10 Innovations – Turning Problems Into Opportunities
When you approach problems from a different angle, they become opportunities. In this blog we take a look at 10 innovative examples of projects that our 360 Associate, and Chair of Well North Enterprises, Lord Andrew Mawson has been involved in.
1. The Olympic Project
Lord Mawson was one of the first movers to propose that the Olympic Games be brought to East London. In 1999 a meeting was held at the Bromley by Bow Centre with Paul Brickell, Richard Sumray and the architect, the late Lord Richard Rogers, which discussed the possibility of challenging the front runner Paris and bringing the Games to East London in 2012. Together this team wrote the first document on the London Olympics and created both the legacy logic for East London and an enticing narrative for the Games, based on East Londons impressive history of innovation and entrepreneurship. The vision was to use the Games to help both East London and the wider world rediscover the 6.5 miles of waterways that defined the Lower Lea Valley, stretching from Canary Wharf and the Royal Docks in the South up to Hackney Marshes and beyond in the North, creating a fantastic place to live, work and play; a Water City. The Olympics would act as the catalyst. London is the only city in the world to have delivered a world class legacy from the Olympic investment. Lord Mawson was a founding Director of the Olympic Park Legacy Company (OPLC) and its successor body the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC). He chaired the Regeneration and Community Partnerships committee.
2. East Bank
Boris called it Olympicopolis, Sadiq Kahn called it East Bank. Lord Mawson, Paul Brickell and Mark Bostock who conceived the idea in 2007 thought of it and described it as an Innovation District. The plan; to encourage world class universities, many land locked on expensive sites in West London, to co locate in East London at the centre of the Olympic Park with leading edge organisations from business, the arts, science and technology. Years of experience at the Bromley by Bow Centre, on the edge of the Park had taught Lord Mawson and Paul Brickell that real innovation is spawned on the interfaces, when organisations and individuals who haven’t before shared space in traditional silo’d cultures, now would sit alongside each other in one of the country’s largest campus cluster developments. Boris Johnson, the then Mayor of London backed the idea and an Innovation Platform was born. But only after Lord Mawson and colleagues had persuaded University College London’s (UCL) Council and the then new Provost Michael Arthur to be the first mover and take their first steps into what was to be a £400M investment.
3. Bromley By Bow Centre
The building of the first integrated health centre to be run as a social enterprise and owned by its local patients. It was opened in 1997 by Tessa Jowell MP, Minister for Public Health in the Blair Government, following the tragic death of a local East End mother Jean Vialls, and a public enquiry. The health centre became one of the working models for the £357 million Healthy Living Centre program, NHS LIFT, and the Darzi Centre’s – all early attempts to collocate services and generate a more integrated approach to primary health care.
4. Social Prescribing
The Bromley by Bow Centre started the social prescribing movement 30 years ago. It then put it into every practice in Tower Hamlets 7 years ago, and persuaded the government in 2018 to put it into every practice in the country. The Centre is still involved in developing the approach as well as supporting and training link workers and primary care teams.
5. LIFT
The Bromley by Bow Centre provided one of the inspirations for the multi million pound LIFT Programme initiated by the Blair Government in an attempt to extend and improve primary care facilities. This private finance initiative built primary care facilities across the country.
6. Community Care
The Bromley by Bow Centre was the first to develop an integrated community based model of community care, combining services for frail elderly, learning difficulties, physically disabled etc in community context working with artists and local volunteers.
7. One of the Founders of the Social Enterprise Movement in the UK
Lord Mawson was one of the founders of the Social Enterprise Movement in Britain. He and his colleagues demonstrated how a social enterprise working with the public sector could deliver services ranging from running a local park; adult education and ESOL; childcare; adult and community care, etc in a fully integrated project.
8. Startup Support
The Bromley by Bow Centre working with local social and business entrepreneurs on a housing estate pioneered the first Business Hub of its kind in the country, known today as Beyond Business. Today, the Centre has generated with local people 93 new businesses.
9. Corporate Social Opportunity
In the 1990’s the Centre pioneered new relationships with the business community, what Lord Mawson calls Corporate Social Opportunity (CSO). One of their early business partners was Group 4 and together they won a contract, providing training and employment locally, through a £1m landscape business called Green Dreams. Lord Mawson was one of the first people in the country to pioneer in practice a new working relationship with business which explored win win opportunities for both partners. These early ideas had been extended today through the work of Andrew Mawson Partnerships, Well North and 360 Degree Society.
10. Aldermaston Nuclear Research Establishment Partnership
In the 1990’s the Centre developed a unique partnership with Aldermaston Nuclear Research Establishment to create a children’s play area in the park behind the centre buildings in Bromley-by-Bow. This partnership created very early 3D images of the proposed new Health Centre and the model which today is exhibited in Science Museum.
If you enjoyed reading about these approaches, be sure to take a look at the follow up blog, featuring 15 more innovative approaches to placemaking.