‘SEiSMiC’: Societal Engagement in Science, Mutual learning in Cities
Report on the Workshop in Birmingham
Monday 16 June 2014, 1-4pm
ThinkTank, Millennium Point, Birmingham, B4 7XG
The Birmingham workshop was held at Millennium Point, which houses the ThinkTank science
museum, the Giant Screen cinema, faculties of Birmingham City University and the fashion and
design studios of Birmingham Metropolitan College. Millennium Point also benefits from the City’s
first central park – Eastside City Park – at its south entrance on Curzon Street.
Invitations had been sent to people and organisations with involved in researching and/or
addressing urban challenges through social innovation and sustainable development.
The following individuals participated in the workshop:

Denise Barrett, Regeneration Manager, Birmingham City Council

Geoffrey Brown, Director, EUCLID

John Daly, Doctoral Researcher, Birmingham City Business School

Tim Manson, Policy & Development Director, Marketing Birmingham

James Rees, Research Fellow, Third Sector Research Centre, University of Birmingham

Olinga Ta’eed, Centre for Citizenship, Enterprise and Governance, Professor of Social
Enterprise, University Northampton Business School

Dave Taylor, Birmingham City University

Laura Veart, Deputy EU Funding Manager, Birmingham City University

Mike Coyne SEiSMiC team (Centre for Strategy & Evaluation Services)

Jack Malan, SEiSMiC team (Centre for Strategy & Evaluation Services)

James Rampton, SEiSMiC team (Centre for Strategy & Evaluation Services)
Setting the Scene
An initial presentation from CSES set out the main features of the SEiSMiC project and the aims of
the workshop. These were defined as follows:
The overall intention of the Workshop is to help define the aims and programme of a social
innovation network - in the UK and across Europe - that has a particular focus on responses
to urban or location-based challenges. This would include responses based on an interaction
with national and EU funded research.
The origins of the project in the Science-in-Society theme of the EU’s FP7 Framework Programme for
RTD were explained, as were the implications of the thinking on the interaction of science and
society in the current Horizon 2020 Programme, notably for exploring ways to engage society in
actively generating innovation. The link of SEiSMiC with JPI Urban Europe was referred to and the
significance in this context of the interest of the ESRC and other UK research councils in community
engagement with social innovation in addressing urban challenges.
More specifically, the following objectives were set for the workshop:

Explore the meaning of social innovation in the urban context of Birmingham

Articulate visions for a sustainable future for cities across Europe

Review the role of existing key actors and promote and reinforce their interaction

Identify other potential contributors and ways of engaging communities in social innovation

Explore relationships with formal research support (e.g. Horizon 2020 & JPI Urban Europe)

Plan the next steps at a national and European level
Current activities
The participants outlined the role of their organisations in social innovation in the urban context of
Birmingham:
1
2

Birmingham City Council: as one of the largest local authorities in Europe, the City Council
plays a key role in urban planning, design and delivery of public services, public
procurement, etc. In recent years, pressure on budgets has driven the search for innovative
solutions to urban challenges and innovative ways to reform public services.

Birmingham City University (BCU): with 22,000 students, BCU is a major employer, provider
of graduate labour and stakeholder in the city. Recent investments have been stimulated by
and contributed to the wider regeneration of the city, most notably, the city centre campus
at Eastside. Within the Faculty of Technology, Engineering and the Environment, four
schools specifically focus on teaching and research related to digital media technology, the
built environment, engineering, design and manufacturing, and computing
telecommunications and networks.

Centre for Citizenship, Enterprise and Governance1 houses the external face of University of
Northampton Business School Research & Enterprise agenda. The Centre operates a number
of activities, including a Business Enterprise Support Team to support enterprise activity
across the Business School and in the region and to explore and set up profitable (social)
enterprises. Prof Ta’eed is actively working with Birmingham City Council in the largest social
capital project in the world.

