Case Study · Oxford Innovation · Innovation centres · A distributed network, developed as one and learning from itself
Oxford Innovation's centres are spread across the country and rarely meet. Over a year, 171 of their people became one community, learning from each other instead of solving the same problems alone.
Oxford Innovation's centres are spread across the country and rarely meet. Over a year, 171 of their people became one community, learning from each other instead of solving the same problems alone.People developed across the network
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every level and every centre, learning from each other as one connected network
9.5/10
Performance Partner delivery across 36 rated sessions
3 levels
developed against a single standard of leadership, each pitched to the role
Benchmarked
all leaders against a bespoke diagnostic, built to map them to Oxford Innovation's leadership competency framework for deep intelligence on the network
Executive Summary
- Sector
- Innovation centres & managed workspace
- Buyer
- Director of Organisational Improvement
The Brief
Develop Oxford Innovation's people across a national network of innovation centres, and do it as one organisation rather than one centre at a time. Reach everyone who carries the experience of a site, the Customer Experience teams a tenant meets first and the Directors running whole buildings alike. And do not just push content down: connect centres that rarely overlap so they learn from each other and compound their knowledge and insights, so every centre delivers greater value and a better experience to its tenants and clients.
The Outcome
Across a full year, 171 people were developed at three levels against Oxford Innovation's own competency framework, and centres that had barely overlapped started learning from each other. The lasting change is connection: relationships and shared knowledge that now run across the network, with managers sharing what works rather than working it out in isolation. All of it in service of the thing that matters most to Oxford Innovation, a better and more consistent experience for the tenants and clients in every centre.
From the leadership
The content of the live workshops is really good and the delivery is outstanding. The resources on LeadersLab are also excellent and provide a great way for people to develop outside of sessions.
The development programme scored amongst the highest of any initiative being run in our most recent People Engagement Survey.”
Lisa Richardson
Director of Organisational Improvement, Oxford Innovation
01 / The trigger
Oxford Innovation knew how they wanted their people to lead. They had never developed the whole network against it.
Inside those centres, the buildings where the UK's start-ups and scale-ups find their first offices, labs and communities, the quality a tenant feels is made by people. Oxford Innovation had already set a high bar for those people: a competency framework that defined the standard of leadership they wanted in every centre, because the experience their tenants and clients get is only ever as good as the people leading each site. The opportunity they wanted to seize was connection. Their centres are spread across the country and rarely overlap, so the deep experience built up in one centre had few natural ways to reach another, and they wanted to change that while the business was growing, not after.
Every centre full of hard-won answers, with no line between them.
The framework already said what good leadership looked like at Oxford Innovation. What they wanted next was to bring it to life consistently in every centre, and to make sure the hard-won experience their best people had built up was shared across the network rather than staying inside one building.
What Oxford Innovation wanted was a shared language for leadership across the network, and a habit of pooling what people already knew so every centre compounded the group's expertise rather than rebuilding it alone. They chose to build that habit deliberately as they grew, rather than leave it to chance.
So the brief to 10X had two halves. Land Oxford Innovation's competency framework across the whole organisation, every level and every site. And connect the centres, so the people running them learn from each other and the experience already inside the network starts to move.
02 / Built for their world
Not an off-the-shelf course. A bespoke programme built around Oxford Innovation's own competency framework.
10X did not arrive with a fixed programme to install. We built it around the competency framework Oxford Innovation had already defined, the standard they wanted in every centre, and ran it at three levels so the same framework reached a front-of-house colleague and a Centre Director at the altitude that fit each role. It opened with a diagnostic, then every topic ran twice: a session to teach the thinking, and a troubleshooting session weeks later where managers brought back what they had actually tried and worked each other's real problems. And it was grounded in Oxford Innovation's commercial world, from decision-making and strategic planning to feedback, presenting and contract negotiation, so managers left with something they could use on a real tenant, a real renewal or a real team the next morning.
How it worked
We were never the expert at the front of the room.
