Open Doors Innovation Festival

Open Doors Innovation Festival takes over the Sheffield Innovation Spine on Tuesday 20 October, a day that works like an 'Open Studios' or 'Open Gardens' event but for the city's tech and science spaces. Instead of art studios or back gardens, you're invited behind the scenes of the labs and hubs where the city's scientists, student entrepreneurs, technical experts and deep-tech founders are working on real-world challenges in South Yorkshire. It's free, fully accessible and open to everyone.

The day runs as a trail across seven venues in the city centre: Sheffield Hallam University's Strines Building, Electric Works, Sheffield Technology Parks' Cooper Building, the Royal Academy of Engineering Enterprise Hub at the UKSE Innovation Centre, the University of Sheffield's Ella Armitage and Engineering Heartspace, Pennine Five, and the University of Sheffield's Siemens Digital Innovation Zone (DIZ). Along the way, you'll find labs and demo spaces showcasing startups in deep-tech, ClimateTech, HealthTech and EdTech.

There are two talks from the Centre for Machine Intelligence on the programme. Dr Youssef Nader led the 2023 team that used machine learning to read the first passages from a scroll carbonised by Vesuvius nearly 2,000 years ago, and there's a second talk on using AI and acoustic sensing to support healthcare. The festival also forms the official fringe of the Northern Tech Summit.

You navigate the trail using the Spine Guide app, which unlocks founder stories and feeds a leaderboard; over-16s can enter a prize draw for a £100 city centre gift card donated by Sheffield Business Improvement District. One of the venues is known locally for its three-storey helter-skelter slide, billed as '7 seconds of pure exhilaration'. The festival is part of the Sheffield Innovation Spine, which spans 190 acres across five mixed-use neighbourhoods, bookended by two world-class universities. Its chief executive, Tom Wolfenden of Sheffield Technology Parks, describes it as a 'live urban innovation district' rather than just a project.