, for instance, might appear to be create a solid platform amidst the ocean waves, but it is also:

A platform in a much more profound sense: the mounds, plates, and crevices of the reef create a habitat for millions of other species, an undersea metropolis of immense diversity… The beaver builds a dam to better protect itself against its predators, but that engineering has the emergent effect of creating a space where kingfishers and dragonflies and beetles can make a life for themselves. The platform builders and ecosystem engineers do not just open a door in the adjacent possible. They build an entire new floor.

Johnson describes platforms as being among the most generative methods of fostering innovation. Rather than the physical cluster model, which has inspired much place-based innovation orthodoxy in the hope of replicating Silicon Valley and which regards proximity as a forcing-function for innovation, platforms are creative spaces that encourage not just interdependence but renewal and reproduction: these “hotbeds” - when transposed from the natural world to coffeehouses and campuses - become places where “good ideas … productively collide and recombine”.

Community organisations in themselves are micro-versions of this: bakeries, radio stations, pubs, and libraries in which all kinds of people thrive, producing social capital and social infrastructure as a byproduct, and creating many “new floors” of adjacent possibilities in the process. Rather than trusting the process of the “Medici effect” and assuming that community organisations will be beneficiaries of spillover, the role of community organisations should be recognised as foundational not just to delivering Levelling Up but to offering respite during the inevitable period of increased poverty and declining support that will precede it.

Supporting these community organisations by embedding them in the Innovation Accelerators proposed in the Levelling Up white paper would intensify the opportunity for this symbiosis – anchoring communities alongside academia, business, finance, and culture as contributors to, and beneficiaries of, the “Medici effect”. This would mitigate some risks of top-down decision-making and help ensure any place-based outcomes reflected local need and contributed to necessary infrastructure. But on its own, this would not be enough.

The Levelling Up white paper includes proposals for three Innovation Accelerators, but there are many more left-behind neighbourhoods. As the authors say:

For levelling up to mean something to people in their daily lives, we need to reach into every community in the country, from city centres to rural areas, in order to start to rebuild social capital and self-reliance in our most abandoned neighbourhoods

Community businesses are most prevalent in the most deprived areas of England, with more than 50% based in the most deprived decile. As such, they are a ready-made network for delivering community-driven innovation that builds social capital, bridges new gaps in times of crisis, and increases engagement with digital technologies – all the time patterning spaces for local recovery and innovation. The kinds of innovation outlined in this essay collection – providing social care, good jobs, deeper civic engagement, skills development, and R&D opportunities – are not optional components for a healthy society, but foundational elements. Through the Community Tech: Makers and Maintainers Fund, Power to Change are supporting ten community organisations to invest in maintenance, infrastructure, and resilience: rather than project funding, this is adaptive, foundational support that will help equip these organisations to endure whatever shocks might come next. More of this support is needed as the UK adapts to long-term crisis management.

3. Embed community tech as essential Levelling Up infrastructure

The Levelling Up proposals in the white paper rely heavily on spillover from academic and private-sector R&D to increase social capital in left-behind places. This risks creating asymmetric, and perhaps undemocratic, power relationships, in which communities passively benefit from the “trickle down” effects of financial growth, with no power to shape them.

Community organisations, and the innovation they deliver, should instead be recognised as playing an integral part in equitable economic and social renewal, and offered support to do so – not just to fill essential gaps during the cost of living crisis, but to pattern what comes next.

Communities and community organisations are small-scale, alternative infrastructure that both respond to and help to shape the places in which they are based. Along with other organisations in the third sector, they are often required to make something out of nothing: taking over empty shops; repurposing and patching together off-the-shelf software; and galvanising people through both action and campaigns. Community organisations also help to create hope where hope might not have existed before.

As the UK enters a cost of living crisis, this alternative infrastructure will need strengthening in order to become more multi-purpose. Over the coming years, community organisations will need to be reactive and responsive to shocks; to offer solace and protection to those in need; and to find space to be generative – a part of laying down a more hopeful path for whatever comes next.

Digital technologies can be optimised for exactly this kind of connection and, as the essays here show, enabling residents to shape their own services and experiences is vital for strengthening neighbourhoods. Ruurd Priester’s essay about locally owned social network Gebiedonline describes how:

Better neighbourhoods are created by knowing each other, exchanging information, and working together.

This exchange of knowledge enables trustworthy relationships to grow, which in turn enable collaboration for beneficial local outcomes, such as organising for green transition.

Similarly, Rich Mason and Ben Jacob from Wings food delivery co-op explain how their model is radically place based, adapted for the needs of Finsbury Park residents and restaurants. The next stage for Wings is to expand into a multi-stakeholder co-op, co-owned by residents. The team’s ability to adapt to local challenges and concerns has been fundamental to their ability to offer things the gig economy cannot, including “well-paid jobs with progression prospects and holiday leave”.

Meanwhile Bianca Wylie’s contribution to this collection shows how participatory local decision-making can also lead to better public services that effectively solve urgent public needs. Julia Darby from Local Care Connect explains that this comes from an ability to really understand the problem at hand, not a compulsion to implement a global solution:

Communities themselves are the best placed to answer their own issues and design, develop, and ideally co-produce, their own services… It’s about relationship building and making connections between people at a neighbourhood level, where the people are the assets. I used to call it having a million cups of tea.

As previously discussed, this relatively small-scale connection to place might sound out of keeping with innovation orthodoxy, but the “million cups of tea” model speaks to the fact that there are many ways to apply digital technologies.

Conclusion

For traditional innovation policymakers, community tech might seem like small beer, but it represents an increasingly urgent need in our innovation economy: a lightweight, adaptive network of delivery-focussed organisations that can use digital technologies to understand and respond to granular local needs. If this was a fully automated system, governed from a dashboard in Whitehall, it would be hailed as a game changer, but it would also be risky, difficult to implement, and impossible to test. Community tech will become more important, more essential infrastructure through the cost of living crisis, as more people experience poverty and more neighbourhoods pull together to respond to deal with the resulting shocks. It is part of the alternative infrastructure that will bind places together, and it requires support to grow and adapt in beneficial ways.

This is the kind of innovative delivery that the UK needs now: diffusing innovation, increasing skills, solving urgent problems, creating purpose, and bringing people together. Many of the contributors to this collection have made change happen against the odds; as we enter the next phase of life in the UK, it is vital to support new and sustainable ways of delivering practical, empowering change – and more investment in community technologies is essential to making this happen in future-facing and maintainable ways.