Simon Green is a familiar face across North East England’s innovation ecosystem. He founded Edge Innovation – which supports innovation with and across the public, private and charitable sectors – in 2015. He span out the Innovation SuperNetwork and Rural Design Centre. And he set up Northumberland Community Energy in 2023.
And Simon certainly has his hands full at the moment: Edge Innovation is currently delivering Tyne Design Week, a celebration of creativity, innovation and design, in partnership with the North East Combined Authority, Northumbria University and Newcastle University. It’s bringing together designers, businesses, educators, students and communities over a vibrant programme of events including workshops, open studio sessions and seminars.
There’s no better person to speak to about the innovation landscape in our region – and the impact of collaboration in design…
We are currently in the midst of Tyne Design Week – the first event of its kind in North East England. How did the idea take shape?
We started talking to Northumbria University a year and a half ago about building something around graduate degree shows. Every year, the universities tend to have a show at the end of design-led courses where students will show off what they’ve done to a wider audience. Employers might have come in and talked to them… and those events have been big endeavours in the past. But more recently, they’d started to become less externally focused. We felt there was an opportunity to do something to link these events into the wider design and creative industry sectors. We then started talking to Newcastle University, who got really excited about it, and we built it from there.
However, from a design point of view, it’s much broader than that. It’s about how we can showcase the interesting work that’s going on in the region around the design and creative industries, some of which is within graduate groups, some of which is within small local businesses and agencies, and some of which is within bigger organisations. We are trying to represent all of that.
On that note, Tyne Design Week has a very broad line-up, from companies working in the renewables space, such as Kinewell Energy, to Rob Law MBE, founder of Trunki and Jo Feeley of TrendBible…
Well, design is a very broad concept! So we’re talking about the design of physical things. We’re talking about design of graphics, branding and communication tools. We’re talking about fashion. And we’re talking about the design of processes and systems. It’s about celebrating all of the different things that are going on, and at the same time, trying to create connections between organisations in those fields that wouldn’t automatically talk to each other.
What kind of impact do you think Tyne Design Week could have?
There’s the immediate impact in raising the profile of the participating organisations and the sector more widely. But the real value will come if people end up working together on the back of this who wouldn’t have otherwise.
People are often really good in the spaces that they work within, but they don’t necessarily have the time, resources or expertise to look outside of that… and see things from a different perspective.
Why is it important to host an event like Tyne Design Week in North East England?
We know that the North East economy is not as strong as we need it to be. We know that the region has challenges around economic growth. It has social challenges around issues like child poverty. We have issues that we need to deal with and we can’t deal with those issues with the same thinking that we’ve had in the past. It hasn’t worked. The gap between the North East and South East is as wide, if not wider, than it ever has been.
But there is a real strength in the North East around design that we’re perhaps not making the most of. Northumbria University School of Design has been there for decades, training some really skilled people, and a lot of those people have gone on to work in other parts of the world. How can we build more on the community that we have here and make sure that we’re having as much of an impact on the local area as possible? How do we do things differently to try and come up with a better way of doing things that helps the North East to develop and thrive?
You’ve worked with innovators throughout your career – and witnessed a great deal of change in the public and private sectors. How has the innovation environment evolved?
I think there is a different perception of what innovation is now than there was when I first started out. I moved up here to work for Procter and Gamble several years ago. At that time, innovation was done internally within organisations. You had a lot of people who were responsible for taking an idea through a linear process. You would start from concept, you would develop it, you might test it with customers at some point on the journey, and then you’d take it through to market launch. You did most of that in-house.
Procter and Gamble were one of the organisations that took a lead in trying to understand the different ways of innovating, and trying to understand how you might engage with partners outside the organisation, to bring in different perspectives and expertise. I think that’s much more accepted now, and that’s much more aligned to what we’re doing: we see the real value in collaboration and driving innovation, in terms of reducing risk and coming up with ideas that you know are going to sit well with customers, rather than hoping they’re going to sit well with customers.
I think there’s much more acceptance of the ‘fuzziness’ around innovation than there used to be – people are more open to applying design thinking and a creative mindset to very technical projects. There is an acceptance that you can’t do everything yourself and you’ll need to work with partners.
What’s on the horizon?
We know that there isn’t going to be as much funding from the public sector for innovation as there has been in the past. And that means that if we want to succeed, we need to unlock private sector investment in innovation.
If we’re going to do that, we need a different approach. We need to ensure that public funding is used to enable activity in the private sector or in third sector organizations, rather than to direct what the investment should be.
We don’t necessarily know what the next groundbreaking thing is going to be. We don’t know where things are going to be in two years’ time. Very few people five years ago predicted where we would be with AI and we don’t know where AI is going to be in five years’ time. So what’s the point in having a five-year strategy which says these are the exact things that we want to do? What we need is a five-year strategy that creates the right environment within which we can enable the people who are coming up with the best ideas and following the most professional processes around innovation, to do what they need to do.
And in North East England specifically?
I think the big opportunity is around energy and sustainability. We need a huge amount of innovation activity in areas like energy generation, storage, distribution, energy usage, home insulation and the mitigation of climate change. The North East can play really well across all of those themes.
Find out more about Tyne Design Week here.
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