Innovation doesn’t always happen in boardrooms. Sometimes, it happens in a tent—surrounded by post-it notes, passionate people, and the occasional burst of sunshine. In early July, the NWG Innovation Festival offered a refreshing change of scene and a powerful reminder that when you bring together diverse minds in an energised environment, big ideas start to flow. Jonathan Lewis shares their reflections on the experience and the energising impact of working in such a dynamic setting at Newcastle Racecourse.

Held in a field that buzzed with energy and optimism, the NWG Innovation Festival is unlike any other industry event. It’s part think tank, part summer camp, and part problem-solving bootcamp. With tents dedicated to different challenges—from underground assets to robotic sewer cleaning—the festival creates a space where people can step away from their day jobs and dive into collaborative innovation. For the OS team, it was a chance to support a sponsored sprint focused on infrastructure planning and housing development, all while soaking up the festival’s unique blend of creativity, collaboration, and community.

NWG’s Innovation Festival is pretty magical.

It’s not quite Hogwarts, but it’s close—though sadly, there’s no sorting hat. Coming to the Festival from my day-to-day at Geovation, it feels like the perfect opportunity to bring that start-up mindset of dreaming big and tackling problems in innovative and dynamic ways. If you boil down the Innovation Festival to its core, there are three components that make it a magical place to spend a week:

The Problems

Most of your time at the Festival is spent in a tent, trying to work through problems. Every tent has a different focus, but you’re all part of one massive community of problem-solvers working together.

One tent might be looking at robotic cleaning of sewers; another might be exploring underground assets. Our focus was tackling the needs of infrastructure planning to enable the government’s target of constructing 1.5 million homes.

What ties all the tents together is how relevant every problem feels—and the potential to really help people in the UK if we can come up with clever solutions.

The Vibe

A 26-degree tent doesn’t sound like the best environment to come up with innovative ideas, but you’d be surprised. It’s a lot better than last year’s washed-out festival, where umbrellas became a form of black-market currency.

The collection of people moving in the same direction, surrounded by inspiring speakers—from Simon Reeve to George Clarke—really creates a space where people can think more openly and tackle problems together.

Away from offices, job titles, and emails, it’s an environment that encourages people to think outside the box. Your tent becomes overflowing with post-it notes and the detritus of reworked ideas, but you’re well-fed, and random activities help break up the day and build a stronger team for the week.

The People

But the real key is the people who attend.

With our sprint, we were lucky to have incredible talent in the tent throughout the week. The most common problem we see at Geovation is start-ups not understanding their users. At the Innovation Festival, you get user groups represented in person by people with deep knowledge about the problems you’re tackling.

We had representatives from infrastructure owners, local government, developers, planners, central government, solution providers—and everyone else in between.

The genius of the format came through as these people pulled ideas together on how to tackle the problem of infrastructure planning, bringing their own perspectives to bear. There’s nothing quite like that, and it’s no surprise that amazing ideas have come from the festival and been held up as solutions to real problems.

Our solutions

We came out of the four-day sprint with a bunch of ideas we want to take forward. The common denominator was the fractured view each stakeholder has of the development landscape.

We saw some great ideas, like:

• A concept around common identifiers for sites, coined as “Sitefy”
• Platforms that bring together data into central hubs that act as lifecycle management tools, aiding decision-making when sites jump between gates owned by developers, infrastructure owners, and local authorities

When you look back at your week, you get a real sense of satisfaction from helping tackle big problems as a team.

I always leave feeling the same: absolutely shattered and needing a holiday—but always looking forward to a train trip up north for my summer getaway to a buzzing tent quite like no other.

Grounded in collaboration, driven by data

While the festival buzzed with creativity and collaboration, the challenges tackled were anything but light-hearted. The UK’s infrastructure is under mounting pressure—from environmental constraints to fragmented data systems—all while facing the government’s ambitious pledge to build 1.5 million new homes. Ordnance Survey’s role at the festival was clear: to help shape a smarter, more integrated approach to infrastructure planning.

By working with utilities, developers, and local authorities, OS is developing a prototype platform that brings together geospatial, planning, and environmental data to support faster, more sustainable decision-making. The sprint focused on real-world problem statements—from how to support local authorities in making quick, informed decisions, to how to better understand the evolving built and natural environment. With its track record of supporting start-ups and fostering innovation, Geovation is ideally placed to help turn these ideas into scalable solutions—bridging the gap between concept and implementation.

The energy and spontaneity of the festival coupled with the strategic lens applied to the scale and seriousness of the challenges ahead created the perfect environment for fresh thinking. Together, they show how innovation thrives when diverse perspectives meet in the right environment.

The NWG Innovation Festival proved that stepping away from the usual routines can unlock new ways of thinking—and that when people come together with purpose, even the most complex problems start to feel solvable. As OS continues to build on the ideas sparked in that buzzing tent, and with Geovation’s support in nurturing and accelerating innovation, the goal is clear: to turn prototypes into platforms, conversations into collaborations, and challenges into opportunities for lasting change.