Inclusive Innovation & The 150 Year Moment

Just at the north end of Waterloo Bridge sits Somerset House, a neoclassical palace that embodies one of Britain’s most successful industrial and cultural moments.

It sits on the banks of the Thames, the ancient river that has connected the UK with Europe for millennia: once geographically, now economically. Rebuilt at the height of the Industrial Revolution, Somerset House was designed to bring together the very best of Art and Science. With the Royal Academy and the Royal Society under one roof, painters and sculptors brushed shoulders with inventors and industrialists. Statues of Michelangelo and Isaac Newton faced each other across its entrance. The building became the very symbol of collaboration and inclusion, where leaders from rarely-overlapping disciplines could share ideas and drive forward each other’s ambitions.

The Academy and the Society found new homes, the scientists and the artists moved on; but the building remains, as do the busts of Michelangelo and Newton. Today, it serves as a reminder of one of the UK’s greatest eras of innovation, and of what true collaboration looks like. At another turning point for UK ambition, where we look to redefine our role in global innovation, this feels particularly poignant.

It was at Somerset House where we held our first Inclusive Innovation gathering on June 4th, bringing together a thriving community of UK entrepreneurs, scientists, academics, policymakers, artists, and storytellers. Throughout the day, a message reverberated: how can we capitalise on this generational opportunity that the UK faces to build longer-term, fairer opportunity?

A case for inclusive innovation

Two competing truths exist at the same time in the UK.

On the one hand, we hold an exceptional opportunity in our hands. Phoenix Court co-founder Saul Klein, in his introduction to the day, referred to this as the UK’s “150 year moment”, where scientific strength, industrial progress, funding, and academic excellence is at an unparalleled high. London has just been named Europe’s top ecosystem by Dealroom, fourth globally behind only the Bay Area, New York, and Boston. With four of the world’s top ten universities on our doorstep, we have more colts ($25M+ revenue companies), thoroughbreds ($100M+), unicorns, and VCs than France, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands combined.

You have to go back to the Victorian era R&D boom, around the time of the Great Exhibition, to witness breadth and depth this strong. That the world’s leading tech companies, from Google to OpenAI to Anthropic, are queueing up for London office space speaks volumes to this.

Yet at the same time, trust in technology has never felt weaker. People feel disconnected from technologies that they’re using every day, where they increasingly feel more like the product than the customer. Lawrence Newport, co-founder of pressure group Looking For Growth, outlined how ordinary people don't feel the benefits of investment and innovation. “They’re starting to ask: there’s growth, but who is it for?” Professor Erika Brodnock, an academic and entrepreneur, painted this challenge from a gender perspective: female-led AI companies in the UK raised £136M over the past decade, which by today’s standards is roughly equivalent to a single round for a male-led AI business.

So how do you reconcile these two truths? The answer lies in bringing people closer to innovation to foster an environment where people can see, feel, and directly benefit from technological progress; and in the Somerset House model, bringing innovation out of its siloes and into shared, collaborative spaces. Or in short, inclusive innovation.

Dame Julia Black, professor and strategic director of innovation at LSE, outlined some of the different dimensions that we might consider with regards to inclusivity in innovation. Three key questions stick out: who is this innovation for (broad versus narrow segments), how are you structured (who benefits from the core), and who are you innovating with (diverse backgrounds versus homogeneous teams)?

From AI sovereignty to community-level innovation

As our attendees grappled with different dimensions of inclusive innovation, conversations scattered across the building addressing a number of pressing topics, or ‘provocations’, as we dubbed them.

AI sovereignty and data was a common thread across conversations. We’re often told that data is the new oil: a notion is felt particularly intensely in the UK, as parliament debates giving Palantir access to NHS health data. This is the tip of the iceberg, with UK-owned data spanning the Met Office, Ordnance Survey, BBC, Natural History Museum, and so on. So how can we design a system in which, unlike with oil, those sitting on top of it can share equally in its profits? The Norway case study quickly emerged, specifically how they turned a North Sea oil discovery into the world’s biggest sovereign wealth fund. The central question remains a trade-off: short-term political gains versus long-term investment.

The disconnect between AI and tech companies, and the ordinary people who use their products every day, provoked thoughtful conversation. One huddle discussed whether AI can be a good neighbour, with Laura Flynn-Coley from the London AI Campus (an initiative run by Google, Camden Council, and Camden Learning) underlining the imperative of educating people (particularly those in underserved areas and from older generations) not just how to use AI, but also how it actually functions. Another discussion pod focused on how local authorities and tech companies can collaborate more effectively, and what they can potentially achieve together that neither could do alone. COVID is the perfect case study for this, where public and private sectors practically merged overnight to solve pressing social challenges.

As discussion considered the next frontiers of generative AI, one group keenly debated the role of the human in AI-powered creativity. Some embraced the new possibilities enabled by AI, nodding to the invention of photography and that triggered an explosion of new art forms. Others doubt its potential, preferring it instead for idea generation than actual execution. Art, one participant suggested, is defined by its limitations: just as an athlete flourishes in spite of its human limitations.