Empowering innovation through collaboration.
The Future Towns Innovation Hub is designed to accelerate place-based innovation by stimulating collaboration between affected and affecting stakeholders, in pursuit of sustainable solutions.
Located at the University of Southampton’s Science Park, the Innovation Hub brings people together to address complex challenges facing their towns.
Our peer based platform makes it easier for stakeholders to share challenges, follow structured learning processes, form working groups and co-create impactful solutions.
The platform, currently in beta, was officially launched in March 2025 at the ‘Love Your Place’ event. This event invited the community to share their problems, projects or ideasand turn them into a clear One Page Plan using the CLIP process.
The challenge: Enabling place-based collaboration at scale
With towns across the UK facing many urgent social, economic and environmental challenges, the University of Southampton is seeking new ways to enhance the way people collaborate across sectors and disciplines.
Key ambitions of the Future Towns Innovation Hub include:
- Encouraging innovation by making it easier for teams to coalesce around shared goals.
- Bridging the gap between research, practice and policy.
- Catalysing scalable, low-carbon solutions that can be adopted by towns nationwide.
The University needed a digital platform that could support structured collaboration while remaining intuitive and flexible for a wide range of users. We filled that gap.
Our solution: A network-building platform for collaborative innovation
Made Open’s platform was chosen as the foundation for the Future Towns Innovation Hub due to its unique ability to foster collaboration within and across communities of practice.
As Ruby Jackson, Project Lead at the University of Southampton, shares:
We are thrilled with the digital platform Made Open has created for our Future Towns Innovation Hub Network. It offers a user-friendly space for stakeholders to connect, collaborate and share ideas; transforming how our teams and network work together.
Key features of the platform
Shared challenges
A space for users to post real-world challenges and crowdsource expertise to solve them.
Team collaboration tools
Tools for forming working groups and managing projects in an open, inclusive way.
Innovation showcase
A space to spotlight successful pilots, research findings and scalable models.
The co-design journey
Throughout development, we have supported a collaborative process to ensure the platform aligns with the Hub’s strategic goals and design-led approach. As Tom Rushby, Programme Manager at the University of Southampton, explains:
Made Open have guided us patiently at every stage of the process. Their ability to tease out exactly what we want, alongside their intuition of when to take the lead, has really helped with the delivery of our platform. It’s been a real pleasure to work with the team.
Together, we identified several guiding principles for the platform:
- Accessibility and ease of use: ensuring broad participation across skill levels and sectors.
- Cross-sector relevance: designing features that resonate with academics, councils and businesses alike.
- Transparency and openness: encouraging open innovation while protecting sensitive data.
- Scalability: supporting future growth across regions and sectors.
Looking ahead
The March 2025 launch of the Future Towns Innovation Hub is just the beginning. The platform will evolve to support deeper integration with research projects, innovation funding streams and wider regional partnerships. As the network expands, it will continue to serve as a vital resource for those working to create more sustainable, connected and thriving towns.