An open invitation to a thinking party on community-driven technologies and inclusive growth.

“In principle, redirecting finance towards fairer, greener, more socially beneficial forms of growth could usher in the ICT golden age that has long been possible. But while the technologies are there, the politics are not.”

Carlota Perez, What is AI’s Place in History?
“The platform builders and ecosystem engineers do not just open a door in the adjacent possible. They build an entire new floor.”

Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From
“Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the non-violent, the elegant and beautiful.”
E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful

What if innovation were rethought as if people, rather than firms, are the things that matter most? [1]

This essay is a provocation and a speculation, written to stimulate action and debate and shine a light on the people and organisations actively crafting the new innovation economy. At its heart is the single question we propose should act as a guiding light for modern R&D:

What good is innovation if it doesn’t work for everyone?

UK innovation policy tends to focus on the twin priorities of corporate growth and increased research excellence. [2] This outward-facing perspective overlooks the real world of innovation that unfolds day-to-day in neighbourhoods, on high streets and in local communities, powered by ingenuity, experimentation, and the adaptation and reuse of existing technologies.

Community-driven innovation is more local in impact, more disparate in application, and more regenerative in intent than many big tech commodities and prize-winning breakthroughs – which means it is also harder to tabulate into hockey stick charts or translate into eye-catching headlines. As such, it is less visible to policymakers examining the digital economy or seeking opportunities for renewal. Yet community innovation – which enables contextual problem-solving, the development of social infrastructures, and the creation of knowledge commons – is happening all over the UK, often with little or no support. We believe that supporting and fostering local-first, independent innovation is essential to reviving the UK’s innovation economy in ways that will deliver benefits for more people across the UK. This will develop locally grown skills, capabilities, and amenities that do not rely on a small number of Silicon Valley companies, build robust social infrastructure, and create new opportunities for more people, in more places – ultimately building a more diverse innovation economy with higher levels of public benefit and participation.

Innovation can be found across the UK in skate parks and community radio stations and newspapers, in community energy companies and social care collectives, in community pubs and libraries – organisations that are bringing people together to improve lives and create value that sticks to their local place. Community innovation organisations are many and various, and include Chilli Studios in Newcastle which promotes better mental health through creativity; Tamar Grow Local that delivers skills and distribution for local food growers; Equal Care Coop which creates good jobs in social care in London and Calderdale; and We Can Make in Bristol which is making new ways to create homes that build social infrastructure and community wealth.

On the surface, these organisations have little in common, but they are all using technologies to grow the potential of the people and the places where they operate – solving problems, building relationships, improving skills, and realising the value of what community tech pioneer Melissa Mean calls existing “assets and knowhow” to develop ingenious solutions to some of the UK’s most critical problems. [3] Rolling out existing technologies to tackle new use cases is a critical step for technology adoption and diffusion; community organisations are already making this happen in efficient and effective ways that show new economic, technical, and social possibilities.

Illustration of two adults and a child. One is buying something in a shop. The door is open and there's a dog waiting outside. — Illustration by Elly Janz

To scale or not to scale?

For the last two decades, hyperscale has been lauded as the ultimate achievement of digital technologies. However, it is increasingly apparent that smaller scale technologies are also an essential building block for long-term resilience, particularly in the context of the climate emergency.

Rather than accruing benefits only to a small, socially elite group of innovators, a truly modern innovation economy must seek to create more plural, more equitable opportunities that are accessible beyond major research institutions and massive tech corporations, that prioritise regeneration over extraction, and that uplift and empower people and communities in their diversity. “Small” in this case does not mean a lack of ambition; it denotes a lack of concentration – a tendency towards pluralism, and an embrace of many possible, parallel realities and futures that are imagined within limits. The resource intensive nature of modern technologies at scale make these steps urgent, and it seems likely that a shift to smaller-scale and more distributed approaches to computing will become an imperative over the coming decade. [4]

The UK does not need to rely only on trickledown and spillover mechanisms to distribute the benefits of innovation, we could also nurture the vibrant, regenerative network of organisations already building technologies from the ground up. Achieving this requires both a culture change and a narrative shift, so that long-term, small-scale innovation that builds social infrastructure, cultivates skills, and empowers people and communities can be celebrated, receive investment, and play an active role as the UK’s “new normal” unfolds.

