A City Built on Purpose: What the innovation ecosystem evidence offers Bradfield

John H Howard, 25 August 2026

What forty years of evidence on innovation ecosystems suggests for Australia's newest city, now named in The Sydney Plan beside the two oldest engines of the metropolitan economy.

A city named beside Sydney's growth engines

In August 2026 the NSW Government published The Sydney Plan, its twenty-year land use strategy. The Plan provides for at least 800,000 additional homes and 950,000 additional jobs by 2046, and organises the metropolis as a network of centres anchored by the Sydney CBD, Parramatta and Bradfield (NSW Government, 2026).

The newest city centre in the country now sits, in the Government's own strategy, beside the two oldest engines of the metropolitan economy. This Insight is an edited version of an address to a Bradfield Development Authority workshop for senior and middle managers on 17 August 2026, and asks what the evidence base on innovation ecosystems offers an organisation carrying that ambition.

The material comes from The Handbook of Innovation Ecosystems (Howard, 2025), which draws together four decades of policy, advisory and research practice grounded in fieldwork across Australia, Europe and North America. More than 90 case studies sit behind it, with 44 ecosystems analysed in depth and 17 detailed case narratives.

A management idea before a policy idea

The ecosystem idea did not come from government. James Moore borrowed the metaphor from ecology in a 1993 Harvard Business Review essay to describe how firms evolve together with their customers, suppliers and regulators rather than succeeding or failing alone (Moore, 1993). Remembering that origin keeps the term working hard.

From there the concept travelled to regions and their institutions in the late 1990s, into European place-based policy through the Barca report (Barca, 2009) and the smart specialisation strategies it helped shape, and on to the districts and precincts of the 2010s. The arc carries a single shift, from investing in inputs to managing the systems that turn money, land and buildings into results.

What an ecosystem is, and is not

An innovation ecosystem is an adaptive system of universities, firms, entrepreneurs, intermediaries, government agencies, capital providers and communities. Knowledge flows, joint ventures, worker mobility and institutional relationships hold it together, and its value lies in the density and quality of interaction across organisational boundaries rather than in buildings or budgets.

An ecosystem is not a cluster or a building program by another name, and co-location alone does not produce one; precincts exist with superb architecture where the tenants barely know each other's names. Nor can a government purchase an ecosystem through inputs alone. Funding creates knowledge, while coordination turns knowledge into value. This Insight returns to that sentence.

Four domains on a capital base

The framework at the heart of the Handbook organises ecosystems through four domains. Placemaking covers the built environment and connectivity that attract people and investment; economics covers industry attraction, jobs and high-value sectors; business covers start-ups, corporate engagement and commercialisation; and governance covers the coordination, leadership and funding architecture that align institutions.

Each domain normally lives in a different profession and a different agency, and in most cities nobody's job description covers the joins. The case evidence suggests that ecosystems succeed when the four domains converge on the same place and purpose, and fragment when they do not.

Very few organisations anywhere hold a remit spanning all four domains at once. The Bradfield Development Authority does, and in the international case set that combination may be its single biggest structural advantage.

Beneath the domains sits a bedrock of four forms of capital: physical, in laboratories, transport, energy and digital infrastructure; knowledge, which builds cumulatively and which no budget cycle can buy whole; financial, as risk-bearing capacity across grants, venture and corporate investment; and social, the relationships and trust that let the other three work.

The Authority is assembling all four at once: physical capital through the city build, knowledge capital through the Advanced Manufacturing Research Facility and university partnerships, financial capital through investment attraction, and social capital through occasions such as the development day that prompted this paper. Days of that kind are ecosystem building in themselves.

What the cases show

The case evidence indicates that districts succeed through an architecture of public policy rather than through clustering technology companies inside a boundary. Six overlays recur: commercial property, investment attraction, housing, transport, urban renewal and placemaking. Economic development strategy is the hinge; where it is present the others align, and where it is absent they run in parallel.

Without a deliberate industrial strategy, a precinct risks becoming a real estate development with little enduring economic or social return. The Sydney Plan can be read as this architecture drawn at metropolitan scale, and Bradfield gains twice over: the metropolitan strategy names it as an anchor, and the Authority's remit institutionalises the same integrating logic at district scale.

Two overlay findings deserve emphasis. On property, public land ownership or strong zoning authority appears essential for aligning development with innovation goals, since without one or the other real estate cycles take over and the highest bidder displaces the best use. Bradfield holds both.

Housing is the most neglected overlay in the case set. Kendall Square in Boston became one of the most productive square kilometres on earth and found its gentrification very hard to address after the fact, while 22@Barcelona built a thirty per cent affordable inclusion in from the start and held its communities in place. The lesson is to decide early, while the choices remain cheap.

