David Legg, Regional Manager at Innovate UK, reflects that “the stars are aligning” for place-based partnership working.
There’s a sense, right now, that the stars really have aligned for the Local Policy Innovation Partnerships (LPIP) and the Local Policy Innovation Fund (LPIF). After years of groundwork, conversations, and small but significant shifts in practice, the timing feels right: a convergence of people, purpose, and policy that is beginning to make genuine system change feel possible.
The Long Work of Partnership
What the LPIP experience has shown—again and again—is that change at a local or national level is not fast work. Building trust between academics, policymakers, and communities takes time. That time is often undervalued and underfunded, yet it’s the invisible infrastructure on which everything else rests.
Partnerships don’t begin with shared outputs; they begin with shared understanding. In places like the West Midlands and South Yorkshire, where local authorities have lost up to half their staff in a decade, universities and civic partners have had to fill the gaps—sometimes stepping further into leadership roles than anticipated. The question has become: how far do we, as researchers or civic intermediaries, lean in to lead change, and how far do we enable others to do it?
The answer isn’t simple. The most successful collaborations have been those that treat partnership as a process, not a product: one built through trust, empathy, and persistent engagement even when capacity is thin and the language between institutions feels incompatible.
Lessons from Practice: PICES and the Art of Partnership
At a recent LPIP and LPIF discussion, I reflected that “the stars are aligning” and drew on my own star sign—Pisces—to capture some of the key features of partnership working. My PICES framework provides a neat lens through which to reflect on what we learned:
- P – Place, People, Partnership, Policy, Purpose, Productivity
At the heart of every LPIP story is place: the specific social, political and economic realities of a locality. Partnerships thrive when they start from those realities, not from abstract goals. The work has shown how local people, policies, and purpose must be woven together—aligning academic research and civic action to drive productivity and social value.
- I – Inspiration, Independence, Innovation
Partnerships inspire change by showing what’s possible. They rely on a degree of independence—trusted enough to convene, but free enough to challenge. And they foster innovation, not only in policy ideas but in the ways of working.
- C – Catalysing, Connecting, Collaborating, Culture, Communication
These partnerships are catalysts—connecting actors across silos, creating shared language where none existed, and working within and across very different institutional cultures.
- E – Evidence, Engagement, Expertise, Enabling, Encouraging
Evidence remains central: not just data, but stories, lived experience, and practice-based insight. Engagement, done properly, turns that evidence into shared understanding and enables collective action.
- S – Systems, Skills, Structures, Scale
All of this happens within complex systems of governance, funding, and practice. The work of LPIP has been to navigate those systems, build the skills needed to sustain them, and experiment with structures that can endure beyond any single project.
The Challenge of Legacy
Three years is not long enough to build trust, change culture, and redesign systems. Yet that’s the typical timescale of funded programmes. What LPIP has shown is the necessity of investing in the long term. Many of the strongest collaborations today rest on relationships built quietly over a decade or more.
The question now, as LPIF begins, is how that learning becomes embedded. How do we keep the trust alive when the money stops? How do we sustain the local ecosystems that have begun to form?
Legacy is not just about infrastructure—it’s about relationships, confidence, and language. It’s about ensuring that what has been built doesn’t dissolve when the funding ends, but continues as part of a living, civic ecosystem.
Holding on to the Moment
Universities, city leaders, and communities have shown what’s possible when they stay at the table, listen to each other, and commit to shared outcomes. The alignment we see now—between funders, local partners, and national policy directions—is rare.
We should recognise this moment for what it is: a golden alignment of place, people, and purpose. If we can hold on to that alignment and invest in the relationships that make it real, LPIP and LPIF can leave not just a legacy of projects, but a new way of doing local policy—one rooted in trust, imagination, and shared care for place.
This blog was written by David Legg, Regional Manager at Innovate UK. Innovate UK, the ESRC, and the AHRC funded the LPIP Hub and the LPIP programme.
Find out more about the Local Policy Innovation Partnership Hub.
Disclaimer:
The views expressed in this post are those of the author and not necessarily those of City-REDI or the University of Birmingham.