To spark this necessary change, we are sharing five questions for debate and discussion:

Funding: What needs to shift to make viable technology investment that prioritises long-term social returns rather than short-term profit and status?
Measurement: What are the metrics and measurement approaches that will make this attractive to policy makers?
Infrastructure: What infrastructures are needed to foster long-term, vision-led investments in technology capabilities that prioritise equitable, regenerative, health societies?
Intelligences: What interventions are needed to enable technologies to be created and altered to enable a “repertoire of intelligences” [5] rather than support returns to a small number of Silicon Valley companies and investors?
Organising: What methods of organising are needed? What does organising in this new normal look like? How can communities organise for a new innovation economy?

Let’s make technology work
for 8 billion people
not 8 billionaires

This is a vision of a more equitable, regenerative near-future: one in which technologies improve quality of life, health and wellbeing, work and leisure, social relationships and economic opportunities for everyone, everywhere. It is a vision for the UK in which policymakers are not only betting on the future opportunities created by R&D and big business but are also ensuring the technologies we already have are effectively rolled out, adopted, used and repurposed by people across the four countries to solve their most pressing problems, build stronger communities, and create better access to good jobs and new skills.

We are sharing these ideas in the hope of finding like-minded and action-oriented friends and collaborators. Our ambition is to build a movement and a set of investment opportunities that will enable and foster a golden network of community innovation across the four nations of the UK – fostering long-term thinking and resilience in uncertain times, creating opportunity, and deepening social bonds.

A golden network of community innovation

“Being excellent on a global scale begins with being excellent in the neighbourhood”

Peter J. Denning and Robert Dunham, The Innovator’s Way

Image of the UK in purple pixels with green dots where the Community Tech clusters are.

Since 2021, Careful Trouble has been holding the space for a community of innovators who are using technology to solve problems and create opportunities at the neighbourhood scale. These are people and communities who run green energy co-ops and social care collectives, community pubs and libraries, creative technology studios and arts centres, housing retrofit schemes and local media companies. This diversity of practice shows that technologies can be used to strengthen social bonds, build resilience, enable skills sharing and development, and create local economic value. With investment and support, the power of this network could make a significant contribution to national economic renewal, creating a new UK innovation economy that joins up the skills and potential across the country and unlocks a new era of technology confidence.

This is critical because the UK has a problem with inclusive technology roll-out and adoption.

The UK Government’s newly published modern Industrial Strategy finds that, “UK firms lag in adoption of intermediate digital technologies”, ranking “20th out of 64 economies in 2023”. The UK is home to world-leading deep tech research, yet 64% of businesses are not confident about applying AI and green tech. In Q2 2024, there were 134,000 job vacancies across the UK ICT, science and technology professions, the highest combined total of any sector in the UK. As of March 2024, 3.7 million households with children did not meet the Minimum Digital Living Standard, 2.1 million people were offline, and almost 5 million people cannot connect to WiFi. And while the number of patent applications in the UK is going up, 65% of the STEM workforce are white men and female-founded companies account for less than 3% of venture capital deals involving AI startups.

Meanwhile recent government research shows the public are pessimistic about the impacts of AI on society and see its use as driving inequality, while research undertaken by Careful Trouble in August 2024 shows the public is split on the impact of digital technologies on their freedoms.

A diagram in response to the question: Which of the following statements comes closest to your view? — *Diagram from Careful Industries’ Digital Identity in the UK report.*

Not only are the opportunities created by technologies not equally distributed, but being physically adjacent to innovation does not mean that its benefits will be accessible. As investor Saul Klein notes, living “within sight of Google and Meta’s huge European headquarters” is no guarantee of shared prosperity; in London’s Somers Town, “50 percent of children receive free school meals, 70 percent of residents receive social care, and adults live 20 years fewer than in leafy Highgate, only 20 minutes up the road.” [6] Fixing this present-day distribution problem requires an urgent rethinking of innovation norms that will not simply be achieved by increased investment in big companies or additional attention to moonshot innovation. This, and the default expectation that technological progress will deliver future benefits, means that technology policy is often caught chasing the hope of jam tomorrow rather than making firm plans for today.

