It's goodbye from us

From May 2026 Open Innovations will not be commencing any new work, we will be archived.

All our work - tools, data, blogs and everything else - will remain on our website and in our open repositories for anyone to access, use and share but we will not be actively completing new work.

We would like to thank everyone who has been involved and supported what has been a fabulous and positive enterprise over the past 13 years. It's fair to say that our team has, with your help, punched way above our weight to make a difference.

Open Innovations began as ODILeeds in November 2013. As a pioneering independent not-for-profit organisation, it was our mission to be #RadicallyOpen with data that anyone can access, use and share. Helping everyone to work on the web and innovate with open data, helping people make better decisions.

We created a unique innovation space in central Leeds and since our creation, we welcomed over 26 sponsors, hosted 1379 innovation events, delivered 166 data projects, published 443 blogs and reached over 3.7 million people on our website. Statistics that have helped to make an impact upon people's jobs, projects, start-ups, spin-outs and most importantly on difficult problems that affect peoples lives.

After 12+ years at the forefront of Innovation & Open Data from North England, we have decided it is time to elegantly wind down our organisation across the next 12 months. We began by advocating for the power of open data, showing what it could achieve & enable and convening people to make a difference. This quickly evolved to helping to publish open data with Leeds Data Mill & Data Mill North and building useful open source tools on the web.

As our messages and approaches gained traction and cut through, we began to hear our words, hashtags and our event series titles repeated back to us - at conferences, online and in the media, #RadicallyOpen, #KillAllReports, #PlanetData, #Northernlands, 'The underperformance of North Englands economy is a mystery.'

After years of us showing the way, organisations have begun to start working in the ways we hoped they would, using data and open data in a positive way, which is why we can move on knowing we have been successful.

Our popular website will stay on the web, it is used by many as a resource, and our email will be in place for a while yet if anyone would like to get in touch.

We are incredibly proud of what we have achieved, and very grateful to everyone who has helped along the way. A big shout out to our talented and dedicated team of employees and contributors, Tom Forth, Stuart Lowe, Amy Evans, Dan Billingsley, Giles Dring, Christian Spence, Taz Chiles, Luke Strange, Grace Durkan, Michelle Brook, Neil McClure and all of our associates and contributors over the years - too many to mention but you are all featured on our website.

We'd also like to thank Gavin Starks, Jeni Tennison and Richard Stirling from The ODI who really helped us in our early years. 

A huge thank you to Tom Riordon, Tom Bridges, Dylan Roberts and Stephen Blackburn and everyone at Leeds City Council who believed in us in 2013 &14 helping us to springboard into success. 

Another big thank you goes to, Stian Westlake, whose philanthropic funding via the Mohn Westlake foundation enabled our team to work on important mission led projects including, Warm Spaces, National Data Library, General Election coverage, Constituency Hex Maps and many more ...

We were lucky to have a group of organisations that trusted in us and the work we could and did do, our sponsors. There are too many to mention but they are all on our sponsors page. A huge thank you to all of you who helped make the work we did possible.

With all your help we showed that it is possible to "just do things" innovating with data from North England, become nationally relevant and make a global impact.

In all the best goodbye speeches, there is an emotional presentation, for us it's a timeline of our 'best bits' - Thanks everyone, it's been a blast!

Open Innovations timeline

Paul & Kathryn Connell

Very Best

Open Innovations