The convening university: How the University of Bristol is shaping regional impact

How can universities help fragmented regional systems coordinate and act?

In this episode, Lisa Kehoe, Head of Impact Development at the University of Bristol, shares lessons from community micro-campuses, cyber growth planning, and health partnerships. She also explains why effective convening depends on curiosity, credible teams, practical experimentation, and long-term infrastructure.

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Summary

Universities often describe themselves as civic anchors, yet their regional value is determined by what they help others accomplish. Lisa Kehoe, Head of Impact Development at the University of Bristol, works across translational research, knowledge exchange, and research impact. Her experience suggests that effective convening starts with understanding a place on its own terms, then connecting the people, resources, and opportunities that can address a shared challenge.

This approach asks universities to exercise judgement about their role. They may lead an initiative, create space for partners to find common ground, or help establish infrastructure that others will eventually carry forward. Across Bristol’s community micro-campuses, the UK Cyber Growth Action Plan, and Bristol Health Partners, Lisa shows how listening, credible teams, practical experimentation, and long-term coordination can turn civic ambition into regional capacity.

Regional impact begins with listening

For Lisa, a university becomes a civic anchor through behaviours that connect it meaningfully with its region. Bristol’s institutional strategy describes it as a global civic university with an ambition to create positive impact. Giving that commitment practical meaning begins with a question about the region and an open view of the institution’s contribution.

What’s the need that we’re able to understand, and where can the university contribute most effectively to that?

Knowledge exchange is central to answering that question. Its value lies partly in the relationships it enables with businesses, communities, policymakers, and public services. It also brings behaviours that help people explore complex problems together: curiosity, openness, facilitation, and the ability to frame a challenge without arriving with a predetermined answer.

It helps connect resources and opportunities around shared challenges.

The distinction is important because research and innovation naturally sit high on a university’s agenda. Regional bodies, local authorities, health services, employers, and residents will have different priorities and constraints. A university that begins with its own offer can easily mistake institutional capability for regional demand. Listening helps it understand where those perspectives overlap and whether it has a useful role.

This creates a more disciplined account of convening. The university can bring resources and continuity to a shared agenda while leaving ownership distributed among the people and organisations affected by it. The first capability is therefore institutional curiosity: the willingness to ask why others are engaged, what they need, and what they already know about the place.

Community spaces make commitment tangible

The University of Bristol’s two micro-campuses show how this principle can become physical and long term. Connected to the Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus, the sites at Barton Hill and Hartcliffe and Withywood provide community-based spaces where local people, employers, and the university can work around shared priorities. Barton Hill was established in 2020, while the second site followed more recently.

These spaces reverse the usual direction of engagement. Local priorities shape university activity, and collaboration develops through repeated presence over time. Research and innovation can be co-designed with residents, while university infrastructure creates routes into learning and participation.

At Hartcliffe and Withywood, the Skills for a Changing World micro-qualification was co-designed with local residents, employers, and the community organisation hosting the campus. Its focus on entrepreneurship and professional studies supports people who bring work experience, ideas, and ambition, yet may have no formal qualifications or prior expectation of entering further or higher education.

The example demonstrates why convening requires more than an invitation to a university campus. Trust grows when an institution commits space, people, and time within a community and allows local knowledge to influence what is offered. That investment also creates a practical interface through which different forms of expertise can meet.

For universities considering a civic role, the micro-campus model points to an operating question: which forms of infrastructure make collaboration easier to sustain? A visible, accessible place can provide continuity, help relationships deepen, and give communities a stronger hand in shaping the work.

Credible teams make convening useful

Convening also depends on who represents the university. Lisa’s work on the UK Cyber Growth Action Plan brought together the University of Bristol and Imperial College London for an independent rapid analysis of the interventions needed to support growth in the UK cyber security sector. The assignment required more than cyber expertise alone.

The team combined social science, regional knowledge exchange, facilitation, experience of defence, security, and quantum programmes, industrial-sector advice, and cyber-industry knowledge. Imperial added academic expertise in cyber security. Together, those perspectives shaped the stakeholder conversations, workshops, surveys, and analysis behind the recommendations.

