OS Innovation Festival Returns For a Longer 2026 Event
Ordnance Survey is expanding its Innovation Festival in June, turning it into a two-day gathering after the strong response to the first edition. The event is held in Southampton, and the aim is straightforward: bring together people from government and academia to see how location-based technology and data can help the United Kingdom deal with major public challenges while supporting current government priorities.
A Bigger Gathering Built on the First Festival
The event follows the debut festival held in 2025 and scales it up in both time and reach, with more than 250 attendees expected this year. From what I have seen with geospatial events, that extra day matters because it gives teams enough room to move past introductions and into useful working sessions.
The focus stays on practical innovation rather than broad theory. Ordnance Survey is positioning the festival as a place where public bodies, private organisations and academic specialists can test ideas around location intelligence in a setting that feels closer to a working lab than a conference hall.
That also helps separate it from the Fast Company Innovation Festival, which is a media-led event built around interviews, talks and brand programming. The OS version is narrower and more applied, with location data and public-sector problem solving at the center. At the time of writing, no confirmed 2026 dates for the Fast Company event are included here, so anyone tracking that festival would need to watch its official announcements.
Innovation Sprints at the Center
The core of the programme is a set of innovation sprints, where participants spend the full event working together on a defined challenge using location data. Each person joins one sprint and stays with it throughout, which should help keep the work coherent. In mapping terms, it is a bit like holding one map layer in view long enough to see the real pattern instead of skimming across the surface.
These sessions will examine issues across several high-value areas.
- Transport and financial services
- Infrastructure, public protection and NUAR-linked operational work
The themes also point toward wider festival territory, including sustainability, health and the technology trends shaping public services. Beyond the sprints, events like this often include workshops and panel sessions, with time set aside for informal networking. The goal is to move toward ideas that are practical, testable and tied to real-world impact.
Speakers and Public-Sector Participation
Alongside the sprint work, the festival will feature keynote talks from:
- Sabrina Cohen Hatton - British firefighter, psychologist and writer
- Priya Lakhani OBE - founder of CENTURY Tech
That pairing suggests the programme is trying to balance frontline experience with a wider view of how technology can shape decision-making. Innovation festivals also tend to bring in other voices, especially industry leaders and startup founders, depending on the brief.
A broad group of government organisations is also due to take part, including the Cabinet Office and Defra. Other representation comes from transport, environmental and emergency-response bodies, which shows the festival is reaching well beyond one policy area and into connected parts of government where location data often acts like shared infrastructure.
How to Take Part and Whether You Can Join Remotely
Participation usually depends on the organiser's registration or application process. For the OS Innovation Festival, that means checking the event page for sign-up details, eligibility and any sprint-specific requirements. When I checked similar events, places tied to hands-on sessions tended to be more limited than general attendance.
No virtual option is mentioned here for the OS event. Some innovation festivals do offer remote access for selected talks, but this format appears designed around in-person sprint work, so online participation may be limited or unavailable unless Ordnance Survey says otherwise.
