Wrexham’s recent global spotlight from football success has coincided with a quieter but equally important story of how the city, led in part by Wrexham University, is embedding inclusive innovation into everyday practice to build a collaborative, resilient ecosystem that can sustain long-term change.
The three consecutive promotions of Wrexham football club have casted a global light into the city and, understandably, advance local pride and opened up the scope of possibility. Together with this attention, Wrexham has seen another story that I believe matters just as much for its community and its people. It is a story of how a place builds its capability through building, into its routine, inclusive innovation.
A couple of weeks ago together with Nina Ruddle, our piece was published exploring this second story. In it, we explore how Wrexham University has acted as a powerful steward with civic convening commitments helping partners across the North of Wales, strengthen collaborations, ground learning into real practices and make long-lasting decisions. With this blog I aim to share some of the practical lessons that we have learned in the writing of such piece.
Why “ecosystem” talk often disappoints
A lot has been said about “Innovation ecosystem” and I’m sure many of you are quite familiar with its meaning. However, if you have tried to coordinate across multiple institutions, communities or policy makers you would understand that collaboration doesn’t just happen because of the putting into place of a partnership or even goodwill on its own. And there are good reasons for that. Places are messy, they are complex in their configuration and how they take shape over time. Furthermore, places differ in how power is balanced (or unbalanced) across various stakeholders, and often times they struggle with overlapping mandates. That is the reasons why I believe the Wrexham case illuminates how a bespoke made (social and cultural) infrastructure can work and develop systems that deliver in their promises.
Platforms that make collaboration possible
In this piece, I describe four interlocking civic platforms that Wrexham University has helped steward across North Wales. We can think of these as “micro-systems” or structures that repeatedly bring people together, align evidence, and support follow-through. These are:
- A Public Service Lab that creates psychologically safe space for leaders and practitioners to work on live problems, test ideas, received and provide feedback, and learn together. The significance of this platform is that systems change requires experimentation, and experimentation requires trust, which is what this Lab permitted.
- An Insight Partnership that helps align evidence in the form administrative data, evaluation learning and its translation of this learning and accounting for lived experience. This platform permitted the use of evidence in a credible manner, thus overcoming the challenge of decision-making focused either only on hard data or anecdote without robust understanding of nuance qualitative data.
- A Civic Engagement Partnership that provides decision-routing by helping ensure participation “heard” and ensuring that it travels into arenas where authority and resources sit. This platform permitted connecting the voice and experience of people with real actions which also strengthened trust by making people accountable and voices consequential.
- A Tertiary Alliance focused on pathways in the form of supporting skills, progression, access, and outreach. This platform helped in widening participation of groups given that often times ecosystems (by the nature of funding cycles, governance structures, or decision-making processes) could reproduce inequality unless inclusion is deliberately designed through routes that expand capability to engage and benefit.
These four platforms put into place and articulate the difference between having projects and having a system that can learn and deliver across projects. If you are interested in knowing how these platforms operated on the ground, then I encourage you to read the full paper here (from page 113 to page 131). Although, to be fair, the full edition contains valuable insights concerning innovation ecosystems, for those of you who are more avid readers.
Sustaining the “invisible work”
For me, one of the most important lessons is that the elements most crucial to ecosystem success are often the hardest to sustain politically. And the reason why that is, is because they have a strong tendency to be slow, heavily relational and often times hard to see (thus the “invisible work” term ).
Unfortunately, there are certain areas (four to be more precise) that are most vulnerable to churn, and as it just happens, they are the “hidden operating system” of place-based collaboration. First, we have convening and brokerage capacity, which supply the time, the roles, the expertise and the boundary-spanning labour that bring organisations into the same room and keep joint work moving. Second, we have the relationship maintenance, which sustains trust over repeated interactions, and, crucially, over time so cooperation can deepen rather than reset with every new project. Third, we have the participation infrastructure, which ensures that engagement is inclusive and credible and disrupts the status-quo of data extraction and attention to already-heard voices. This one, in particular, requires a lot of effort in terms of thoughtfully considering accessible formats, translation of concepts and working with and through trusted intermediaries. Fourth, we have the evidence alignment routines, which turn data and lived experience into shared judgement that partners can act on without slipping into either technocratic dashboarding or anecdotal decision-making. And finally, fifth, we have the learning infrastructure which converts what works into reusable practice so insights survive staff turnover and funding cycles, enabling change to accumulate at the end of each initiative.
Interestingly, these four areas are the ones that get first squeezed when budgets tighten or when political attention shifts to quick wins, which is ironic given that they are precisely what make quick wins possible without undermining trust and legitimacy.
Alongside this, another recurring tension we identified, but would certainly not be alien to those working on this sphere, is impact measurement. As I’m sure most of you are aware, several institutions are facing increasing pressure to show results in ways that are easily counted. But many of the real benefits of ecosystem stewardship are not immediately measurable such as is the case with trust, legitimacy, alignment, capability, and the reduced “cost of collaboration.”
The Wrexham approach includes the development of a civic and economic impact assessment framework that tries to broaden what “counts” and to treat evaluation as a learning tool. The point of this effort is to prevent a situation where the excessive focus on measurements ends up punishing the very relational work that makes collaboration possible.
So, what next?
If you’re a city leader, a public service leader, a funder, or a civic university leader, the most transferable lesson is obviously not to “copy Wrexham.” I don’t think at this point, after the decades of lessons learned (the hard way) about the dangers and awful consequences of policy transfer from the Global North to the Global South, anyone would dare to say that Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V is the right approach to anything, really. However, I do believe there are some important lessons that could draw from the Wrexham case. First, adopt the platform functions that make collaboration and inclusion routine.
To do that, a first practical move would be to fund platforms (not just projects!) that work by focusing on and, ideally, investing on brokerage, convening, facilitation and coordination, which should prevent the ending of partnerships at the end of each funding cycle. A second practical move would be to build blended evidence practices that align administrative data, evaluation learning and lived experience into shared judgement, so decisions are both credible and grounded. A third move would be to make participation consequential by clarifying decision-routing. In other words, where do insights go, who reviews them, how are they weighed, what changes as a result, and how is feedback communicated back, all of which would increase trust with partners and constituents. And fourth and final practical move would be to design ecosystems for inclusion through deliberate pathway infrastructure (skills routes, outreach channels, supports that remove language/time/digital barriers), because without intentional capability-building and access, ecosystem benefits tend to concentrate among those already well positioned to participate and adopt, reinforcing existing advantage rather than widening opportunity.
A final thought: from moments to muscle
Yes, I know it’s tempting to think that place transformation is driven by big moments in the form of a funding win or a flagship project which provides a headline success. However, those moments are scarce and frankly, I think, too overvalued. What the Wrexham case clearly shows and illuminates is that long-term inclusive innovation is quieter and sorry to say it, not too glamorous. But the muscle memory most be created in the system in the form of ways of convening, learning, deciding to such an extent that they become the standard way of doing things. Doing it otherwise will risk reproducing a status quo that has seldom served and benefit the communities we are supposed to serve, and, perhaps even worse, reproducing an ill-equipped system to support the development of our societies.
Truly, ecosystem stewardship is not a perfect system and it surely is time-consuming and intensive in the use of resources. However, if done with commitment, it can unlock the conditions under which a place can keep solving problems together even when the spotlight moves on.
This blog was written by Dr. Gerardo Arriaga-Garcia , Research Fellow, City-REDI, University of Birmingham.
Disclaimer:
The views expressed in this analysis post are those of the author and not necessarily those of City-REDI or the University of Birmingham.