In early 2025, Andrew Limb conducted over 50 interviews with stakeholders across Cambridge’s innovation ecosystem to explore what inclusive innovation means to them and what is currently happening in this context. His resulting report and blog reveal diverse interpretations of innovation and highlight key factors that enable or hinder more inclusive approaches across the city. Andrew offers here a set of reflections and recommendations on how inclusive innovation in Cambridge could become more impactful.
A former leader of Cambridge City Council liked to describe Cambridge as a “city of considerable magic”. As the place that gave birth to theories of gravity, evolution and DNA, as well as Concorde’s nose cone, the rules of football and Gary Numan’s first album, I would tend to agree.
However, data regarding the city’s economic, social and environmental conditions suggest that while the innovation economy has boomed in recent years, this has been accompanied by a stark inequality in life expectancy, significant housing pressures, low social mobility for those on low incomes and environmental stresses including on water supply and water quality.
This data suggests a clear case for change, a case for a more inclusive and sustainable approach to innovation-led growth.
Through my research interviews, a very broad range of activities and interventions were identified, falling under four broad categories of inclusive innovation. I met many brilliant people, doing many great things – things to help give a wider range of local people a chance to engage in the innovation economy, and things to bring innovative solutions to the social and environmental challenges Cambridge, and the world, faces.
These activities ranged from ground up initiatives creating career pathways for local young people, to medical and environmental innovations improving lives locally and globally, and corporate programmes supporting STEM (science, mathematics, engineering & technology) skills for local children. Some of these activities have the potential to have significant impact.
But there is not, seemingly, a coherent, overarching framework for inclusive innovation in Cambridge. This creates a risk of diffusing the effort and achieving suboptimal impact.
There is also low visibility and awareness of much of this activity, both within the ecosystem and more broadly. This can fuel a lack of understanding between sectors and communities.
The research suggests a case for an inclusive process to develop an overarching, mission-led framework for inclusive innovation-led growth in Cambridge. Cambridge can learn from other places, such as the London Borough of Camden that have taken the lead with this sort of approach.
There is also a case for a shared and concerted communication and engagement programme to raise awareness, involvement, input, understanding, trust and supportive relationships between the diverse stakeholders, sectors and communities living and working across the city.
The research suggests that a rare opportunity for transformational change currently exists, arising from – among other things – national Government’s strong and particular interest in Cambridge’s growth and its innovation ecosystem, and the anticipated advent of unitary local government in Cambridgeshire. This may, therefore, be the moment for Cambridge to find new ways of pooling local energies, talent and resources from all sectors to ensure that everyone has a stake in the future growth and direction of an innovation-led 21st century city.
I am sure the people I met, and the initiatives I heard about, were only the tip of the iceberg – I’m sure I could have gone on for months meeting more brilliant people and learning about more great projects. I apologise if I misunderstood or misrepresented anything; and to everyone who I didn’t have time to meet and every project I didn’t have room to mention.
But it felt as though much of this activity was taking place under the radar, without much awareness between the actors of the different-but-similar initiatives they were engaging in. Perhaps this is reflective of a wider Cambridge paradox – in a small city that prides itself on a high degree of networking, it appeared that there were still many separate Cambridges, co-existing in blissful (or not so blissful) ignorance of each other.
This not only means that those individual activities, whilst worthy and impressive in themselves, are perhaps not achieving that transformational impact on the city overall that they could if they were operating with a greater degree of coherence, ideally under a mutually-agreed and co-designed framework. It can also fuel a sense of suspicion, scepticism or mistrust between sectors and communities, as I heard from some interviewees.
Hence my call for all stakeholders from all sectors to take a step towards each other, to put personal and organisational primacy to one side for the greater good and to innovate new ways of collaboration, to help ensure that the bigger city that Cambridge will become is also a better city, a model of inclusive innovation and sustainable growth.
The degree of change implied by the innovative, collaborative approach suggested in this report would require everyone in the system to offer their skills and capabilities, as well as their resources, their funding and their assets.
Those who are currently thriving in our innovation economy may need to be willing not just to donate but to transfer those innovation skills – those capabilities. So that those who are currently being excluded and left behind are not dependent on handouts or noblesse oblige, but are actually empowered to have agency over their own destiny. And to build the skills and structures and processes that, on an ongoing basis, innovate to address the particular challenges facing their neighbourhoods and communities, as they arise. To design inclusivity into every decision, every investment, every board appointment, every built asset or public space.
That would be a truly inclusive innovation economy, blending world-leading problem-solving, entrepreneurial talent with community wealth building, energy and leadership. It would require deep change among bodies and among communities of people who may feel they have a sufficiently successful model already, or that they are protecting and nurturing well-established entities, objectives, status, codes and roles.
Are we all up for this?
- Can we bring about that degree of change?
- Can we be elite, without being elitist?
- Can we innovate in the way we collaborate?
- Can we turn a cluster into a genuinely integrated ecosystem?
- Can we seize the rare opportunity provided by local will, national focus and the prospect of singular democratic voice for the place, of bringing together our disparate talents and voices, of collaborating and sharing for the greater good?
- Rather than looking to replicate innovation clusters across the Atlantic that have generated their own social and environmental disbenefits, can we have the courage, confidence, collaboration and commitment to build the best Cambridge there could be? To genuinely be “a city of considerable magic”, for everyone?
After speaking to innovators and leaders across the city over the last two months, I am confident that Cambridge can.
Read the report: Inclusive innovation in Cambridge
The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy.
