Innovate Manchester

Large organisations, smaller businesses and academics often hold different pieces of a solution, but rarely work through a well-framed challenge together. Innovate Manchester was created to connect those perspectives around themes including sustainability, data ethics, emerging technology and human-centred design.

The aim was to get beyond inspiration alone: to make space for participants to analyse a challenge, identify possible responses and explore useful collaborations.

At FutureEverything, George originated Innovate Manchester and led the successful proposal before designing and delivering it as a cross-sector, event-led innovation programme, with substantial contributions from colleagues across the team.

He shaped its challenge-led format and facilitated workshops that brought organisations, SMEs and academics together to work through shared problems and explore collaborations.

FutureEverything curated a series of webinars and two-day Innovation Labs with MIDAS and GC Business Growth Hub. Large organisations brought a challenge; multidisciplinary participants used a design-led workshop process to examine it and shape responses. The programme sought to connect companies with SMEs and academic expertise suited to the challenge.

That combination of challenge framing, facilitation and cross-sector participation is the part of the work most relevant to Creative Disruption’s current approach.

MIDAS’s 2023 programme recap reports that a September 2020 workshop helped bring Chiesi, Dsposal and the University of Manchester together around inhaler waste. The partners’ initiative was described as ongoing when the recap was published.

The partnership was developed by the organisations and people involved. It is an example of follow-through from the original programme, rather than an individual outcome.