Three channels of value

Well-connected ecosystems outperform the sum of their parts. Research on ecosystem interdependence finds that systems with high interdependence and institutional alignment outperform loosely coordinated networks (Autio & Thomas, 2014), and the mechanisms are practical: less innovation friction, faster time to market, capability formation and resilience.

Value arrives through three compounding channels. Conferral, the granting of standing to a place by credible voices, attracts talent, capital and institutions ahead of what fundamentals alone would secure. The capabilities attracted yield productivity, and resilience preserves both through disturbance, as the supplier depth assembled around Philips in Eindhoven survived the company's contraction in the 1990s.

In a country that has struggled with productivity growth for two decades, the framing worth carrying into cabinet rooms is productivity infrastructure rather than start-up program.

Vision, leadership and the integrator

The finding the evidence supports most strongly concerns vision and leadership. Where a person or organisation articulated a long-term direction, set an investable narrative and coordinated actors, districts accumulated capability and weathered political cycles. Where vision was absent or contested, projects drifted into land speculation, stalled infrastructure or episodic programming.

Leadership takes four recognisable forms across the cases: university-anchored at Kendall Square and Parkville; authority-led at 22@Barcelona and Singapore's one-north; entrepreneur-catalysed with Atlassian at Tech Central; and city-orchestrated, as Canberra has done through successive economic development strategies. Bradfield sits in the authority-led family, designed to hold a vision through political and investment cycles.

That is the strength of the model and the responsibility it creates, because the archetype only works if the institution genuinely holds the vision rather than administering the project, and the case set suggests that difference decides outcomes.

If coordination is the answer, the question becomes who does the coordinating. The cases point to a role the Handbook calls the system integrator, whose craft resembles a jazz combo leader: setting rhythm and themes, creating space for improvisation, and relying on trust rather than command (Drucker, 1988). Command and control kills the improvisation an ecosystem exists to produce.

Australian practice has favoured new entities and property-led initiatives over coherent strategy, and the integrator function is the connective tissue those approaches leave out. We keep building the venues and skipping the band leader. Bradfield can build the function in from the start rather than retrofit it in year ten, and on the evidence retrofitting is far harder.

The input fallacy

Australian innovation policy has leaned on a misleading assumption: that governments can buy innovation outcomes through research funding, business programs and institutional development. The tell lies in what we measure, which is research outputs, partnership counts and program compliance rather than the conditions under which innovation emerges. I call this pattern the input fallacy.

The response the evidence points to is coordination sustained over time, across research, business investment, talent, regulation and infrastructure. A recent piece in InnovationAus argues the companion point that time-limited spending programs do not create ecosystems because what firms adopt and use must outlive the funding term (Howard, 2026). Bradfield, done well, is the correction to that pattern rather than one more program within it.

Three questions for Bradfield

Three questions frame the practical agenda. Who holds the Bradfield vision, and how does it survive political and investment cycles? Institutions hold visions through named people, documents with standing, and decision rights that survive a change of minister, so “the Authority” is only the beginning of an answer.

Who plays the system integrator role, and with what standing and resources? The integrator is the function Australian practice keeps leaving out, and standing and resources separate a genuine integrator from a newsletter.

What does the lived experience of Bradfield need to be in its first five years? People choose places before metrics validate them, and the first thousand workers, residents and students will decide with their feet whether the place has life. Somebody needs to own what a Tuesday afternoon in Bradfield feels like in 2029.

Conclusion

Innovation ecosystems evolve through deliberate choices, institutional craft and shared commitment, as people work across boundaries, build the relationships that carry trust, and adapt as conditions shift. Bradfield stands where those choices remain open, with the evidence in hand and a metropolitan strategy that has placed the city's name beside Sydney and Parramatta.

Very few people in any generation get to make these choices from the beginning. The people building Bradfield do.

John H Howard is Executive Director of the Acton Institute for Policy Research and Innovation and author of The Handbook of Innovation Ecosystems (2025). He has published a weekly Innovation Policy Insights blog from the Acton Institute for the past two years. Contact: john@actoninstitute.au.

References

Autio, E., & Thomas, L. D. W. (2014). Innovation ecosystems: Implications for innovation management. In M. Dodgson, D. M. Gann, & N. Phillips (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of innovation management. Oxford University Press.

Barca, F. (2009). An agenda for a reformed cohesion policy: A place-based approach to meeting European Union challenges and expectations. European Commission.

Drucker, P. F. (1988). The coming of the new organization. Harvard Business Review, 66(1).

Howard, J. H. (2025). The handbook of innovation ecosystems: Placemaking, economics, business, governance. Acton Institute Publishing.

Howard, J. H. (2026, August). Time-limited spending programs do not create ecosystems. InnovationAus.

Moore, J. F. (1993). Predators and prey: A new ecology of competition. Harvard Business Review, 71(3).

NSW Government. (2026). The Sydney Plan. Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure.