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Belfast has the UK's only Innovation Commissioner. Should every city region have one? 

  • Writer: David Marlow
    David Marlow
  • Jul 15
  • 5 min read

How Belfast is cracking Inclusive Innovation...
How Belfast is cracking Inclusive Innovation...

Fifteen months ago, Adrian Johnston took on a role — Innovation Commissioner, Innovation City Belfast (ICB) — whose title elsewhere might suggest a job built almost entirely around commercialising research. Patents, spinouts, R&D spend — the standard innovation-district scorecard. But in Belfast the job means something else entirely: helping a risk-averse public sector learn to innovate, helping universities rethink what "responsible research" means when the community it studies is sitting in the room, and holding seven anchor institutions to a single, stubborn question — does any of this actually raise household income and reduce health inequalities for people who've felt little of the previous decade's growth?


That's the territory Adrian occupies, and as far as we can establish, he is the only person in the UK doing precisely this job. Innovation City Belfast (ICB) is a seven-anchor institution partnership — Belfast City Council, Ulster University, Queen's University Belfast, Belfast Metropolitan College, Catalyst, Belfast Harbour and Invest Northern Ireland — built around the £1 billion, ten-year Belfast Region City Deal. Its ambition, to make Belfast the UK's healthiest and most productive city by 2035, sits alongside an Inclusion Capital White Paper Adrian co-authored with Robin Klingler-Vidra and Alex Glennie. This argues that innovation success has to be measured across economic, human, cultural and social capital — not just the first of those four.


Our conversation ranged across governance design, measurement, community trust, and spatial equity within and beyond the city. And given Belfast's and Adrian's involvement in the Improving Inclusive Innovation Outcomes (i3o) programme we've discussed on the podcast — most recently in the Michael Glass episode last December — it's worth reading Belfast's experience against the Innovation District 2.0 (ID2.0) frameworks at the forefront of ED policy and practice.


At least five things are worth pulling out of the episode and pushing further.


1. The Innovation Commissioner role is a positive governance innovation. Ambitious cities should consider whether a bespoke Innovation Commissioner would add coherence and wider inclusive growth dynamism to their science, technology, research and innovation (STRI) strategies and investments.

 

Adrian is candid that the role only works because Belfast already has an unusually integrated quadruple helix, underpinned by decades of peace-and-reconciliation investment most English city regions don't have. Belfast Inclusive Futures — the eight-month process that got all seven ICB anchor institutions, and community partners, to agree what inclusive growth actually means — is a genuine instance of inclusive innovation planning in action. But agreeing goals is only half the test; the ID2.0 model also demands they be business-planned and performance-managed, and for ICB that is still work in progress.

We see adjacent moves elsewhere — John Seager's evolving Estates Director role at Newcastle Helix and their Helix Success Framework, informed by i3o findings, is one. Adrian's right about both the role and the concept: it's exportable, but each place probably needs its own pathway to it.

 

2. "How do you measure the unmeasurable?" is the right question for inclusive innovation across the whole LED and placemaking field, not just Belfast.


The inclusion capital framework names cultural and social capital, alongside the comfortable economic and human metrics. Adrian proposes a genuinely novel proxy for social/inclusion capital: the shape of people's social graphs, and whether institutions expand people's confidence to move beyond their existing networks rather than parachuting initiatives in. ONS and NISRA hold none of this data today. The gap between "agreeing inclusion priorities" and "performance-managing" them is far from a Belfast-specific failing, but the clearest evidence yet of how underbuilt this data infrastructure is everywhere.

 

3. Mission-based convening around healthy life expectancy is a genuinely transferable delivery model, independent of Belfast's specific history.


Belfast's most deprived communities lose roughly five years of life expectancy against the city average. Three of the Belfast Region City Deal's five research centres of excellence sit in clinical data, digital health and healthy ageing. That coincidence of research capability, community need and a health system needing transformation is exactly the cross-sectoral integration Greater Manchester has pursued through health-and-work integration — and exactly what most combined authorities (see our episode with Mayor Claire Ward of EMCCA) lack the cross-boundary authority and co-terminosity to attempt. The lesson isn't "copy Belfast's health metrics" — it's copy the convening method: find where research capacity, acute community need and institutional appetite for change already overlap. Organise the mission around that intersection rather than a generic growth ambition.

The open question, which the episode doesn't resolve, is whether this activity stays embedded in the neighbourhoods with the worst health outcomes, or clusters around the research and hospital campuses themselves. The wider determinants of health inequalities won't be solved inside a high-tech, high-knowledge enclave, however well-intentioned the research agenda.

 

4. Agency, not transparency, is Adrian's answer to community trust — and it has immediate relevance beyond Belfast.

 

Recorded in a month of community disruption in Belfast and Southampton, the conversation didn't dodge the link between polarisation and communities feeling left behind. Adrian's answer — that trust comes from agency, from co-design rather than delivery — is the right instinct. His example of the Bloomberg Mayors Challenge-funded alleyway regeneration is a genuine small-scale proof point, resonating with the spirit of the physical connectors bridge linking Glasgow Riverside ID to neighbouring Govan highlighted in our Emma Frost episode. The larger claim — that agency is what prevented recent unrest from escalating in the way it might once have — is asserted rather than tested in the episode. It deserves scrutiny before other places assume it travels.

 

5. Spatial equity within a city region is a live design problem, not a solved one — and the "core city vs the rest" framing needs replacing.


Adrian reframes city-centre concentration: not Belfast versus its hinterland, but how each community contributes to the other's prosperity. That's the right instinct, and territorial equity is i3o's third ID2.0 parameter — taking responsibility for an ID's impact on distant communities, not just the ones inside it. But the underlying mapping of where Belfast's innovation activity could scale into Foyle Port's renewable energy capability or the Derry-Londonderry corridor is still work in progress. Adrian recognises Belfast still needs to address regionally his own critique of Whitehall industrial strategy for not integrating place and also help foundational economies transition rather than be marginalised or replaced by frontier sector investments.

 

Concluding remarks: What makes this episode worth the full listen isn't the Belfast case study on its own terms — it's the transferability test Mike pushed Adrian on throughout. Belfast's integration is real, but it rests on historical capital other places can't quickly acquire. What's exportable is the method: convene early around a shared definition of success, measure what everyone else skips, build agency rather than assume trust follows transparency, and treat spatial equity as a two-way contribution, not a distribution problem. Those are portable regardless of a region's history.


Tested against ID2.0 specifically, Belfast is ahead of most places on agreeing what inclusion means and who's responsible for it — but hasn't yet closed the loop on performance-managing those goals, or on territorial equity beyond its own boundary. It echoes the more general i3o observation, and indeed LEDCs Michael Glass and Emma Frost episodes, that most contemporary innovation districts and knowledge quarters do some bits of the ID2.0 agenda well but none is good at everything. The components Belfast is good at, though, are important and translatable for IDs and their host cities more widely.


David Marlow, July 2026

 

Further reading:

 

 

Further LEDC listening:

 

 

 
 
 

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