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Welcome to our Annual Review of 2024. Our review, like all of our work is #RadicallyOpen. It is concise and published openly on the web.
2024 is our eleventh year of operation. We are so proud of our achievements, our team, our constant evolution, our ambition and our resolve. We have lots coming up in 2025 to share but first we will reflect on our delivery in 2024.
Our #RadicallyOpen approach means that when you work with us we all work:
Paul Connell & The Open Innovations team, January 2025.
Remember all of our work is on the web and easily found using your favourite search engine.
We are a not-for-profit independent small business operating remotely from Leeds. Over the last year since closing our workspace we have been "On Tour" - enjoying working from clients and sponsors' locations. Thank you to Arup, Tetra Tech, CEG and Bradford 2025 for hosting us. In 2025, we will continue to work remotely and have a base with The Data City, watch this space for updates.
We innovate in the open with data, working with our sponsors, partners, companies, organisations, governments and individuals. We help others to access, use and share data – to use the web as it was intended – and create massive surpluses of shared value.
Our team is small but knowledgeable, experienced and talented, with a mix of backgrounds including data science, data analysis, innovation, economics, marketing & comms, IT, web development, project management and much much more.
Founder Open Innovations
Director
Data, Research & Development Open Innovations
Data Scientist Open Innovations
Economics Data Lead Open Innovations
Associate Data Architect Open Innovations
Head of Data Open Innovations
Data & Innovation Consultant Open Innovations
We are doers not talkers; we innovate iteratively on the web by working at pace, being on the web, testing rapidly, building prototypes and creating real tools/ websites and data assets and infrastructure.
Our mission-led approach means that we work on stuff that matters to us, our sponsors, partners and network and ultimately everyone else. Everything we do is on our website.
We focus on these key areas:
Anyone that has an interest in data, working with data, sharing data, innovating with data, analysing data, publishing data openly on the web. So far this has been local authorities, governments, cultural programmes, think tanks, public and private sector organisations from every sector. We work in two main ways: collaboratively with our sponsor network or commissioned by clients/partners.
Each year our sponsors support us with a small amount which means that we can maintain and develop our assets - the website, toolbox, mailbox help, mission-led projects
We are commissioned by clients/partners to work in partnership on a specific data project or programme - we continue to work openly on these projects so that ultimately any developments and progressions we make together can be used and shared so that others can benefit from the work too.
Open Innovations has existed since 2013 with the intention of being #RadicallyOpen making a difference in North England.
Our key USP is our website and the way we work openly. The aim of this is to make a difference, for individuals, organsations, governments and academia to use, learn, share and benefit from our work. To do this we publish most of our work under a couple of open source recognised licences:
Over the last 2 years we have focused on helping organisations use their data differently, openly and quickly. We have also focused on our mission-led, data for good work.
Our work is dominated by the public and regulated sectors. We have noticed that the public sector’s ability to deliver excellent data projects has been hampered by the UK’s centralised institutions. In our opinion, they have made progress slow and in some cases nothing “gets done” at all. Our approach proves that there is a credible alternative. One that focuses on outputs, ambitions, and realistic progress.
Our most important success is that Open Innovations is still here after 11 years. We're still relevant, still ambitious and still aiming to be a new type of organisation in North England.
We're an independent, not-for-profit organisation. We need to be aware of our commercial situation to stay in business. Our revenue streams are made up of sponsor support and our data partnerships and projects.
Because of our sponsors we are able to fund our team to work on projects which are politically and topically relevant and can make a difference - we call these our mission-led work. We will highlight this later in the review.
Our work matters because we care about doing the right thing with data. We care about doing the best possible job of sharing, publishing, visualising, and innovating with data. We care about helping others do the same and helping affect positive change.
Our impact and value is easy to measure as we capture the data via our dashboard - but the output we achieve consistently is impressive:
At Open Innovations, we measure our work openly. Our dashboard is used to measure our progress and success. It is updated automatically, regularly and is open to all. We report on our sponsors, projects, revenue, events and social media. At a glance you can immediately see the value we deliver.
Note that the website visits recorded in the dashboard are before bot removal which we introduced recently.
