Innovation Nation: Interactive

Great, I can’t wait to see this one succeed.

I am not sure that the second sentence actually follows. I can think of any number of innovations which do not depend upon one or more of “education, law, health or transport”. I fully agree with the rest of the paragraph

Excellent but unless we define our risk appetite what will this change?

Excellent but how do we ensure that these people are resourced and supported to drive innovation both within and across organizations?

I am not sure I understand this paragraph. What is “designing demand for practitioners”?

You might want to look at HMRC’s Dragon’s Den work as an example of how to support front line innovation and the Pension Service Innovation Centre.

The CIO Council have been working in this area for a while now and there may be a read across.

There’s more to the public sector than Whitehall, can we call it something else, otherwise people working outside the civil service might not feel involved.

A great mix of groups involved right across public services, in its most inclusive sense

How about a network of frontline innovators?

I think this is critical as at the moment many of the forces (attitudes to risk, budgeting, recruitment etc) within a local authority actual work against people trying to innovate. It’s not that the desire isn’t there, it’s that the structures don’t support it.

The last sentence I find patronising to those working within Public service. There is often the view that there is a need for consultants to advise PS with regards to it’s work when actually there are a large number of people from within the sector who could actually do the same type of work in creating innovative solutions if given the responsibility or forum to be heard.

Great

This is a great idea and follows up some of my previous comments.

State your criteria for success, in objective terms, and explain how you will measure progress.

Could we perhaps start with “the most competent”?

There’s a general principle of process improvement that you first have to establish effective processes and ensure that they are always followed: only then can you improve them and have confidence that any improvements will be sustained.

Mark, Desigining Demand is a Design Council/RDA collaboration to help businesses use design to improve their products and market them more successfully. http://www.designingdemand.org.uk/
The idea of the trial is to see whether the use of modern design techniques can also help in delivering better public services

Concur with Martyn about ‘comptency’. I always recall hearing the director of Deutsche Telekom’s labs boasting about his teams innovative output. The number of patents it filed. This was back in the early dotcom days. Very innovative but not very profitable for his unit.

The study by NAO will be interesting in this respect, as they are responsible for evaluating how competent public services are, along with Audit Commission for local government. However, the issue of competency is an interesting one as it also relates to skills in the workplace which links into the Innovative People and recommendations there?

Thanks for your comment on this Hilary. Bit of a slow response from us here at DIUS, but I can now say that we are actively trying to find out what are the structural and systemic features that act against public sector workers innovating.

People often talk about ’structures that don’t support innovation’, but actually they don’t often go into any further depth on what they were, why they were unsupportive and what could be done about them.

Any other comments?

Hi Noel,

DIUS, in partnership with Treasury, is now beginning to plan focus groups with front-line workers to try to get a better grip on what systemic and structural things make it harder or easier for them to innovate - and what the centre can do to help.

I was wondering how we might get to front-line workers using online means as well. Intuitively I really like the idea of a network of front-line innovators (both to support innovation at the front-line and as a source of feedback to us at the centre). I wonder how they would be identified though? Would they be self-selecting? If not, how would we know who to invite?

Thanks very much for the comments again - this kind of input is fantastic as we think through the best way to take Innovation Nation forward!

Mark, David,

I think the key thing to emphasise here is that ‘design’ as the Design Council conceptualises it is not the same thing as say designing a house.

One the main benefits of design lies in helping organisations to think freshly about the ‘discover and define’ end of their business instead of just being production lines (kind of similar to the ‘disruption’ that fundamental innovation or real strategy entails). It’s like having the ability to stop and think ‘now, why do we do this again?’

Also, the design approach seems to involve undertaking lots of prototypes that are quickly trialled with key stakeholders and ‘failed’ or adapted quickly (rather than embarking on long piloting efforts that ultimately end up not meeting needs very well). This seems to me to offer a simple but revolutionary new way of doing things in government.

The Design Council talk about innovation as ‘doing thing differently’ and one of the main benefits of design being that they ‘de-risk’ innovation as part of what workplaces do. This seems like a really useful way of putting it.

The Design Council are currently developing 2 demonstrator projects to show how ‘doing design’ in the public sector can offer the kind of revolutionary benefits (better outcomes, happier clients etc) as they’ve seen in the private sector.

Hope that helps!

Steve

Stephen

I definitely think that you need to embrace a broad scope of contributors within the Network of Whitehall Innovators; in essence there should be an opportunity to rotate in and out entrepreneurial input such that there would be regular fresh perspectives and challenges. By effectively creating a large pool of contributors, all of whom connect virtually to the ongoing discussions and then select “jury-style” diverse focus groups from that large pool to participate in face-to-face sessions, you would gain multiple benefits.

