Future Lab: innovation through academic partnership

This October, HILO launched Future Lab – a significant new partnership with Historic Buildings & Places (HB&P). This three year project comes at a transformative time for HB&P (formerly known as the Ancient Monuments Society) as it reflects on its 100 years in heritage conservation and considers how it will have impact in future. The HILO partnership will support HB&P to define a new vision for its future along with the strategy and business plan to ensure its sustainable development. Future Lab brings together research capabilities and expertise from across Oxford University, not just the HILO team and colleagues at Oxford’s School of Geography, but drawing on Oxford University’s Heritage Network, including academic expertise from Social Sciences and Humanities such as Saïd Business School and the Faculty of History. From the outset, the development of Future Lab has been a collaborative endeavour. Over the course of 2025, the HILO team have worked closely with HB&P to understand their needs and design a programme of work that blends consultancy, research and knowledge transfer. By sustaining this level of integration and engagement Future Lab will deliver long term benefit for HB&P so that findings and lessons learned are not only transferred but are also embedded within the organisation. Our goal is to ensure that HB&P is fit for the future with a renewed purpose and business model, and with a creative and innovative organisational culture. Three years is a long time to spend defining HB&P’s purpose so there are two distinct phases. Year 1 will focus on an evidence-based review of HB&P’s current activities while scoping opportunities for future development. This will include stakeholder consultation and peer learning within the heritage sector and beyond. By the end of year 1, HB&P will have a better understanding of its achievements, and a clearer sense of its role in the heritage sector. The really exciting part of Future Lab will be Years 2 and 3 – an innovation lab where we will explore and test how HB&P can deliver impact. This will be a period of research and development to include developing new ideas and partnerships, piloting new initiatives, and also discrete mini research projects. Again, this will be done with an evidence-based approach to ensure that we have the means to evaluate how effective new initiatives are. At the heart of this is the need to ensure a sustainable future for HB&P, particularly financial sustainability, so we will look at potential new income streams and see what we can learn from the wider non-profit sector. While the focus of Future Lab is undoubtedly the future of HB&P there are academic benefits that flow from this partnership model. Close collaboration opens up opportunities for academic research that relate directly to HB&P’s activities, such as the rich archive of publications from the Ancient Monuments Society as well as the casework archive. However, it’s not just about access to research sources, but also about co-creating lines of enquiry that will generate sector insights of direct relevance to HB&P and other heritage organisations. Partnerships such as Future Lab are vital to ensure that heritage research remains impactful and relevant, something that is best achieved through close collaboration with heritage practitioners. Academic opportunities extend to student cohorts with an interest in heritage careers or heritage research, but also students with no previous heritage experience looking to develop employability skills through Oxford Careers Service initiatives such as the Oxford Strategy Challenge. Future Lab is a unique opportunity for HB&P to define a future vision and explore ways to achieve this vision with capacity and expertise from HILO and the wider university. It is also our intention to share what we learn with the wider heritage sector. This includes research findings, sector insights, and learnings from HB&P as they undertake organisational change. Of course, this also includes our learnings about the academic partnership itself, the benefits and pitfalls, challenges and opportunities. The next three years promises to be an exciting time as we chart the future of HB&P.