Come Together: Academia, policy and innovation (a work in progress)

Universities move slowly and carefully. Digital teams move fast and break things.

The two sit so far apart they rarely touch: the big thinking gets diluted before it reaches the services people use, and what delivery learns seldom finds its way back.

And the ground is shifting: policymaking and budgets are being devolved to regions and mayors, the Treasury has written test and learn into its guidance on public spending, and AI is either the future or the end, depending on who you ask.

For the past year, Lighthouse and Professor Mark Davis of the University of Leeds have brought the two worlds together on one real problem, in a live civic lab.

This is an honest account of what that produces: what each world gets wrong about the other, where AI earned its place and where it did not, and the parts still held together with tape.

A talk, open questions, then drinks and networking at the Everyman.

What we’ll cover

• How the worlds of digital and academia have traditionally been incompatible, to the detriment of citizens, business and government.
• Why place-based problems are pulling universities and the public and private sectors closer together
• A year of running peer-reviewed research and fast, test-and-learn delivery side by side on the same civic problem
• Where AI earned its place in the work, the tooling we built so researchers and delivery teams could both trust it, and the places we decided it had no business being
• What the Treasury’s new test-and-learn guidance changes, and what it does not
• The money: huge pots, mostly the wrong shape – devolved budgets that buy kit, not the experiments that show what is worth buying
• The parts that do not work yet: the gaps, the unsettled arguments, the assumptions still waiting to be tested

About Professor Mark Davis

Mark Davis is Professor of Economic Sociology and Deputy Head of School at the University of Leeds. He founded the Bauman Institute and co-created Community Municipal Investments (Local Climate Bonds) with industry and public sector partners, work selected as one of the University’s ten showcased REF2021 impact case studies. He is 2025 President of Sociology and Social Policy at the British Science Association and a Fellow of the Civic Exchange, and has spent his career arguing that the university has to be useful to the place it sits in.

About Lighthouse

Lighthouse is a policy, service and innovation design studio that helps governments and public bodies design better services and test them before they scale. With the University of Leeds, it runs the Retrofit Policy Lab, a live civic lab applying research, design and experimentation to place-based problems.