10 Steps To Transformation

4. Don't 'buy-in' the answer - develop your own solutions quickly and cheaply

Laura Bunt - 28.10.2010

There’s a perception of innovation as something that’s expensive, or only the task of experts. This doesn’t need to be the case. We’ve come across countless examples of innovation in public services driven by the staff who work in them using low-cost tools and speedy processes.

Image: Service design agency Live|Work’s analysis of a service users’ journey into work, used as a basis for service design. Source: Radical Efficiency, NESTA and the Innovation Unit, 2010

There’s a perception of innovation as something that’s expensive, or only the task of experts. This doesn’t need to be the case. We’ve come across countless examples of innovation in public services driven by the staff who work in them using low-cost tools and speedy processes. Given that services need to be more user-centred, local and personalised, innovation could often be about replacing costly systems or complex IT services with cheaper, more human alternatives.

There are two issues at the heart of the misconceived ‘cost’ of innovation. The first is investment, the second is risk. Let’s deal with each in turn.

Firstly, investment. The kind of innovation that we’ve seen to be most powerful doesn’t necessarily demand significant upfront investment in a new system or programme. Often it’s about looking again at existing resources and re-imagining how these could be spent more effectively. As we’ve argued in a previous post, innovation needs to be about shifting or reprioritising resources and not just put on the shelf until new resources are available. 

Technology is a good way to illustrate this. It is too easy to see a new technology as a catch all solution to efficiency – a way to streamline and coordinate existing practice. And yet we’re all familiar with stories of costly technology failures, where new systems take time to get up and running and aren’t appropriate for what staff and users need. However, there are ways in which existing technologies – often those that are cheaper, more agile – can offer a way to improve current communication and release pressures on precious time.

For the past few months, Westminster Council’s children safeguarding team have been working with the support of designers and software developers to think about a new way to use technology to make services more effective – both for the people who work in them and the users they serve. Cheap, existing social media tools – like blogs, social networks or mobile phone applications – can facilitate quick distribution of information and connect staff to each other and to the data they need. Though using technology, the tools used here are very different from costly, centralised IT systems that can take time to install and adapt.

Secondly, risk. Spending scarce resources – both time and money – on developing new approaches may feel too risky. But by understanding what your users really need and what your staff think you should do differently, the risk is mitigated. And by testing and adapting ideas before wider implementation, you’ll find out what works and what could work better from an early stage.

This was the approach facilitated by service design agency Live|Work when they helped Sunderland Council to re-think users’ access to employment services. By spending time with service users, they came to understand real and perceived barriers to employment and were able to radically redesign local services to help people get over these. In developing the new suite of services, they relied on quick, iterative testing of their idea rather than a prolonged pilot with costly evaluation.

Constrained resources mean that everyone needs to think about innovation differently. It won’t be enough just to promise a new approach or new way of thinking about public services, or to offer organisations new tools or products that might seem to offer quick solutions. Think about what already exists in the organisation, and build on it.