Creative destruction, designed for good: why Milton Keynes might be the future of innovation

When the Nobel Committee announced that this year’s prize in economics would go to Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt (along with historian Joel Mokyr) “for having explained innovation-driven economic growth,” it felt like a nod to something many of us have known for years: that progress doesn’t arrive neatly or politely. It comes through friction - through the constant cycle of creation and collapse that Joseph Schumpeter once called creative destruction.

The idea sounds brutal, but it’s really a story of renewal. Old ways give way to better ones; technologies evolve, industries adapt, and societies, if they’re lucky, grow a little wiser in the process. As someone with an economics degree, I’ve always been fascinated by the way that process works in practice: how ideas turn into growth, and how growth in turn shapes the conditions for the next wave of ideas. What Aghion, Howitt and Mokyr have shown is that innovation doesn’t appear from thin air. It emerges from an ecosystem: a set of relationships that allow new things to take root.

At MIT Sloan, Dr Phil Budden (who appeared as keynote at the start of MK Tech Week) has mapped that ecosystem in what we’ve come to call “the star model.” Instead of a single hero at the centre, there are five points: entrepreneurs, corporates, risk capital, universities, and government. When these groups work in concert rather than competition, you get the conditions for genuine, sustained innovation. It’s a framework that describes places like Boston o      r Cambridge - and increasingly, Milton Keynes.

This city has always had a streak of experimentation in its DNA. It was designed to test ideas about how people might live, work and move differently. Today, it’s home to over 17,500 people working in the tech sector - nearly 10% of the city’s total workforce. Milton Keynes has one of the highest densities of start-ups outside London, and it’s growing fast: the local economy expanded by more than 20% between 2017 and 2022, outpacing most UK cities. It’s also a national testbed for smart city technology - from autonomous delivery robots and AI transport trials to open urban data platforms.

Protospace builds on that legacy. We see creative destruction not as a corporate slogan but as a civic responsibility: the willingness to make things better, not just newer. Because we’re a Community Interest Company, our version of acceleration doesn’t come at the community’s expense; it feeds back into it.

Through our Foundation Sprint and Design Sprint programmes - built on the Click methodology by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky - we help teams compress months of work into days, finding out fast what really clicks. But the real power lies in who gets to take part. Every sprint brings together unlikely collaborators: engineers and artists, founders and funders, coders and curators. It’s a reminder that innovation is as much about chemistry as code.

The truth is that acceleration is no longer optional. It isn’t a competitive advantage to innovate quickly; it’s the price of staying relevant. The organisations that survive the next decade will be those that learn faster, share more freely, and design with empathy. Working with Protospace is a kind of two-for-one: you get the speed and rigour of a proven innovation process, and the creative depth of Milton Keynes’ cultural community - the “A” in STEAM that too many still treat as decoration, not propulsion.

That blend of art and engineering is what makes ideas take hold. It’s what turns technology into something human. And because we operate as a not-for-profit, we can offer it at a value point that keeps the door open to everyone - from global corporates to local start-ups with a good idea and limited means.

Milton Keynes isn’t always seen as an innovation capital. It’s still often misread as a city of roundabouts and retail parks. But under the surface, there’s a different story - one of radical thinking, civic imagination, and quietly effective collaboration. One of our secondary goals is to demonstrate that MK is not just a good place to test ideas, but also a great place to build something that lasts. A destination, not a detour.

This year’s Nobel laureates reminded us that economies grow when ideas collide. Dr Budden showed how those collisions can be designed. And here in Milton Keynes, we’re trying to prove that creative destruction can be constructive too: a force that renews not just markets but communities.

So when people ask what Protospace actually does, I tell them this: we help good ideas find their moment and help the city that hosts them grow stronger in the process. That’s not just economics. That’s evolution.