Prototyping Ninjas

by Lesley Anne Gundy

On my second day working at the Innovation Unit, I had the opportunity to attend a prototyping workshop given for the Transforming Early Years project. Representatives from the six sites involved with the project travelled from all over England to participate in the day’s activities. The different Transforming Early Years workshops are designed to represent steps in the Radical Efficiency model. Prototyping is a later step in the model.

Like many of the participants from the localities, I was unfamiliar with prototyping and did not know what to expect from the workshop. Sean Miller and David Townsend from Nonon walked us all through the concept and process of prototyping explaining its importance. The day began with everyone being divided into several groups of four to six people and embarking on service safaris. Groups either travelled to the local post office or the British Library with the main goal of analyzing the service provided with a hypercritical eye. After critiquing anything and everything from actual face-to-face contact to the appearance and layout of the buildings, the groups were asked to think of one thing they would change and develop a prototype of the proposed solution. We were all a bit apprehensive initially, until Sean and David assured us that perfection is actually antithetical to prototyping. The prototypes that the groups developed were creative and exceeded expectations.

Mapping social innovation

by Perrie Ballantyne

Young Foundation has just launched a new web-resource for social innovators, socialinnovator.info. The website is the result of a two year project to map the methods being used around the world, across all sectors and fields, to design, develop and grow social innovation. 

This material is intended to support all those involved in developing practical solutions to social challenges;  policy‐makers who can help to create the right conditions; foundations and philanthropists who can fund and support; social organisations trying to meet needs more effectively; and entrepreneurs and innovators themselves.

You’ll find the work of  Innovation Unit represented in the resource’s social innovation taxonomy. We’re depicted as an ‘arm’s lenth or spin off innovation unit’ reflecting our development out of the government’s education department. Innovation Exchange is also featured as a ‘dedicated intermediary’ and there’s a brief case study describing our work on the Next Practice programme and Festivals of Ideas.

This is helpful map of international activity in an emerging field. There is a lot we could add to it – starting with Innovation Unit’s new model for supporting Radical Efficiency and our work with local authorities towards the development of innovation labs.

Radical efficiency and the rebound effect

By John Craig

NEF have published an impressive report – Growth Isn’t Possible – looking at the economics behind avoiding climate catastrophe.  It’s sobering reading to say the least, but I recommend it.  There are two interesting insights in there for radical efficiency:

Swear boxes and abstinence rings

By John Craig

Sometimes, it’s easier to do the right thing by other people than it is our future selves.  Parents will neglect their own health and happiness to provide for their children, far beyond the point of diminishing returns.  The other day, I blogged about Peter Mandelson’s comment that the Labour Party should focus a little less on the ‘politics of distribution’ and a little more on the ‘politics of production’.  I said that in public services the reverse might be true, because too often equality concerns frustrate efforts to improve everyone’s well-being.  But there is a second problem with too great a focus on distribution – it focuses attention on distributive justice between individuals, to the exclusion of efforts simply to help everyone get on in life.  Part of the drive to create Radical Efficiency should focus on services’ ability to work with the grain of people’s will power and help them to lead more responsible, generous lives.

Keep calm and bring it on

By Sarah Gillinson

Narayana Hrudalaya (NH) cardiac hospital is proud to offer a service that confounds expectations – they conduct eight times as many open heart surgeries as comparable Indian hospitals. Operating theatres allowing multiple simultaneous operations have enabled NH to combine the precision of heart surgery with the efficiency of the production line. Founded in 2001 by renowned cardiac surgeon, Dr. Devi Shetty, NH also works to prevent critical cases by actively connecting with ‘hard to reach’ rural populations. Technology from the Indian Space Research Organization links heart specialists with local GPs to support diagnosis. Today, 99% of people are treated locally and only the 1% of patients that need surgery is sent to NH. The quality of the hospital’s service is higher than could ever have been imagined a decade ago, and its costs lower.

Unlikely as it may sound, thousands of miles away in Norfolk public servants are getting to know that Narayana feeling. Police, local government officials, health officers and others are working together to re-think public services. They have been told to think big and think differently. They are working with users to develop a deeper understanding of the challenges they share – like how to stop dropping the ball when children move from primary to secondary school. They are using these new insights to find both savings for Norfolk’s hard-pressed politicians and service improvements for Norfolk’s citizens.

The Department of the Future

by Gareth Wynne

Capgemini has just published an interesting report based on their research since 2008 exploring the challenges facing public services and how the civil service will need to adapt to meet them.

A number of the key lessons they highlight mirror The Innovation Unit’s own experience of research and programme design & delivery e.g. citizen insights should be used to shape services and tailoring services to the needs of particular groups and individuals can dramatically reduce cost per outcome.

They highlight that in reshaping delivery there are three models to choose from – centrally managed, networked delivery and service-user choice.  The report argues that correctly defining outcomes, policy choices and delivery strategy can be transformative and describes six levers that government can pull to improve policy and customer outcomes.

Full report available here (you will need to register on site to download).

Social care: Creation not delivery

By John Craig

When finance is the growth sector of our economy, it’s an opportunity; when care is the growth sector of our economy, it is a threat. These are two sides of the same mistake; we tend to see only the upsides of growth in the private sector and the downsides of growth in the public sector. Sure, the growth in demand for social care poses huge challenges, but we must not miss the opportunities it brings. As a growing source of employment, care has the potential to bring regeneration to our poorest areas. And as those involved in the care economy reach critical mass, the potential for those receiving care to support one another will grow exponentially.

Innovation and novelty are not the same thing. Often the best innovations are simply an existing idea in a new context. So it was with Slivers of Time, an online system that allows individuals to trade as little as an hour of their time to provide services to one another. Originally conceived to help those excluded from full-time work into the labour market, Innovation Exchange has supported Slivers to shift their work into social care. They are now working with six local authorities to create local marketplaces to enable personal budget holders to purchase care when they want it from individuals they trust. At the same time, it is helping new individuals to join the social care workforce, whether they work full-time work or simply support two people that live on their street. And it is enabling consumers of care to also become providers, whether as volunteers or as paid staff. So Slivers of Time is an important innovation because it tackles an existing problem – how to create dynamic local marketplaces for social care – but also because it unlocks new sources of energy from unemployed people and from service users themselves.

Radical efficiency in the regions

by John Craig

Across health and social care, we spend huge amounts of money prescribing drugs and ensuring they are taken.  Not only are millions of pounds worth of drugs wasted, care staff have routinely to visit people in their homes for the sole purpose of ensuring they have taken their pills.  West Midlands JIP is part of a consortium innovating to tackle this problem.  They are developing and piloting a pill dispenser that can distribute 28 sets of pills over a timescale determined by a pharmacist.  Using motion censors, they can even text a next of kin to tell them when pills are removed.

Radical efficiency in health

by John Craig

Alongside the Great Wall of China, I’m pretty sure the NHS is visible from space.  This afternoon I have been working with innovation experts from around government to think about a cross-government IT platform for innovation.  The best way I can understand it is like an Innovation Exchange on steroids.  And predictably, the architecture NHS’s National Innovation Centre is probably the leading piece of work in this space.  For someone working primarily with third sector innovation, the scale of some of this kind of work is staggering.  To appear in the NIC’s Showcase, for example,  innovation projects must have saved the NHS £10m.  That’s an incredibly high bar, but in the context of a £100bn organisation, it’s also an eminently reasonable one.