EUCLID2: EUCLID provides international information services on behalf of the Arts Council
England. EUCLID has developed Culture.Info, an extensive series of online portals providing
cultural information from across the world – covering cultural areas, geographical locations
and themes such as funding, research and the creative industries. Other information
services include the Alert e-newsletter on EU funding and the CUPID database of EU funded
culture projects.
www.cceg.org.uk
www.euclid.info

Marketing Birmingham3 is the city’s strategic marketing partnership, which operates the
city’s leisure and business tourism programmes, Visit and Meet Birmingham, as well as
inward investment programme Business Birmingham. Specialist teams cover
communications, marketing, digital media, research, partnerships, policy and visitor services.
Marketing Birmingham operates the Regional Observatory, which provides high quality
research data and intelligence on inward investment and the visitor economy to inform
strategic planning, policy development and marketing and PR campaigns.

Third Sector Research Centre (TSRC).4 TSRC is based at the University of Birmingham, with
contributions from the Universities of Southampton and Lincoln. The Centre aims to
enhance knowledge of the sector through independent and critical research, giving a better
understanding of the value of the sector and how this can be maximised. Research
addresses seven main streams: Quantitative Analysis, Real Times, Service Delivery, Below
the Radar, Theory and Policy, Social Enterprise, and Workforce.
Defining the Priorities among Urban Challenges
The workshop discussed the major urban challenges or location-based challenges faced, not only in
Birmingham but generally, and the potential themes for a UK SEiSMiC network. This developed into
a discussion of the potential for social innovation to respond to such challenges. This would include
responses based on an interaction with national and EU funded research. With that in mind, a
number of issues were discussed.
Legislation as a driver of social innovation
The Public Services (Social Value) Act 20125 aims to transform the way money is spent on local public
services. It does this by placing a duty on public bodies to consider social value ahead of
procurement. The Act applies to the provision of services, or the provision of services together with
the purchase or hire of goods or the carrying out of works. Commissioners of public services must
think about more than just how to design these services and who will provide them. Public
authorities must also consider how the new services could have an even further reaching impact on
the local community. For example, in the West Midlands, all major councils have nominated social
value champions. 3,000 businesses signed up to Trading For Good, a platform that helps SMEs
showcase their social impact.6 In the long-term, it is hoped that companies contracted to deliver
public services will be prepared to make a long-term investment in the economic health of
communities. For example, Wilmot Dixon has invested £1 million in a skills academy to train 2,000
people a year in support of its contract with Birmingham City Council for long-term repairs and
maintenance of 60,000 properties for the council. However, there is debate as to whether measures
such as the Social Value Act will prove counter-productive through creating more “red tape” for
businesses and thus hindering the job creation.
In India, the Companies Act 20137 requires that companies set up a Corporate Social Responsibility
(CSR) board committee consisting of at least three directors, one of whom must be independent.
That committee must ensure that the company spends at least 2% of the average net profits made
during the three immediately preceding financial years on “CSR” activities. If the company fails to
spend this amount on CSR, the board must disclose why in its annual report.
3
www.marketingbirmingham.com
www.birmingham.ac.uk/generic/tsrc
5
www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2012/3/enacted
6
www.tradingforgood.co.uk
7
www.mca.gov.in/Ministry/pdf/CompaniesAct2013.pdf
4
Public procurement as a driver of social innovation
Pressures on public budgets, as well as the Social Value Act are pushing public authorities to
consider how the procurement process can maximise the social impact of public expenditure.
Changes in European procurement legislation (Directive 2014/24/EU replacing Directive 2004/18/EC
and Directive 2014/25/EU replacing Directive 2004/17/EC) will have a similar effect, after they come
into force after March 2016.
Current initiatives in this area include the following:

Find it in Birmingham,8 an internet portal for local businesses, providing access to
procurement information, local contacts, suppliers and businesses, as well as networking
events and information about public services for employers (Employment Access Team,
ACAS, etc.)

Centre for Social Business, an initiative supported by the city’s universities, with three sites
in the city (Balsall Heath, Shard End, Castle Vale).

