Resilience Communicating – Accelerating collaborative innovation in the UK and beyond

Dear Friends,

We hope this finds you in good health. It is a pleasure to share our latest news, including the launch of our Living Lab Playbook, an update on our Global Business Innovation Programme (GBIP) trips to Portugal and India with Innovate UK and an update on our current projects.

The Resilience Brokers team are excited about working collaboratively towards fairer, healthier, more climate-resilient places & livelihoods and we love co-developing new opportunities with our friends and colleagues.

If you have comments, questions, suggestions or would like to collaborate with Resilience Brokers, please do get in touch with us.

Living Lab Playbook 👥 

It is more important than ever that the cities and places of the future should be adaptive and resilient to the risks of climate change. Complex challenges, such as climate change risk, require cross-sector solutions and innovation. This belief inspired us to write the Living Lab playbook, which details our unique approach to accelerating innovation in local areas.

Our Living Labs use a cross-sector, collaborative approach to co-create solutions and accelerate the pace of innovation. We use a three stage approach – map, support and amplify – to deliver solutions and innovations that will help boost local climate resilience. The Living Lab Playbook summarises the tools and approaches used to facilitate a Living Lab, the estimated cost and information about how we might address your local or regional needs.

                        The Three Stage Approach harnessed in our Living Labs

 “Exeter Living Lab introduced me to a collaborative way of working, connecting people, and developing ideas to help solve sustainability challenges in and surrounding Exeter. Through the Lab, I was able to connect with people around the globe with a zeal for addressing sustainability challenges in a fair and inclusive way.” David Bacon, Operations and Maintenance Director at Exeter Community Energy

Please do read, share, and join the conversation through our social media platforms – Twitter, LinkedIn. If you have questions or are interested in integrating systems thinking into your projects or strategic priorities, please contact team@resiliencebrokers.org

India and Portugal 🇮🇳🇵🇹

Through Innovate UK EDGE, two members of our team were selected to participate in the Global Business Innovation Programme (GBIP) this summer. 

CEO Stephen Passmore visited the cities of Hyderabad and Chennai as part of a delegation focussed on city systems. Stephen’s mission was to explore how our approach to helping teams adopt systems thinking approaches might add value in these regional Indian contexts. It was a whistle stop tour with many opportunities to meet government, business and research teams and to begin to build connections and partnerships. Particular highlights included hearing the great progress and ambitions from both cities’ administrators, visiting the first Indian green certified building and the T Hub 2.0, dubbed the world’s largest innovation campus. With huge thanks to Innovate UK, UKRI and UKinIndia, we are very well-placed to continue to build partnerships – watch this space for further news.

Our Senior Programme Manager for International Initiatives, Anne Giles, went to Portugal as part of a UK delegation to attend the annual Global Innovation Summit (GIS2022) in Estoril. This year’s Summit focussed on the preservation of oceans, the potential of space science and the reformulation of policies to promote sustainability. In the margins of the Summit, the delegation met with local businesses in Lisbon, such as start-ups at Start Up Lisboa, the Smart City Innovation Lab at the Universidad Catolica and attended a networking event hosted by Portugal’s National Innovation Agency. 

Phase 2: Pathway for a Sustainable Covid-19 Recovery in Yucatán 🇲🇽

We are excited that our collaborative project with GIZ México and the Yucatán State Government, Pathway for a Sustainable Covid Recovery in Yucatán, has progressed into its second phase. This phase is focussed on rapid prototyping of a digital tool in co-development with a Technical Working Group of diverse local stakeholders that met in a series of six remote meetings throughout this summer. Through this process and in partnership with Fab City Yucatán, we have developed a prototype, which will be a participatory webpage that will aim to increase recycling rates in the State as part of the Yucatán State Government’s wider Yucatán Cero Residuos campaign. Our team will be back in Mexico in late October for a final project visit and we look forward to providing a final update later this autumn on the project’s impact! 

Work we love ❤️

 …and recommend you check out!

• EcoCity World Summit 2023 will be held at The Barbican London in June 2023. Stephen and Anne both attended the breakfast launch event at the same venue.
• Systems Mapping – How to build and use causal models of systems by Pete Barbrook-Johnson, Alexandra S. Penn
• Stephen will be speaking at the Healthy City Design International conference at the Royal College of Physicians in London on 11 October.

For all enquiries, get in touch with us.