If a small number of firms cannot be relied upon to create prosperity for everyone, then a mixed model of innovation should be promoted that includes and values neighbourhood-scale innovation; that fosters technological diffusion and adoption through community networks; and enables grassroots invention and innovation alongside more formal and institutional R&D. Supporting this would begin to create the conditions needed for inclusive growth.

Our inspiration is grounded in a call for innovation through diversity that engages with theories of diverse economies to drive social change. As J K Gibson Graham writes, “once we include what is below the waterline… we expand our prospects for taking back the economy”. [7]

Illustration of an iceberg with words highlighted above and below the water line. — *An adapted version of the Diverse Economies Iceberg by* *Community Economies Collective* *licensed under a* *Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License*.

Plural policy approaches

Translating this kind of pluralism into a policy context can be difficult. This is in part because the combined benefits and outcomes of multiple approaches are not so easy to forecast and measure — and as what gets measured gets prioritised — more diffuse and distributed methods of innovation are easily crowded out by more simplistic systems.

For instance, technology and innovation policy is often considered to play out entirely within a capitalocentric economic reality, often divorced from the social and political contexts in which all technologies operate. As such, scale and financial return become the primary measures of success, with a small number of ideas and initiatives receiving a self-fulfilling degree of investment and policy attention. Meanwhile, more complex sociotechnical approaches receive relatively little support which means they are more likely to remain at the pilot or demonstrator stage, or become reclassified as low-stakes “Tech for Good” initiatives that are dependent on charitable funding. While Invest 2035, the UK Government’s Industrial Strategy, seeks to improve distribution through “increased market dynamism”, a future-facing strategy for tech diffusion also requires new infrastructure, the facilitation of skills development and knowledge transfer, and the creation of mechanisms to support technology diffusion.

In this context, when set alongside slick billion-dollar tech investments aimed at providing universal solutions at scale, community innovation can appear to be quaint and somewhat amateurish, with little reach or impact; however, this is simply due to framing – much of real life, online and off, happens in the pluriverse of relationships rather than in transactions or on corporate balance sheets, and our technologies should reflect and enhance that.

Indeed, as Davids Wengrow and Graeber set out in The Dawn of Everything,

Social theory is largely a game of make-believe in which we pretend, just for the sake of argument, that there’s just one thing going on: essentially, we reduce everything to a cartoon so as to be able to detect patterns that would be otherwise invisible.

Looking beyond this cartoon requires a systems thinking approach, something the Government Policy Lab have been exploring in relation to tackling other entrenched systemic problems, such as multiple disadvantage. As Vanessa Lefton and Alex Fleming write:

There is no silver bullet, model, pilot or innovation that can fix systemic challenges. Shifting systems requires multiple transformative innovations at different times and levels in the system

But, fundamentally, supporting a mixed model of innovation means moving away from a tendency to make big bets on a single technology or regulatory mechanism and committing to stewarding a variety of interventions at different speeds and paces. As Hilary Cottam, author of Radical Help, says, a flourishing society cannot be achieved only by maintaining an economic view of the world:

We require a design code – the values and parameters that enable small, human-scale solutions to grow within a national framework. This is a policymaking process that is about a clear vision, human networks and relationships. It is the opposite of the existing industrial command and control policymaking process. The parameters will specify new forms of metric and regulation, within a culture in which our relationships to one another are what matter most. This in turn requires a new economic framework: a care economy. [8]

Technologies and innovation do not only exist as economic intensifiers, they also demonstrate what matters and deemed worthy of investment. To quote engineering professor Deb Chachra in How Infrastructure Works, “Infrastructural systems are a physical manifestation of social cooperation [and] a physical manifestation of values and norms”.

Community interventions are critical to designing and creating infrastructures that reflect our real lives beyond the demands of economic growth; to realise the full potential of existing initiatives, and cultivate the conditions needed for more community-powered change, community innovation needs to be visible, with a seat the table alongside big business, with proportionate investment and policy support.

We believe this will become a reality and build solid foundations for the future if a more inclusive approach to tech policymaking and investment is championed by Government – one that includes community innovators and other stakeholders, that prioritises building grassroots infrastructure, and supporting long-term investment.

