From agency to product: Our innovation platform pivot
After four years specialising in building digital platforms for innovation accelerators, we’ve productised our offering. Four core products, each designed for a specific stage of the innovation cycle, all built on shared infrastructure that gets smarter over time.
This means clearer specifications, more predictable timelines, and allows us to pivot away from the typical agency structure and embed strategic delivery leads directly in your team, giving you access to senior-level expertise on a daily basis.
Why productise?
Working exclusively within The Catapult Network, Government Departments and innovation accelerators, we kept seeing the same patterns.
- Websites that grew organically into confusing tangles.
- Alumni networks that scattered after programmes ended.
- Valuable knowledge buried where no one could find it.
- Multi-audience challenges where SMEs, academics, and funders all needed different experiences.
And critically, the same solutions working repeatedly.
- The taxonomy structure that increased engagement for Satellite Applications Catapult by 35% solved the same problems for others.
- The community platform we built for Connected Places Catapult led to us being asked to build more communities for innovation teams and the Department for Transport.
- The AI-powered search we built for the Digital Twin Hub became a blueprint for our knowledge-based connected infrastructure.
Productisation was the logical next step. Why rebuild proven solutions when we could refine them?
Four products that solve specific challenges in the innovation cycle.
High-Performing Innovation Websites.
Your top-of-funnel challenge: attracting and engaging multiple audiences at different stages of their innovation journey. SMEs seeking funding speak different languages than academics looking for partnerships or funders evaluating opportunities.
Our websites are built on proven information architectures that route the right content to the right audiences. Clear taxonomy structures, intelligent navigation, and content organisation designed specifically for multi-stakeholder innovation ecosystems.
Result: When we restructured Satellite Catapult’s website engagement jumped 38%.
Spaces: The platform for collaborative innovation.
Your mid-funnel and customer retention challenge: keeping communities engaged after programmes end. Brilliant cohorts scatter within months. Alumni networks die. Valuable connections disappear.
Spaces is purpose-built infrastructure for innovation communities that need ongoing collaboration, structured knowledge sharing, and long-term relationship building. Not LinkedIn. Not Slack. A platform designed for the specific dynamics of innovation ecosystems.
Currently deployed: Connected Places Catapult’s and the Department for Transport are using Spaces to manage their TRIG innovation grants cohorts & alumni, who have delivered 430 transport innovation projects and awarded £15M in grant funding.
Interactive guides and frameworks that scale programme impact.
Your impact scaling challenge: innovation programmes produce breakthrough learnings, but dissemination stops at a final report. The wider industry struggles to access and apply what you’ve discovered.
Toolkits transform programme findings into interactive guides for sector-wide adoption.
Take the Station Innovation Playbook, developed through Connected Places Catapult’s partnership with Network Rail and funded by Innovate UK. It packages learnings from the Station Innovation Zone at Bristol Temple Meads into a framework that any station operator across the UK can follow and implement.
Not static PDFs that sit unread. Interactive decision tools, methodology guides, and frameworks that help the industry adopt and build on your programme’s advances.
Strategic outcomes: This is how innovation programme learnings become sector-wide change.
Connected Infrastructure.
The AI enabled backbone connecting everything: fast, scalable, secure infrastructure that enables AI-driven knowledge experiences across all your digital properties.
This isn’t just hosting and servers. It’s the technology layer that allows us to build sophisticated features once and deploy them across multiple products. AI-powered search that understands context and connections. Integrated systems that reduce manual work. Infrastructure that scales confidently.
Productised delivery works better.
Strategic engagement leads, not project managers
Your day-to-day contact isn’t a project manager relaying messages. It’s working directly with strategy leads who’ve spent years in this sector delivering results. Decisions happen in the conversation, not three emails later, and results are central to product conversations.
Shared product roadmaps
Product specifications are defined. Implementation timelines are predictable. You know what you’re getting and when, either because we’ve delivered it before or it’s on our future roadmap.
This eliminates “we’ll need to scope that out” conversations. When multiple clients need similar functionality – better search, improved navigation patterns, new community features – it gets built once and deployed across the platform.
Compounding sector expertise
We already know that academics respond to different language than scale-ups. We understand technology readiness levels. We’ve mapped innovation journeys dozens of times. You’re getting accumulated expertise, not an agency learning your sector on your budget.
Predictable implementation
Because we’ve productised delivery, implementation follows defined phases with clear milestones. You know upfront what internal resources you’ll need, what the timeline looks like, and what you’re committing to – no surprises halfway through.
The compounding advantage.
This isn’t a transactional relationship. Products evolve continuously.
When we improve infrastructure for one client, everyone benefits. When we add a feature to Spaces, it’s available across all deployments. When we refine our taxonomy approach based on new learnings, future implementations become stronger.
Your platforms get better over time without separate project budgets or new scoping conversations.
Our sector expertise compounds too.
Every innovation accelerator we work with teaches us more about how innovation ecosystems function. Every programme community we build reveals new patterns in engagement and knowledge sharing. Every website restructure sharpens our understanding of multi-audience navigation.
You’re not paying for us to learn your sector. You’re benefiting from years of accumulated knowledge, deployed through products that improve with each implementation.
Traditional agency relationships reset to zero with each project. With Temper, productised services compound value over time.
Get in touch if you would like to know more about assessing performance, mapping content, rebuilding for users, and ensuring accessibility at every step.