This is at the heart of what we do best. Our team of data scientists, analysts, and developers work on your behalf to design, deliver & maintain some pioneering projects which impact us all. 2024 was a busy and exciting year which saw us work on new projects focusing on culture, the economy and transport:
Thanks to our sponsors' funding we can fund a small team to create, develop and maintain data projects that we think will have an impact. We are incredibly proud of our work and impact in this field. To date we have worked on over of these projects.
They have been used widely - we cannot capture every instance but we know of these organisations that have share or used our work: BBC, The Times, Ministry of Justice, UK Parliament, ONS, RAC, Age UK, Channel 4, Look North, Parliamentary Digital Service, House of Commons, NHS, NHSx, NHS Digital, Leeds Anchors Network, Newsnight, UKMPG, New Statesman, The Economist, Financial Times, Transport for the North, Universities of Leeds/Bradford/Cambridge/Oxford/Bristol/Edinburgh/Warwick/Loughborough/Newcastle, Radio 4, CPC Catapult, RSM Economics, The Data City, BFI, National Grid, Open Research Leeds, Scholastic Solutions, Open Data Manchester, Leeds 2023, The Open Data Institute, Open UK, Leeds Digital, and of course our sponsors past and present.
Our website and our team are our most important communications tools. We publish many articles and blogs which are often reshared and published by others and showcase what we are working on and how it can impact others. We are also asked to attend and contribute to many events, conferences, roundtables and workshops where we can share our work and insight.
We have a mailing list of over 1100 subscribers who we send out regular newsletters and updates to and an active and engaged social media profile covering X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Blue Sky and YouTube. It enables us to engage with an audience that covers the whole of the UK and beyond, sharing our news, project outcomes, innovation work, and more. Please do follow us and join in with our open conversations, and share your stories and priorities with us so we can share them. This social media presence is important in raising awareness, sharing info, and also has a monetary value relative to our sponsors, partners and clients.
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| Youtube viewing time (across all videos): | ? minutes |
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| Total online engagement: (measured in number of times a tweet, post, link, page, etc, has been seen) | ? |
Across our main website as well as microsites for particular projects.
The big spike in visits in July was due to our live mapping of results for the General Election.
Our blog is a useful and important method to communicate our work, showcase tools, announce research and development work, and connect people & orgs to our work so that it can be shared, developed and amplified. During the year we wrote ? blog posts:
Our work, our impact, and our knowledge are great so it's no surprise that we get asked a lot by a wide variety of organisations to use resources, and services for free. As a not-for-profit, non-funded organisation we simply cannot operate on this basis. However, we do choose a couple of relevant projects each year to support with some of the funds raised by sponsorship and events.
Open Innovations will be making a cash donation this year to 3 organisations: Zarach.org (helping ensure children don't go without a bed to sleep in), Unicef and the Red Cross.
We operate a commercial non-profit model - which means that we use profits to work on our mission-led projects. In simple terms this means that sponsorship and other revenues can support work and projects that make a difference.
The fact that we have established Open Innovations as a business with stable revenues means that your sponsorship can be directed towards these mission-led projects and we can provide technical support, space for meetings and collective pooling of resources to make the most of all of our investments.
All of our current work has started with us completing self funded activity (Meetings, Conversations, Events, Web Communications) and doing innovation (Data Projects/Visualisations/Tools).
In 2024 this has meant that our collective investment has allowed projects including: #PlanetData, How Does The North Win?, Economic Data Dashboard, Housing Data, Culture Data, Bus journey times tool, Population around a point, Parkulator, Constituencies hex maps and the WarmSpaces Finder tool to make a difference for everyone.
Lots more, following our recent track record in helping cultural organisations publish, share & visualise their data, we are excited to be working with Bradford 2025 on their year of culture, and a collaboration between the North East Combined Authority and the University of Northumbria and helping Calderdale with a cultural audience tool too.
We are continuing our work with Northern Powergrid DFES, and will be announcing more data observatory and data partnership projects in culture, the economy and transport very soon.
We will continue to work on our important and valuable mission-led work. So please join in, share, get involved and get in touch. Working together is more impactful and more fun.
Use our website, share our work, ask us for help, join in :)
Paul and the Open Innovations team