This breadth gave the team credibility with different audiences. Sector specialists could understand the technical and commercial context, while facilitators and knowledge exchange professionals could design productive conversations and interpret regional needs. Cross-university professional services networks were especially valuable because they helped identify colleagues whose interests and experience might otherwise remain dispersed across a large institution.

The lesson extends beyond a single report. Universities contain many relevant capabilities, but regional partners experience the institution through the people at the table. A credible team needs enough subject knowledge to grasp the challenge, enough relational skill to hear competing perspectives, and enough institutional awareness to connect the work with wider expertise. Convening becomes useful when those capabilities operate together.

Mapping must lead to choices and experiments

The Cyber Growth Action Plan also illustrates the limits of ecosystem mapping. Stakeholder conversations revealed the importance of “places for cyber”: regions with different combinations of infrastructure, research and innovation, investment potential, industry clusters, and supply and demand for cyber technologies. The analysis exposed a disconnect between suppliers and potential users, as well as a gap in coordination.

A map can make those components visible, but it cannot decide what a region should do. Lisa describes the growth and resilience sought by government as a beacon that gave the analysis a shared objective. Researchers could then examine regional assets through that lens, speak with people who understood local gaps, and identify interventions worth testing.

You just have to try things.

Participation provides an early indication of whether an idea fits its setting. If a significant group is prepared to contribute time and effort, the proposal has begun to gather the commitment needed for action. Lisa regards that willingness as a soft measure and one of the most important available at an early stage. A technically attractive intervention that lacks local support is unlikely to progress.

Pilots therefore connect evidence with practice. They allow partners to test a proposition, learn how organisations work together, and see where leadership might emerge. In the cyber work, activity continued in regions where local leaders and existing infrastructure saw opportunities to advance growth. The university’s project had an end date, while the relationships and recommendations gave others a basis for continuing.

Lasting coordination needs the right home

Successful convening can reveal the need for a more durable arrangement. Lisa describes coordination infrastructure as the next natural step when partners need a way to persist beyond a project or series of meetings. Bristol Health Partners offers an established example: a strategic regional partnership linking universities, the NHS, local authorities, public health, and community organisations.

If you have good convening, and then the next natural step might be around coordination infrastructure that allows partnerships to persist.

The partnership creates a continuing mechanism for understanding demand from the health and care system. Practitioners, service leaders, and people with lived experience can shape priorities alongside institutions. Because engagement is embedded over time, it does not depend on one project team repeatedly rebuilding the same relationships.

Durability introduces questions of funding and ownership. Long-term coordination requires paid roles, stable structures, and agreement among the relevant stakeholders. A university may help partners articulate the need, identify a priority, pilot activity, and seek funding. The eventual infrastructure may sit within the university or take a separate form that better represents the organisations responsible for delivery.

Sometimes we might want to lead, sometimes we might be convening, and sometimes we might need to step back.

That flexibility is fundamental to the convening university. Its contribution is strongest when role follows need: leadership where institutional capacity can unlock progress, facilitation where fragmented actors need common ground, and restraint where regional or sector leaders are better placed to continue. Lisa Kehoe’s experience at the University of Bristol suggests that success is visible in a stronger regional system, capable of sustaining relationships and delivering place-based impact after the university has moved away from the centre.

Ready for more?

Universities can strengthen innovation ecosystems by doing more than participating in individual partnerships. Their wider contribution comes from connecting knowledge, organisations, and communities around shared challenges, while helping ideas and resources move across the ecosystem.

• The university as a catalyst: Knowledge, ecosystems and impact explores how universities can become more influential within collaborative networks by keeping knowledge at the centre, strengthening connections between different actors, and contributing value to the ecosystem rather than focusing only on institutional outcomes.
• From precincts to ecosystems: How universities can build the connective tissue of innovation examines why physical proximity alone does not create an innovation ecosystem. Drawing on examples of precincts and place-based collaboration, the episode highlights the importance of connectivity, purposeful orchestration, institutional diversity, and outcomes that reflect the needs of the surrounding region.

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