Innovation for All…
As easy as ABC;
Cultivating the means to give everyone a chance to contribute to a better future
As our society progresses from the Information age into the Intelligence Age ingenuity, creativity, and ultimately innovation will become increasingly dominant in our lives.
To create a sustainable future during this age, innovation itself will need to become an aspect in all our lives, not just a business buzzword but instead innovation for all by all will be a direct and required necessity for human success.
What is true innovation?
Innovation is often framed as something a business does, a product a university lab makes, or a feature a city installs.
These are often the outputs and the results of innovation, the actual seed of innovation lies elsewhere, in the gaps between disciplines, in lived observations, and in the friction between what exists and what is needed. Innovation now is supremely social, often messy and is about people identifying and problem solving in new and diverse ways.
True innovation is driven by diversity in thinking, by confronting new thoughts and ideas, by interacting and connecting with other people, and by finding solutions to problems, which all work to transform our current understanding and conception of the world around us. This process allows unique and novel approaches and concepts to be created that bring greater benefits for our wider society.
How do we design the process of innovation to reflect the often social and situational conditions it needs to thrive?
The answer lies in the way we work together through collaboration that cuts across boundaries, disciplines, and hierarchies to drive truly groundbreaking and impactful innovation for all.
This means taking innovation out of the university lab, out of the boardroom and into our communities. To have a lasting and positive impact on our cities and communities, innovation will be about solving real problems first and foremost that have definite uplifting effects on our lived experience and our cities and societies.
Innovation as a Shared Practice, not a Product
Cities have always been sites of possibility. In Cities Beyond Buildings, I argued that their true power lies not in infrastructure and systems, but in people, their ambitions, expressions, and capacity for connection.
In the Designing for Real Life blog post, I explored how human experience demands more integrated approaches to connecting, learning, working and I proposed this could be achieved by integrating academia, business and community together. To create shared innovation, we need to overlap our institutions and groups in the same way that we overlap connection, learning and working. I call this overlapping concept The ABC Model, a process of shared innovating that centres Academia, Business, and Community as co-creators of mutual innovation.
The ABC Model: A Process of Shared Innovation
On their own, these sectors are limited. Together, they can design solutions that matter, not just to users/consumers or investors, but to the entire ecosystems and cities in which they exist. This model is not about top-down strategy or community consultation after the fact. It is about starting with people and building with people collectively.
The ABC Model of Shared Innovation
This new way of working fosters equity and openness, encouraging empathy among different actors and building shared understanding across perspectives. This leads to richer, more inclusive innovation outcomes that are grounded and designed to last.
Academia brings research, insight, and critical perspective
Business brings agility, networks, and implementation know-how
Community brings lived wisdom, grounded priorities, and a sense of place
Shared Value for All
The ABC model delivers tangible benefits across all three sectors, allowing each to thrive through collaborative innovation and access benefits that goes beyond the siloed traditional approaches we currently rely on.
This interconnected approach creates resilient ecosystems where ideas, skills, and resources flow freely, empowering people to shape their futures together and delivering lasting value for organisations and communities alike.
Growing Shared Innovation Ecosystems
Academia anchors this process, turning real-life conditions into meaningful research and enabling broader access to knowledge sharing. Business offers structure, scalability, and sustained engagement. Communities ensure all efforts remain connected to actual needs, not assumptions, so that academia and business resolve real world problems first.
The concept of shared or collaborative innovation is not just about novel ideas, it is about community empowerment through upskilling and reskilling, supporting communities to develop capabilities that lead to tangible change. These capabilities fuel community-born businesses, guided by mentorship from existing enterprises and connected industry and business partners, widening the overall ecosystem and embedding resilience into local economies. In turn wider community access to academia encourages future generations to engage with academia and become future students and teachers.
This ongoing cycle of connecting, learning, working, mentoring, and growing extends the ABC model into a living, inclusive innovation ecosystem, one where value flows in multiple directions across academia, business and communities.
Innovation Hubs as Places of Connection and Cohesion
The spaces that host these collaborative activities and conversations, whether they be a repurposed library, a former shopping centre, or underused space on a high street will become the innovation hubs of the Intelligence age.
These are not sterile tech parks or exclusive innovation districts. They are places of human interaction, where relationships grow alongside ideas, where generations learn together and businesses become invested in people and places. In these hubs, diverse communities connect through co-creation, young people work alongside elders, and civic participation becomes an everyday act.
They are spaces that strengthen urban cohesion by making innovation visible, accessible, and shared, places where cities breathe, adapt, and evolve from within.
Beyond Partnerships: Toward Urban Innovation Ecosystems
The ABC model represents a shift from traditional, linear partnerships to something more dynamic: urban innovation ecosystems. In these ecosystems, roles blur, everyone becomes both teacher and learner, contributor and beneficiary. This approach moves collaboration from transactional to transformational, allowing diverse forms of knowledge, practice, and lived experience to evolve together.
It draws on the insights explored in Cities Beyond Buildings, where infrastructure is not just physical but social and designed to foster interaction, exchange, and connection. In this view, citizens are not passive recipients of urban planning but active shapers of value, and the city itself becomes less of a fixed entity and more of a living, changing process. At the same time, this model expands the principles of Designing for Real Life. In modern cities, the boundaries between learning, working, and living are dissolving. Innovation no longer relies solely on single breakthroughs in an isolated lab, it emerges from the everyday friction of people solving problems together, grounded in real-life contexts. These ecosystems thrive in shared space, where innovation is lived, not just imagined.
The Real Innovation: Functional & Structural Alignment
True innovation is not about novelty for its own sake, it is about aligning the functions of human life with the main institutions and organisations that support and foster those functions, to create groundbreaking innovation and impact.
This alignment helps us design solutions with people, not for them.
The ABC model enables different kinds of knowledge and action to align:
Academic knowledge meets practical application
Business investment meets social return
Lived experience meets structural support
Functional & Structural Alignment in the ABC Model
Growing Innovation, Together
As Cities Beyond Buildings made clear, cities must be grown, not just built; and as Designing for Real Life argued, that growth must come from within the interwoven texture of lived experience. This third blog, Innovation for All, adds a third step, that we must innovate in ways that mirror real life experience, by allowing and creating the space for collaborative, curious, grounded, and open innovation to be cultivated in our cities.
When we embed innovation in collectively shared spaces, physical, social, and intellectual, we do not just get smarter solutions:
We grow more vibrant communities
We build cities that evolve with us
We unlock value that belongs to everyone
So let’s build cities where innovation is not something that happens elsewhere, behind closed doors, but something we all get to shape and benefit from, together.
