What if the least experienced people had the freshest ideas?

Introducing Innovation Labs: Where Real Challenges Meet Fresh Thinking

We've been banging on about young people, digital careers and building the future workforce for a long time now.

Through Fresh Meet CIC, we fund paid digital internships for young people aged 16-25. Through our Careers in Digital workshops, we go into schools and colleges and show young people what a career in our industry actually looks like. We're governors at UTC Sheffield Olympic Legacy Park. We're a Cornerstone Employer. We've worked with organisations like Ductu and Changing the Face of Property to help more young people access meaningful employer encounters.

All of that still matters (more than ever). All of that continues (and will scale).

But there's something we've wanted to add for a while now - something that brings more people to the table, earlier, and does something more interesting with everyone in the room.

That something is Innovation Labs.

So what is an Innovation Lab?

An Innovation Lab is a structured, facilitated day where young people work on real challenges - submitted by real organisations - and pitch their thinking back at the end.

Not theory. Not simulations. Actual problems that organisations are grappling with right now, handed to a room full of people who haven't been told yet what's too difficult, too expensive, or too out-there.

That's the point.

Young people in their late teens and early twenties haven't had their thinking squeezed into a particular shape yet. They bring perspectives that most of us have stopped considering. They ask the questions that everyone in the room stopped asking once they got comfortable with how things work.

That's genuinely valuable. And a lot of organisations haven't tapped into it.

The Social Innovation Lab

Our first Innovation Lab will be a Social Innovation Lab - focused specifically on challenges in the social sector: charities, social enterprises, community organisations, and purpose-driven businesses doing work that matters.

We've chosen to start here deliberately. It's where we're most embedded, it's where the challenges are often most pressing, and it's where fresh thinking can have the most immediate impact.

We're still firming up the full details, but we can tell you this:

The Social Innovation Lab will be held at Discovery by Scrannery at Pennine Five, Sheffield, on Monday 6 July 2026
‍It will bring together a cohort of young people from Fresh Meet's network alongside organisations with real, live challenges to solve
It'll be facilitated by Bravand and Fresh Meet CIC, and will run as a full day

More details - including the challenge briefs, and who's involved - will be shared in the coming weeks.

What we need from you

Two things, depending on who you are.

If you're an organisation - particularly one working in the social sector - we'd love to hear from you about Challenge Briefs. A Challenge Brief is simply a real problem you're facing that you'd like a group of sharp, switched-on young people to take a crack at. It doesn't have to be fully formed. It doesn't have to be a tech problem. It just has to be real.

Past examples of the kind of thing that works well as a Challenge Brief include questions around:

How to reach new audiences
How to communicate impact
How to improve a service experience
How to engage communities that aren't currently engaging

If something like that resonates, we'd love to talk.

If you're a business or organisation interested in sponsorship - there are opportunities to support Innovation Labs and have your name attached to something genuinely different. We'll be sharing more on what that looks like shortly, but if you want to get ahead of the queue, get in touch.

Why this, why now?

Because talking about young people having potential is easy. Creating structured opportunities for them to demonstrate it is harder - and more important.

Innovation Labs are designed to be the kind of thing that changes the way a young person thinks about what they're capable of. They're also designed to be genuinely useful for the organisations involved - not a box-tick, not a PR exercise, but a real session that produces real thinking.

We're excited about this. We think you might be too.

Since we published this

This article promised more detail was coming on both Challenge Briefs and sponsorship, and here it is.

If you're thinking about submitting a problem for the Lab, we've written about what a Challenge Brief actually needs to be - and it's probably less than you think. A few sentences describing a real problem is enough to get started.

If sponsorship is where you're at, the tiers are live and the deadline is 26 June.