Proposed new procurement model for Birmingham City Council, which will include a
“Market Exchange” and also ensure the Council’s compliance with the Social Value Act. For
contracts worth in excess of £150,000, the expectation is that social value of at least 20%
should be generated.

Birmingham Business Charter for Social Responsibility9 sets out guiding principles to which
the City Council adheres and which it invites its contracted suppliers, the wider business
community, other public sector bodies (including schools) and third sector organisations
(including grant recipients) to adopt. The principles of the charter are: Local Employment,
Buy Birmingham First, Partners in Communities, Good Employer, Green and Sustainable,
Ethical Procurement. Charter signatories need to consider and describe how they can
improve economic, social and environmental well-being.
As with legislation, there is debate as to the extent to which new approaches to public procurement
is an effective way to address social challenges. In particular, there is the question as to whether
businesses can be expected to take responsibility for addressing gaps and deficiencies in the
provision of skills for local people and the extent to which they can be required or cajoled into
employing local people (who might lack the necessary skills) rather than other people who are more
“job-ready”.
In relation to the issues that are key for SEiSMiC, the mechanisms described for delivering social
value could well represent a response to the question of how to deliver solutions to urban
challenges, but there are important aspects that the project could assist with, notably the issue of
the role of the community – as a passive recipient of the corporate sector’s good works, as a vehicle
for defining priorities or as an active agent in developing solutions. Similarly, there is an issue of
whether or not social value initiatives can deliver a comprehensive set of solutions or will there be
too much of a focus on addressing particular issues?
Restructuring and reforming public services
Pressure on public expenditure budgets is also stimulating new models of delivering public services.
A key problem relates to the delivery of different public services in “silos”, with limited horizontal
integration or co-ordination of services into the same locality. A related challenge relates to the
8
9
www.finditinbirmingham.com
http://www.finditinbirmingham.com/feature/charter
setting of different key performance indicators (KPIs) for different public bodies or providers of
public services. Such KPIs can often be contradictory, for example, KPIs that encourage schools to
retain young people in education until 18 years risk undermining efforts to increase the number of
young people undertaking apprenticeships and other training in the workplace.
As already discussed, new approaches to public procurement are stimulating social innovation and
new ways of delivering public services. There are also examples of initiatives to provide better coordination of public services at ground level and better use of community assets.

Due to public expenditure cuts, the Ladywood Health & Community Centre is at risk of
closure. Located in a deprived neighbourhood close to the city centre, the centre is being
used to bring together the services of different public bodies under one roof, for example,
services of Birmingham City Council, as well as those of the local NHS trust and to encourage
users to take more control. The Centre has been chosen as an area for generating creative
spillovers in innovation under an Urbact project on sustainable urban development. The
intention is not only to provide more services for local people, but to consider the holistic
needs of individuals and families rather than by viewing them as “beneficiaries” of specific
services. It is also hoped that such an approach will also ensure the long-term viability of the
centre itself. The centre features a valuable input from Birmingham Royal Ballet and
operates within the Creative SpIN project (described below), as an example of how the
creative sectors can trigger collaborative work and innovation in health provision and
improve the health and wellbeing outcomes in a deprived area.
There is also a need for efforts to combine not only mainstream public services but also to coordinate different innovations and initiatives aimed at addressing urban challenges. Where these
can be targeted on an area in a co-ordinated way, the impact can be greater.

Lessons can be learned from elsewhere. The Brussels Canal Zone, for instance, features high
unemployment among youth, a major influx of newcomers, and a lack of urban cohesion
due to declining industry. As the rest of the city develops, new opportunities are arising to
develop parts of the zone. Since the territory of the Canal Zone is located in seven different
municipalities, however, it is difficult to arrive at an integrated approach. The present
resources allocated to spatial planning appear inadequate to working at such a large scale.
Thus there is a need for a new overarching vision capable of guiding present developments.
The Brussels-Capital Region is addressing this challenge by formulating the Canal Master
Plan, a coherent urban plan for the entire Canal Zone. The emphasis of this plan lies not on
defining a single desirable end state for the future of the Canal Zone. Rather, a process is
being sought with new methods, studies, and scenarios in which a new strategy can be
developed together.10
Inward investment as a driver of social innovation
The arrival of inward investors into a locality creates opportunities and challenges:

10
Inward investors can use new sites to test new models of production and/or service delivery.
For example, Deutsche Bank, the German global banking and financial services provider, is
creating a new model for the delivery of back office functions at its new site in Birmingham.
The new site will house the firm’s trading floor, as well as sales, trading, structuring and
research operations. It is expected that the location of these services in a single site will
improve the company’s efficiency, e.g. by reducing the time taken to make decisions.
http://www.architectureworkroom.eu/en/work/brussels_canal_guide_plan/

As part of its commitment to corporate social responsibility, Deutsche Bank has also
encouraged all its managers to become involved in local social enterprises.

The massive recent investment by Jaguar Land Rover in production sites in the West
Midlands has created a huge demand for skilled staff. Whilst creating new jobs for local
people, this also creates the risk of existing employers losing their skilled staff. The challenge
is to find innovative and effective ways to increase the supply of skilled labour in the region,
where possible drawing from the pool of unemployed people.

The location of the BBC’s digital hub in Birmingham creates opportunities for wider spillovers into the local economy.

Inward investors are becoming key drivers of research, given their need for more detailed
data about localities into which they are considering investing. This includes detailed data on
the number of graduates in particular disciplines or with particular language skills.
Innovative solutions to climate change and sustainability challenges in an urban context
Increased urbanisation can create particular challenges related to environmental sustainability.

Cities such as Birmingham can require innovative approaches to improvement of ageing
housing stock, not least since one strategic objective of the city is to increase the population
by 100,000 or so over the next few years. Action is needed to improve the “liveability” of
local housing and reduce carbon emissions. Innovative approaches have been tested to
“retro-fitting” old properties, so that they are carbon neutral. However, the challenge is to
roll out such approaches on a larger scale. The Retrofit Plus11 project has received £1.2m of
funding to scale up the retrofit of houses across the UK. Its approach is based on research
carried out at the Birmingham School of Architecture and experimental research on the
“Birmingham Zero Carbon House”, which demonstrates how to convert solid wall houses to
zero carbon.

The increase in urbanisation has placed huge demands on natural resources, which has led
to increased pollution and damage to ecosystems. As a result, improved climate change
planning is required for government, business and stakeholders, which requires a better
evidence base. The KIC Transitions12 project is developing a new approach to presenting
climate data on an interactive platform, outlining mitigation and adaptation strategies and
promoting more informed decision-making. The project will enable the re-use of current and
future modelling tools and data by creating plug and play standards, providing an open and
scalable means of assisting cities with climate change-aware urban planning. KIC Transitions
aims to develop a framework for visualisation of urban analysis and planning scenarios, to
support complex climate-related decision making processes. These frameworks will be used
by communities and stakeholders as a basis for specific planning purposes such as
monitoring, evaluating and designing cities from block to regional scales. For this project, the
University is leading a consortium of eight large companies including industry giants IBM and
ESRI, the university ETH Zurich and local company GreenHill Sustainability.
Potential of the cultural and creative sectors to promote social innovation and transformation in
urban areas
11
12
www.bcu.ac.uk/research/stories/designing-zero-carbon-buildings
www.bcu.ac.uk/research/stories/kic-t
As well as being an important employer in its own right, the cultural and creative sector also triggers
positive externalities in other sectors of the economy, such as by stimulating tourism, providing
content for ICT, fuelling investments in broadband infrastructure and services, digital technologies
and new consumer electronics and telecommunications services. They can also help drive
innovation, for example, through the role that design, architecture and advertising play in new
investments in construction, consumer technologies, environmental technologies and the digital
economy. There remains the issue that not all of those engaged in creative activities are happy with
the instrumentalism inherent in a lot of the discussion of the role of the sector in modern
economies, but the great strengths of the sector in articulating and communicating ideas and views
and provoking debate on the challenges faced mean that it has the potential to make an important
contribution to democratic engagement with urban issues.
Amongst the initiatives highlighted during the workshop were the following:
13

Creative SpIN (Creative "Spillovers" for Innovation)13. Funded under the EU’s URBACT
programme, Creative SpIN aims to create a Thematic Network across Europe which will
address the challenges of how best to connect cultural and creative industries, including
sectors such as audio-visual, design, advertising, architecture and video games, with other
sectors, to stimulate the effects of "spill over". Creative SpIN will set tools and methods to
trigger creativity and innovation in businesses and other kinds of public and private
organisations by encouraging artists, creative professionals (in advertising, design,
architecture), cultural institutions and industries to engage with other sectors to share their
competencies and skills. Birmingham is focusing on the health sector, where it will develop
new ways of working, collaboration, markets and business models. The aim is to test
“creative spillovers” to support health and wellbeing outcomes. Activity is focussed on colocating health and community services at Ladywood Community Centre, with links to
cultural and creative industry clusters in the Digbeth and Jewellery Quarter areas of the city.

Digital Birmingham was established in 2006 as the driving force to spread the benefits of
digital and new emerging technologies. Digital Birmingham is now driving forward
Birmingham's Smart City approach, which aims at integrating technology into all mainstream
city initiatives in the areas of mobility, economy, people, living and governance. A Smart City
Commission has been established. Birmingham has also been selected to partner with IBM
on the Smart City agenda. The ambition is to develop Birmingham as a smart city by
supporting SMEs and the development of new applications.

To improve the city’ image and attract investment, Marketing Birmingham, the city’s
strategic marketing partnership, operates the city’s leisure and business tourism
programmes - Visit and Meet Birmingham.

Several initiatives have been launched in the last 10-15 years to position Birmingham as a
leading regional capital for the cultural and creative industries (CCIs). The Creative
Birmingham Partnership Board assesses the needs of CCIs. Looking for new markets was
identified as one of the main priorities. Birmingham ‘Creative City’ explores new funding
opportunities for CCIs, in collaboration with the private sector. Ad hoc financial engineering
tools have also been created fund business start-ups and growth such as the Creative
Advantage Fund, the Creative Industry Fund.

Birmingham City University facilities a monthly networking meeting for professionals and
stakeholders in the cultural and creative industries, to support the sector and help bridge
the gap between professionals and the world of research and teaching.
http://urbact.eu/en/projects/innovation-creativity/creativespin/our-project/
Data challenges
The increasing complexity of urban life creates the need for decision-makers to have better
information and analysis tools at their disposal. Advances in technology and communications have
enabled such solutions to emerge. For example:

Taking advantage of the developments in “big data” and promoting Innovative applications
i.e. employing the new technology for managing and exploiting large and complex datasets
that were difficult to process using earlier on-hand database management tools or
traditional data processing applications, but which are now increasingly being exploited. The
challenge here is to find efficient ways for the capture, curation, storage, search, sharing,
transfer, analysis and visualization of data in such datasets. In the field of social innovation,
new approaches have been tested that combine large datasets with spatial mapping tools,
such as geographic information systems (GIS).

The IBM Intelligent Operations Center provides an executive dashboard to help city leaders
gain insight into various aspects of city management. The executive dashboard spans
agencies and enables drill-down capability into underlying agencies, such as emergency
management, public safety, social services, transportation, or water. IBM Intelligent
Operations Center enables cities to manage large complex environments, communicate
more effectively with citizens, understand the state of the city and collaborate between
departments. Intelligent Operations Center saves cities money by reducing staff needed to
make decisions and by more effectively deploying resources.
Measurement of social value / social impact
The Social Value Act will increase the need for credible methodologies for measuring and
demonstrating social value and social impact and for communicating the results. Current approaches
include the following:
14

Social Return on Investment (SROI)14, a methodology for analysing social return. SROI maps
out the value of an intervention using step-by-step approach, which includes evidencing
outcomes and giving them a value in order to calculate the social return on investment.