10X's principle is that the answers a business needs are mostly already inside it, held across its people. A distributed network like Oxford Innovation rarely gets to use them, because the people who hold them never meet. So the rooms were built to cross-pollinate, not to lecture.
A Customer Experience Assistant from one centre worked a real problem next to a Centre Director from another. Colleagues who had never overlapped compared how they actually handled the same situations. The Performance Partner's job was to draw the knowledge out of the network and connect it, powered by the context Oxford Innovation people were already in, rather than hand down a generic answer from a slide.
I thought it would be awkward being put into breakout rooms, but conversation flowed easily and it was genuinely good to talk through real issues. The facilitator came back with additional resources tailored to our feedback, which was really helpful.
Alli Keene, Quality Manager
03 / Every level
One standard at every level, and a network that started to learn from itself.
This was not a programme for the senior team. It ran the full height of Oxford Innovation, three levels deep, so the most junior colleague in a centre and the Director running it were developing against the same model, each at the altitude that fit their role. And because the rooms were mixed across centres, people who would never normally cross paths were in the same conversation.
Who was in the programme
Customer Experience & front of house
Customer Experience Assistants, Events Coordinators and the front-of-house teams a tenant meets first
Centre leadership
Assistant Centre Managers, Centre Managers, Community Managers and Operations Managers
Directors & heads
Centre Directors, Innovation Directors, Incubation Directors and Business Growth leads
Group & technical functions
Finance, Marketing, Business Development, and Laboratory Supervisors and Technicians
Two things came out of that at once. The network gained a shared language for leadership, with a Customer Experience Assistant and a Centre Director now describing good leadership in the same words. And it gained connection: colleagues who had never met were solving the same problems together, and those relationships are social capital that now runs across sites, not just within them.
04 / What changed
The biggest change is the hardest to score: a network that now shares what it knows.
The most valuable thing that shifted at Oxford Innovation does not fit in a single number. Centres that used to run in isolation now have relationships across them. Managers who had never met share a language and a habit of comparing notes. Experience that used to stay inside one building now moves around the network.
That is the change that compounds, and the clearest evidence is not a chart. It is what the managers themselves say about learning from each other.
What changed in the work
The programme was built to turn into action between sessions, and across the year it did. A few of the changes managers made, and then passed to each other:
- 01One Centre Manager set up a single shared channel for every centre in her region, so colleagues who had never met could swap answers in one place. Others saw it work and built their own.
- 02A commercial manager turned the objections that recur on renewals into a reusable crib sheet, then shared it across the network so no centre had to start from scratch.
- 03One manager started walking prospective tenants into a happy customer's office and letting that customer sell the space.
- 04Another ran a working-styles session with their team and watched people begin to flex to each other rather than clash.
A tool that works in one centre now travels to the rest.
In their own words, learning from each other
Hear it from the people in the rooms.
“Love the breakout groups. It is great to underline challenges across all the sites.”
“Getting the benefit of colleagues' wisdom and reaffirming you are on the right track is invaluable. It helps you take a helicopter view of how you work as a team.”
“It is about sharing ideas between different teams on how to address common challenges, and it validates the idea that positivity improves things.”
“So engaging. Really inspiring hearing other people's ideas and input to common issues. It made me try doing things differently on current tasks and projects.”
“The facilitation was really motivational and got people out of their comfort zones. It has inspired me to do more coaching with my team and empower them to think more independently.”
“Amazing speaker. I learned a lot and really enjoyed interacting with the wider team. I have already started communicating more with my team as a result.”
And the experience itself
They rated the work highly, too.
9.5 / 10
The Performance Partners were rated 9.5 out of 10 across 36 rated sessions. A reaction score is the lowest bar a programme has to clear, but for an audience this varied and this busy, that level of consistency is worth noting.
05 / Start here
If you run a multi-site operation that needs the same standard of leadership in every location, want to develop your whole organisation rather than just the senior team, or want to break the silos in a distributed business and get your people learning from each other, that is the work we do.
Every partnership between 10X and a client is entirely bespoke and unique. Book a no-obligation call with one of our Development Experts to scope how we could support you and your situation.