Liverpool Chamber × GoodShip*
A Collaborative Activation
Less noise.
More useful direction.
Running a business comes with questions. Growth, money, people, technology, sales, marketing, IP, AI, risk, investment — and usually several of them at the same time.
The good news is that Liverpool already has an extraordinary amount of knowledge, expertise and business support. The difficult bit can be knowing where to start.
Navigate is a collaboration between Liverpool Chamber of Commerce and GoodShip*.
Together, we’re helping Liverpool’s creative, digital, technology and entrepreneurial businesses connect with useful knowledge, trusted expertise, support and each other.
Navigate brings together two organisations with different histories and complementary strengths.
Navigate sits between those worlds. The Chamber brings scale, trust, membership and business infrastructure. GoodShip* brings fresh thinking, creative technology experience and a willingness to experiment with new ways of engaging businesses.
Established experience. New thinking. Shared purpose.
175+ years of Liverpool business
Liverpool Chamber of Commerce has been representing and supporting Liverpool's business community for more than 175 years, connecting businesses with support, expertise, policy, networks, opportunities and international markets.
Creative, digital & innovation thinking
GoodShip* is considerably younger. We bring experience across digital, creative, technology, innovation, products, communities and emerging technology.
Experience meets experimentation.
Business infrastructure meets creative thinking.
Established networks meet new communities.
And somewhere in the middle: useful things happen.
Liverpool City Region has:
That’s a strength. But abundance can also create complexity.
A founder might be introduced to ten different organisations. An SME might receive conflicting advice. A creative business may not know whether traditional business support is relevant to them. A technology founder may know they need legal or financial support but not know who understands their world.
The problem isn’t always “where can I get support?” It can be “which support makes sense for me, right now?”
Navigate exists to make that journey easier.
The ecosystem already contains a lot of the answers. Navigate helps connect the dots. Explore Navigate →
Creative, digital and technology businesses do not always grow in the same way as more traditional businesses. They might:
They still need finance, legal, sales, people, strategy, protection, customers. But the context matters.
Navigate creates an environment where specialist business knowledge can meet people building in creative, digital and technology markets — and where those businesses can learn from each other.
Specialist business knowledge, meeting people building in creative, digital and technology markets.
Navigate supports creative, digital, technology and entrepreneurial businesses by connecting them with practical knowledge, trusted expertise, business support, events and useful relationships.
Agencies, studios and makers.
Products, platforms and services.
Software through to emerging tech.
Whatever stage you're at.
People exploring ideas, products and new opportunities.
People who may not yet think of themselves as part of the established business-support ecosystem.
Businesses navigating the next stage.
Navigate creates routes between businesses and the things that can help them move forward.
You don’t need everything at once. You need the right thing at the right moment.
What happens
Navigate activity is designed around what businesses are actually trying to solve, not around a networking calendar.
Learn something you can use.
Sessions led by people with genuine specialist knowledge around the issues businesses actually face: money, growth, technology, people, protection, investment and AI. Education before selling.
Learn from people building businesses here.
Honest conversations with local businesses and founders. Not five secrets to success — what did you build, what worked, what went wrong, what would you do differently, what did nobody tell you?
Put useful people around one useful question.
Smaller conversations allowing greater depth around sectors, growth, technology, skills, innovation and business conditions.
Sometimes useful things happen when people simply spend time together.
Navigate Co-Working creates more informal opportunities to work, talk, ask and connect.
Experience can shorten the learning curve.
Opportunities to connect with people who have built businesses, solved similar problems or hold specialist knowledge.
Sometimes you just need the introduction.
Where appropriate, Navigate can help businesses find the right person, organisation or route into support.
Professional expertise is hugely valuable to growing businesses.
But traditional networking can create an uncomfortable dynamic. Businesses feel like prospects. Specialists feel pressured to generate leads.
Navigate wants to create something more useful.
If somebody later wants further help, great. But start with the knowledge.
Demonstrate expertise by being useful.
Founding partner
Liverpool Chamber of Commerce connects businesses across Liverpool City Region with local business communities, national networks and international opportunities.
Navigate builds on that established role. It creates an additional community and engagement proposition focused particularly on Liverpool’s creative, digital, technology and entrepreneurial businesses.
Navigate does not replace Chamber membership or existing support. It creates another route into it.
Chamber work spans
Founding partner
Our involvement in Navigate brings experience from decades working across Liverpool’s digital, creative and technology sectors, alongside GoodShip*’s newer work in community building, emerging technology, innovation programmes, products, start-ups, education.
Navigate gives us somewhere to apply that experience collaboratively with one of Liverpool’s most established business organisations.
GoodShip* works across
The partnership also demonstrates something GoodShip* believes strongly: impact rarely happens alone.
Rather than creating another competing ecosystem initiative independently, Navigate combines existing infrastructure with new thinking.
Navigate sits alongside Liverpool Chamber’s wider membership, support and events offer.
For businesses, that creates access to a broader ecosystem — and Navigate can become a route for creative, digital and technology businesses to engage more deeply with that established infrastructure.
Participation requirements vary by activity. Individual Navigate events make clear whether they are open to all, member-only, or offer specific Chamber-member benefits — not all Navigate participation requires Chamber membership.
Liverpool Chamber and GoodShip* are the organisations behind Navigate. But Navigate should never become only about the two of us.