Brandonomics,15 a Social Impact measurement tool that consolidates a brand’s positive
impact into a single number that quantifies a company’s responsibility to society and its
bottom line. Like the P/E ratio that relates share price to earnings, Brandonomics has
developed the S/E ratio that measures Social Earnings.

The Social Earnings Ratio or “S/E Ratio” is a free, open source, simple, repeatable, objective,
scalable, one-number social impact metric that uses no-financial proxies and comes in
manual and cloud-computing formats.16

Wiki inter-university program17; 24 universities have enrolled on a joint programme to
measure 'top 100' of different sectors. Conducting research under an open source Creative
Commons 4.0 license available on the free open education JORUM resource, university
postgraduate and undergraduate students are trained over an EdX MOOC (Massive Online
Open Course).
www.thesroinetwork.org
www.brandanomics.com
16
www.cceg.org.uk/#!research/cmp
17
https://infogr.am/social-impact-analysis-social-earnings-ratio?src=web
15
Organising the SEiSMiC network
It was mentioned that a number of organisations had expressed an interest in the work of the
project and in the development of a network, but had not been able to attend the workshops. It was
agreed that a useful role for a network nationally and across Europe would be to continue to bring
together people and organisations that are active in different aspects of social innovation with an
urban focus.
As part of this function, highlighting and communicating relevant work undertaken in other EUfunded projects would be a useful contribution.
A possible theme for a UK network, given the interest in the country, is the measurement of social
innovation. There is a need to collect better data on the effects of a range of projects and with
appropriate planning and bringing together of existing initiatives, a service could be provided that
would be a distinctive UK contribution. The modelling that has been done in Birmingham could be a
helpful starting point.
Various communication tools could be used, to support the planned on-going series of meetings and
conferences. The Wiki inter-university program could be useful in this context
A number of participants expressed a wish to make active contributions to developing a SEiSMiC
network.
Overall Conclusions
With a wide-ranging discussion, it is difficult to summarise all the points raised. However, the
following stand out:

In the face of the severe difficulties in prospect for local authority budgets and the possibility
of drastic cuts in non-statutory provision, there is a need to find new ways of providing services,
including those that aim to address major urban challenges








As well as contributions from social entrepreneurship and the 3rd (voluntary) sector,
there is a growing contribution to be expected from the corporate sector
Birmingham and other cities are developing a major role for corporate social
responsibility in their procurement regimes
In the UK, the Social Value Act has given a major impulse to these developments
Inward investment can also be an occasion for important initiatives under the umbrella
of corporate social responsibility
A major effort is required to measure the effects of social value and other initiatives,
with tools such as those developed by the Centre for Citizenship, Enterprise and
Governance
The challenge, however, is to engage the community with these initiatives, not only as
passive recipients of corporate and other action, but as active contributors to shaping
service delivery and contributing to the development of innovative solutions
At the same time, it is important to break out of the silo mentality and promote
interaction between initiatives
The project at the Ladywood Health & Community Centre represents an innovative
approach to engaging the community in addressing health issues. It also illustrates the
potential contribution of the cultural sector, in this case through the Creative
"Spillovers" for Innovation project



More generally, the contribution of the cultural and creative sector is important, not
only for stimulating and motivating engagement, but also for promoting democratic
debate and exploration of urban issues
A major issue however, is the co-ordination and integration of the many bottom-up
initiatives, so that a consistent and balanced approach to the whole range of urban
challenges is achieved
The public authorities still have an important role in promoting integrated solutions.
Timetable for Future Developments
Finally, the meeting was informed of the timetable for future developments within SEiSMiC:

National meeting
1 October 2014 (venue to be confirmed)

Launch of European network
24-25 November 2014

3 National Workshops
2014 – 2016

3 European Fora
2014 – 2016