In the third meeting the Innovation Districts committee tied our work for the year together by thinking of the following elements:

 

Policy: what are the areas of possible alignment on policy across the national government, GLA, and the local councils along with instututions, major developer and companies to ensure that the innovation sector (life science, technology, and media) has the space to grow, the financing to scale, and the ability to get broader institutional support.  How do the multiple centres for innovation across London become more than a series of individual areas to enable ‘London’ to continue to function as a key innovation node globally?

 

Program:  what are the mix of uses conducive to catalysing and supporting innovation – including housing to accommodate a growing workforce affordably at multiple income levels, ‘shed’ space in the form of light industrial space that can support early stage work, and social space to encourage mixing and innovation?  What spaces should be provided by councils, academic institutions, and developers and how can existing amenity be leveraged?

 

Planning: what are the ways that planning can align policy across uses to support innovation, provide affordable and scalable space across uses, and provide certainty and security conducive to private and institutional development?  

 

Underlying all these discussions was a feeling that in the future, it would be good to organize a series of cross-disciplinary expert panel reviews such that there might be one on innovation that would also involve the housing, workplace, sustainable, industrial, and public realm panels.  Similarly, the innovation district panel might have expertise to help address issues central to the themes being investigated by other panels.