The building blocks of community innovation are already there - realising this change does not require reinvention, but a redirection and reprioritisation of attention away from Silicon Valley to local neighbourhoods. This is possible; achieving it requires:

Long-term investment and policy support for the vibrant, regenerative network of organisations already building technologies from the ground up
Local-first infrastructure — from physical assets such as access to shared spaces and equipment through to good quality data and skills sharing opportunities — that builds capabilities and offers more people routes into community innovation
Policy approaches that look towards the complexity that occurs “below the waterline”; local-first mechanisms that enable more people and communities to engage in innovation.

Good growth requires the right conditions to take root. Community innovation makes great compost, but it needs the sunlight of investment and good policy making to flourish and grow.

Discover More Community Tech

The Bristol Cable

The Bristol Cable started in 2014 as an alternative to corporately-owned local media. It produces online and print journalism, made by and for the residents of Bristol. The Cable is fully owned by its members, over 2000 of them, and is run as a workers’ cooperative.

Community Tech Aid

A close-up photo of a person in a yellow hoodie holding up a laptop in bubble wrap.

Community TechAid was founded in 2020 by a group of volunteers keen to address the digital divide within their local communities of Lambeth and Southwark in south London.

Carbon Coop

A photo of three people talking and laughing.

Carbon Co-op is an energy services and advocacy co-operative that helps people and communities to make the radical reductions in home carbon emissions necessary to avoid runaway climate change. Now, over 400 members pay an annual subscription to receive help and assistance in reducing their home carbon emissions through Carbon Co-op’s bespoke home energy management services.

What do you think?

We would love to hear from you. What do you think about:

Funding: What needs to shift to make viable technology investment that prioritises long-term social returns rather than short-term profit and status?
Measurement: What are the metrics and measurement approaches that will make this attractive to policy makers?
Infrastructure: What infrastructures are needed to foster long-term, vision-led investments in technology capabilities that prioritise equitable, regenerative, health societies?
Intelligences: What interventions are needed to enable technologies to be created and altered to enable a “repertoire of intelligences” [5] rather than support returns to a small number of Silicon Valley companies and investors?
Organising: What methods of organising are needed? What does organising in this new normal look like? How can communities organise for a new innovation economy? What examples are there of current methods and practices?

[2] See, for instance, UKRI’s most recent strategy, https://www.ukri.org/publications/ukri-strategy-2022-to-2027/ukri-strategy-2022-to-2027/, and Sir Paul Nurse’s “Research, development and innovation (RDI) organisational landscape: an independent review” (2021) https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/research-development-and-innovation-organisational-landscape-an-independent-review.

[3] Melissa Mean, “What if the power and resources to build our neighbourhoods were in community hands?”, Civic Square (October 2022)

[4] See, for instance, this recent paper on small-scale AI development: Gael Varoquaux, Alexandra Sasha Luccioni, and Meredith Whittaker, “Hype, Sustainability, and the Price of the Bigger-is-Better Paradigm in AI” (21 September 2024), which argues that “AI research has acquired an unhealthy taste for scale … [which] comes with dire consequences – economic inequalities and environmental (un)sustainability, datasets that erode privacy and emphasize corrosive social elements, a narrowing of the field, and a structural exclusion of small actors”, and suggests that more plural and socially beneficial uses “will come from de-emphasizing scale as a blanket solution for all problems, instead focusing on models that can be run on widely-available hardware, at moderate costs. This will enable more actors to shape how AI systems are created and used, providing more immediate value in applications ranging from health to business, as well as enabling a more democratic practice of AI.” https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.14160v1

[5] Mattern, S. (2020) A city is not a computer. In The Routledge Companion to Smart Cities (pp. 17-28). Routledge.

[6] Saul Klein, “Europe’s Innovation Ecosystem Can Make It the New Palo Alto”, Wired (14 October 2024)

[7] J.K Gibson-Graham, Cameron & Healy “Take back the economy - An ethical guide for taking back our communities”, 2013, University of Minnesota Press. p.11

[8] Hilary Cottam, “A radical new vision for social care: How to reimagine and redesign support systems for this century”, Health Foundation (November 2021), https://www.health.org.uk/publications/reports/a-radical-new-vision-for-social-care

What good is innovation if it doesn’t work for everyone?

An open invitation to a thinking party on community-driven technologies and inclusive growth.