I think innovation in place is exceptionally important for the Management School. Where innovation takes place matters. It’s how we go about improving people's lives. We have developed very good relationships with local organisations, who are interested in how to evaluate better. It's not about necessarily the organisation you're working with and the size of the organisation. It's about working with an organisation that wants to actually make change. It really is looking at research and how we innovate in different geographies. So, space and time are very important dimensions. We have a long history of place-based innovation and have done much work in our region, across all our areas of interest, to ensure that we are sensitive to the needs of our region and our locale to deliver good solutions for our communities.

So, for instance, we would be looking at urban renewal or potentially looking at how we can regenerate rural areas or areas which have become very impoverished. The I-Connect Project focuses on connecting communities and creating a sustainable way of living in our beautiful Lancashire. It was established in partnership with Lancashire County Council, Lancaster City Council and Groundswell Innovation. Having established the Lancashire 2050 strategy, the local authorities identified the need to reach out to Lancaster University and see whether we have any capability to help them design more futureproof and human-centred policies.

The policies that we have focused on were connected to transport, health and wellbeing, and also to the general lifestyle of the communities in Lancashire. Working with local communities and collaborating with the communities on understanding how the county is evolving, how the ecosystem operates is absolutely essential for the University to understand how we bring additional value to the region. I think the positive benefits that we're seeing by working with local companies and local organisations, there's lots of different ways that that can go for the local artists that we've worked with. It's been a sense of empowerment. It's been a sense of pride that they've gained from their artworks being displayed in public exhibitions across the world and now being used to change dialogue around accessibility with businesses. One of the key things I learned from the start of these projects was, it's not about necessarily the organisation you're working with and the size of the organisation. It's about working with an organisation that wants to actually make change. That's incredibly powerful and has been illuminating for me personally in terms of how your research can affect people, how businesses can make active change based on the discussions that you have with them, and then how that can foster better brand advocacy for them, or businesses have also seen increased profitability.

We have developed very good relationships with local organisations who are interested in how to evaluate better. We've worked with Lancaster CVS, Cumbria CVS, and other smaller organisations across Lancashire and Cumbria. What we hear back from them when we deliver training on creative evaluation, or help them train in different methods about how to evaluate creatively, is that it helps them, demystify the evaluation process. It helps increase their capacity, their evaluative capacity, their confidence in how to evaluate. It helps them to think strategically about how to evaluate in the future and what resources they need to develop to be in that position in the future. With the work with SMEs, we help them, we educate them. We have set curricula that are part of ERDF projects or other SME-focused projects; we educated them how to change the business model. With the multinationals, we’re working very closely and helping them to define the new business model, to run pilots on the new business model and to then scale it up. So we’re learning with the multinationals while they're doing this, and we’re helping to feed all the insights to the rest of the economy.

The NHS is facing many challenges. Staff shortages, funding constraints, capacity constraints in the system, which makes the delivery of novel ways of delivering care imperative for driving resource productivity into the NHS. So things like the implementation of digital health and remote care technologies is very important. Technology-based SMEs are very well placed to deliver these innovative solutions, but they struggle to engage and collaborate with a large organisation as the NHS is. So there are many of what we call institutional failures, that actually impede this collaborative innovation between the NHS and SMEs. So what we are trying to understand is whether there are specific things that the government can do in order to lift these constraints. It's important to work closely with these organisations to really understand, often through very particular instances and examples, where the obstacles lie.

We can talk in broad terms about SMEs being short of time and short of resources and very different to the NHS, which is big, maybe bureaucratic and slow to change. But we need to understand exactly how that plays out in practice in particular instances. What stops the SMEs being able to get an interview with the procurement manager at the NHS or whatever it might be. So only by working closely with the firms and with the NHS colleagues, can we really understand how that obstacle really plays out in process, what form it takes. For example, the work I'm doing in Wales is supporting the NHS in Wales to deliver on a ten-year strategy to develop compassionate leadership and cultures across the whole of health and social care. That involves me working with the boards of all of the health service organisations in Wales, supporting Health Education Improvement Wales to develop compassionate leadership programmes, to develop compassionate cultures across the whole of the NHS. Lots of work in England with individual hospitals, other health service organisations, national organisations. In the Republic of Ireland, I'm working with the Health Services Executive to develop compassionate leadership and cultures as they devolve responsibility for health services to local regions. So for me, it's a really privileged area of work, and I just get enormous personal satisfaction from what I do. The most important thing about being a civic university, I think, is the fact that we can work with society and we can bring about change and that we're very much a kind of a social innovator, I suppose, in that process. But we can play at different agendas, I suppose, and deal with different stakeholders and communities in ways that other people can't. Because with the University we're very much bridging all these different areas of activity. Lancaster University Management School is an anchor institution in the region. The impact of the school is absolutely crucial for our communities to know that there is an education body that they can reach out to. We don't just research for the purpose of researching or finding data that is interesting for us. The Management School scholars are really committed to finding solutions together with the local communities, together with the local authorities as well, and local businesses, bringing that engaged research to the core of what we do.