Liverpool’s business ecosystem is bigger than any single organisation. Navigate creates space for:
The strength comes from connecting what already exists.
Two organisations can create the platform. The wider community creates the value.
Made Here
Made Here is a Navigate format built around businesses and people creating things in Liverpool City Region.
People building businesses can learn enormous amounts from others who have already experienced growth, setbacks, hiring, investment, difficult clients, product decisions, international markets, change.
Made Here creates room for those stories. Not polished corporate case studies. Real experience.
Share the lesson, not just the success.
What are you trying to navigate?
You don’t need to understand the whole support ecosystem. Start with what you’re trying to solve.
Finding customers, building pipeline and deciding where to focus next.
Related Navigate activity
Nothing scheduled on this specific theme right now — the full Navigate programme covers it across knowledge sessions, roundtables and Made Here.
Navigate & OneDock
One of the ideas emerging from GoodShip*’s wider work is that ecosystems need both people and infrastructure.
Navigate helps people access knowledge and relationships through events, conversations, specialists and introductions. OneDock helps people discover events, support, opportunities and organisations through digital infrastructure.
They are different initiatives. But the underlying challenge is connected: how do we make useful things easier to find?
Navigate and KinShip can cross over. But keeping the propositions distinct makes both more useful.
KinShip
Wider connection and curiosity. Starts with: who should you know?
Navigate
Business growth and ecosystem navigation. Starts with: what are you trying to navigate?
KinShip
Focused on ideas, knowledge sharing, people, community and cross-sector relationships.
Navigate
Focused on businesses, founders, knowledge, specialists, support and growth.
KinShip
A GoodShip* community.
Navigate
Built collaboratively with Liverpool Chamber of Commerce.
Contribute
Navigate depends on people who are prepared to share useful expertise with businesses facing real decisions.
Expertise we're interested in
Share practical knowledge with businesses facing a real decision.
Bring specialist perspective to a focused conversation.
Turn something you explain often into knowledge that lasts.
Give time to a founder working through something you have already solved.
Talk honestly about what worked, what didn't and why.
Partnership
Liverpool Chamber and GoodShip* are interested in working with organisations that can add useful value to Navigate.
The purpose should always be clear: what becomes more useful for businesses because this partnership exists?
Partnership might involve
Legal, finance, HR and advisory firms with knowledge to share.
Research, talent, students and knowledge-exchange capacity.
Organisations that can explain how funding decisions really work.
Spaces that can host sessions, roundtables and co-working.
Practical technology and AI expertise for growing businesses.
Programmes and support routes businesses should know about.
Communities already close to creative, digital and tech businesses.
Events
Navigate happens through knowledge sessions, Made Here, roundtables, co-working, conversations and community activity.
Navigate’s own events platform is the authoritative source for dates, venues and booking.
Nothing listed here right now — the authoritative Navigate programme lives on the Navigate events site.
Knowledge
Navigate should create a growing body of practical business knowledge.
Practical writing on the questions businesses ask most.
Conversations with founders and specialists.
Sessions and stories captured for people who couldn't attend.
The useful bit of the room, written down.
Step-by-step help on growth, money, people and technology.
Made Here conversations in longer form.
Over time, people should be able to find useful Navigate knowledge even if they never attended the original event — connected with Chamber insight, GoodShip* stories and wider business support.
Navigate should not judge success only through attendees, registrations or content views. Those are useful activity measures.
But the more important questions are:
Navigation matters when somebody gets somewhere useful.
Businesses
Businesses engaged
Including Chamber members and businesses new to the support ecosystem.
Sectors
Creative, digital & tech representation
Whether the businesses Navigate is built for are actually in the room.
Knowledge
Sessions delivered & contributors
How much practical expertise is being shared, and by whom.
Routes
Introductions, referrals & support routes
Whether businesses left with a next step rather than a business card.
Navigate is also an experiment in how established organisations and independent innovators can work together.
Liverpool Chamber brings history, scale, credibility and infrastructure. GoodShip* brings specialist sector experience, experimentation and new ideas.
Neither needs to become the other. The opportunity comes from combining strengths around something useful for the wider business community.
That is a model we believe has value beyond Navigate itself.
Good partnerships don’t erase differences. They make those differences useful.
Navigate complements Liverpool Chamber's wider membership and business-support services rather than replacing them.
Navigate extends and complements the Chamber's existing support and membership proposition.
Navigate is developed collaboratively with Liverpool Chamber of Commerce.
Information matters. Relationships and context matter too.
Knowledge comes before selling.
Liverpool already has a rich network of organisations and communities. Navigate should connect with it.
Events create moments. The wider objective is useful knowledge and relationships.
Liverpool first
Unlike some GoodShip* Activations, Navigate is deliberately specific about place. It’s being built around Liverpool.
That focus gives Navigate meaning. The model may eventually generate learning that is useful elsewhere, but the priority is not to make Navigate generic enough to work everywhere. It is to make it genuinely useful here.
Liverpool first.
Learn from what works.
The GoodShip* community for curious people, ideas and knowledge sharing.
How we design and grow communities for clients and partners.
Writing on Liverpool, creative industries, technology, founders and business support.
Growth? People? Money? Technology? AI? IP? Sales? Investment? Or simply: who should I speak to?
Navigate brings together the experience and business infrastructure of Liverpool Chamber with GoodShip*’s creative, digital and innovation thinking.
Start with the challenge. Let’s see what in the ecosystem can help.