- Posted on 5 Sep 2025
- 3-minute read
Universities are the heart of many innovation districts, driving major investments in surrounding tech parks and industrial clusters—but the real drivers are more nuanced. Proximity between deep tech firms, research labs, and access to talent still matters, but innovation is also a global game.
Thriving innovation ecosystems rely on shared culture, place, and norms, yet fostering this environment remains a challenge.
Success in areas such as Silicon Valley came from a unique mix of history, geography, and timing—making it hard to replicate. Many innovation hubs falter without clear strategy or resources. To build stronger, locally grounded solutions, we need a new approach, something transdisciplinary, that brings together diverse mindsets, disciplines and tools to better understand complex systems and people.
So, how might we create a cohesive, encompassing ‘blueprint’ that cultivates and fosters places of innovation?
Project overview
This series of research projects investigates how innovation and entrepreneurship emerge within specific places. Each project uses a complex systems approach to examine places of different scales, such as campuses, precincts, districts, cities, or states. The research aims to benefit innovators, policymakers, and broader communities by emphasising inclusivity and ensuring marginalised groups are considered and not displaced. Partnering with various government departments and the private sector, each project examines the history, current state and future trajectory of the ecosystem. This is achieved through a combination of desktop analysis, interviews, and visualisations. These methods help identify opportunities, actions and resources needed to guide the ecosystem towards its envisioned future.
Our research demonstrates how innovation is embedded in local and global ecosystems—it’s grounded in a shared culture, local norms, and a deep understanding of place.
Our impact
This research underscores the need for custodians of places such as policymakers, to deeply understand how their place has enabled or inhibited innovation, before introducing potential new policies, grants, or other interventions. Lessons learned from one ecosystem need to be adapted before being implemented elsewhere. At best, an ecosystem evolves into an improved version of itself. At worst, if not planned correctly, new investments are wasted, existing disparities are exacerbated, and more friction is created.
This research supports policymaking at all levels, including within organisations (eg, universities or innovative companies), startups, incubators and accelerators, for individual suburbs, precincts, districts, cities and entire regions. This research has enabled the team to develop their own globally unique methodology to evaluate proposed plans, existing localities, past and proposed policies that help guide, support and plan interventions and introductions of the required elements of measurable and successful innovation environments.
Related reading
If you are interested to read more in this research area, here are some additional related resources.
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We live and work in a world with diverse, complex challenges. Navigating them requires new, collaborative and innovative methods, such as transdisciplinarity.
Committed to continually evolving the media landscape in new and vibrant ways, the ABC partnered with UTS, engaging students from their award-winning Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation degree (BCII), to investigate new ways of targeting and increasing engagement with young people across Australia.
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