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.
Following last week’s Spending Review, it’s likely you will feel under pressure to cut new approaches or those that at first glance appear marginal and low impact. But it is these approaches that will save money and alleviate pressure on public services in the future.
Last week’s Comprehensive Spending Review has made the challenge critically clear: how can we save money in public services without significant harm to society?
The potential for open-source software to cut public sector costs is an exciting prospect and it's happening now
Being able to see is pretty important in Darwinian terms. Put bluntly, it's a lot easier to avoid getting eaten if you can see the predator coming.
Apparently the average productive time of a drill in its entire lifetime is about 12-13 minutes.
Going forward into cash-strapped times, there will be increasing pressure to deliver better public services for less.
It is not enough to assume that scaling back the state will allow local innovation to flourish. Achieving genuine localism relies on a different kind of support from the centre.
NESTA's call for radical innovation in public services found a new level of comfort among decision-makers in the NHS this month. As the thinking has evolved about how cuts in budgets could be met, the penny suddenly dropped.
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