For example I do most of my consultancy work abroad, this creates new challenges and new perspectives on a weekly basis. My Innovation needs and lessons learnt constantly evolve as a consequence. The critical need is to embrace the global marketplace and not get too myopic.

Stephen,

Don’t forget to include Research and Technology Organisations - see my comment under ‘Innovative Places’.

Personally, I don’t think that individual innovators are going to elect to join networks and focus groups. These are people more used to doing things than talking about them. I believe that you will need to invite front-line innovators where you can identify them but mostly invite representatives of organisations that are noted for innovative development. Hence my point about RTOs.

Hi Hamish,

Thanks very much for that comment. A bit of context to what we’re doing from my end:

Our project (which falls out of Innovation Nation but needs to look beyond it) has been quite tightly focused by our Steering group on ‘how to create systemic incentives and reduce barriers to front-line innovators’. We’re interpreting this as including the need for the front-line to be stimulated by ideas from the public.

Now, onto the practical side of things - I agree with you that it makes sense to get as diverse as range of people as possible involved, then to have focus groups for a few key topic areas.

The thing that’s not immediately apparent is how! And how to go about it!

One example that I’ve recently been made aware of is walker crisps who have asked people to contribute ideas to ideas for new flavours - see http://www.walkers-crisps.co.uk/. But it’s not clear to me how they actually communicated to members of the public who might actually want to engage.

And then there’s the matter of what questions to ask. I’ve recently been collating a range of questions our work may want to consider going forward. However, given the scope of our work (which I’ve described above), most of them are focused at how to make it easier for front-line public sector workers to innovate.

I’m guessing we could simply ask a couple of questions like (a) how much do people want to change the way the public sector does things to improve services; and (b) how would they like to engage (especially with front-line workers) in doing so. Then we could make recommendations to government on the back of whatever response we get back. Views?

Sorry for the long comment. I strongly agree with your sentiment (i.e. broad and real engagement to stimulate innovation) wholeheartedly) but am not completely sure how to make it happen for ourselves let alone tell the rest of the public sector how to do it!

Thanks again

Steve

Hi Hamish,

Thanks very much for that comment.

Our Steering Group has focused us clearly on trying to answer the question: how can we make the system changes necessary to enable and empower the front-line to innovate?

So for us, the question of how to support front-line workers to seek input from service users to improve services is the right one. If I’ve understood what you’re suggesting – it’s that we should ask service users to be part of the Whitehall Innovation Group (and possibly our focus groups as well) to help answer that question. Is that right?

Thanks again for the input

Steve

Seems like a good idea but let’s hope they take a long enough timeframe to measure the results to avoid encouraging short-termism amongst the high flyers who will no doubt be prominent in demonstrating the innovations they have delivered!

I am all for an Innovation Hub, but I think that it is important to ensure that it captures how successful innovations took place, as well as what they actually did - looking at the gestation of the product as well as the product so to speak. I think that there is as much value in describing where ideas came from, how they were nurtured, what barriers existed etc. as in describing what they actually delivered. I think that the information will be all the poorer without this context.

Just to add a couple more thoughts:

A Network is an excellent idea but membership will have to be carefully managed. I am not sure if we are talking about people at the “coal face” (nurses etc), front-line manager, senior managers, civil servants etc. Each of these groups will have a different take on innovation, what it means to them and how to deliver in practice - for instance at managerial level it is more about enabling innovation, whilst among front-line staff, it is presumably more about generating ideas.

In terms of building representation, it might be worth hand-picking individuals with a known performance in innovating, and then “snowballing” from here - seeing whether they are aware of other innovators.

Mark

Agree with Mark’s comments and would simply add that the successful frontline innovators would rise to the top of the networking pool in any case, as it is the spontaneous energy, ability to influence and build on ideas that separate the innovation wheat from the run-of-the-mill chaff.

Regards to all

Hamish.

Intellect welcomes the emphasis in the White Paper on the importance of stimulating innovation in the public sector. We hope the proposals, particularly the Whitehall Hub for Innovation and the Network of Whitehall Innovators will help to ensure an effective exchange of ideas across the departments. However, these proposals should avoid unnecessary cross over or duplication and where possible, engage with the expertise that exists in the private sector. Innovative processes and ideas that have already been successfully implemented elsewhere should be taken into account or adapted to ensure that resources are sensibly deployed.

Intellect is interested in the forthcoming NAO study into the role of risk stimulating or stifling innovation in the public sector.

The UK Resource Centre for Women in SET welcomes the focus on innovation in the public sector because this sector is so critical to women – as consumers and employees. Most of the arguments we have made in other sections of our commentary apply here too, including our comment with the German example about gender in research. Women’s talents must be nurtured and gender analysis brought to bear on problems and solutions. The work of NESTA and others should include a well integrated gender perspective.