About Innovate Oxfordshire

Innovate Oxfordshire, part of Oxfordshire County Council, helps public sector organisations move from innovation ideas to real-world delivery.

Since 2014, we’ve helped local authorities and national bodies turn complex challenges into practical, deliverable change in a cost-effective way.

Built inside local government

Innovate Oxfordshire sits within Oxfordshire County Council. We understand how change actually happens, from governance and procurement to politics and delivery. This allows us to work effectively across existing services and systems, while bringing the independence to challenge thinking and test new approaches.

We are a self-sustaining service, funded by innovation grants and the services we deliver to local authorities and national public sector organisations. We are not-for-profit, and charge only to cover the costs of the work we undertake and our operational overheads.

Explore our work

Our vision

We believe that innovation in the public sector should deliver real, measurable change for communities. Our focus is on ensuring that ideas translate into practical outcomes that genuinely improve services and deliver value.

We work with organisations that want to move beyond ideas, helping them test, learn, implement and evaluate new approaches in real-world settings. We ground innovation in evidence and align it to clear outcomes, supporting better decision-making and more confident investment in what works.

Our ambition is to help the public sector move faster, reduce risk, and continuously improve. We want a future in which innovation becomes part of how services are delivered, not something separate from it.

Innovate Oxfordshire’s model for delivering de-risked innovation across the public sector is: Define, Deliver, Demonstrate.

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Define

We work with you to shape clear, outcome-focused briefs, where we set success criteria, risks and assumptions from the start. This grounds every project in evidence and aligns it to real-world needs.

Deliver

We take innovation from idea to implementation, designing, piloting and scaling solutions in real-world settings. Continuous testing means we adapt quickly.

Demonstrate

We provide clear, evidence-led insight into impact: what’s working, what’s not, and what to do next. We help you prove value and make confident decisions.

Our team

Our team combines deep public sector experience with specialist innovation expertise and relationships with academia and industry

Jason Taylor

Assistant Officer (Innovation)

Jason supports the delivery of innovative technology and community-focused projects across Oxfordshire.

Polly Zaluznyj

Project Management Lead

Polly leads project management and delivery support across the Innovation Service, overseeing governance, planning and externally funded programmes.

Laura Peacock

Innovation Head of Service

Laura Peacock is Head of Innovate Oxfordshire at Oxfordshire County Council, setting up and leading the UKs first self-funded Local Government Innovation Service that helps public sector organisations design, test and scale evidence-led solutions through partnerships, accelerators, and complex programme delivery nationally and internationally.

Craig Bower

Programme Director (Digital and Smart Infrastructure)

Craig is an experienced telecommunications professional in both private and public sector capacities.

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Meet the whole team

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