Policy Innovation Blog

Wanting more than a Post-It note exercise

Mark Griffiths - 25.04.2012

For the last few months we have been busy articulating a new practical programme to respond to the challenges and opportunities that an ever more ubiquitous, larger and smarter digital environment creates for education.

When doing project work it is easy to get lost in the delivery process, and to lose sight of the tougher questions that sit in your area of work (or in innovation itself as a topic).  Maybe the biggest one for us across Nesta is that which Geoff has recentlyblogged about - what is the best method of generating great ideas, and then turning them into products, services, or enterprises that can support those ideas to be used at scale? 

It strikes me that there is a lack of systematic theory and rigorous evidence on this big topic, and that decisions on which technique to use depend, at best, on unarticulated craft knowledge and, at worst, on habit.

Mainly to collect my thoughts on this topic, I wanted to use this blog to collect some of the examples I know of that can be usefully applied to education, and to group them loosely by their interesting features.

Approaches that try to match the demand for innovation with the supply

It is packed into the definition of a 'good' innovation that it meets a real need or want. 

In an education context an innovation that meets a want, but not a real need, should probably be left alone (one thinks of the familiar bug bear of the success of 'learning' products based on the notion of 'learning styles').  Given that, the troubling cases are innovations that meet a need, but where there is insufficient demand for it to be adopted at scale. 

The I3 funded project InnovateNYC offers a plausible response to this challenge.  This project supports a network of schools to articulate their students' learning challenges which will then be posted to a "community of learning scientists, instructional designers, product developers, and early-stage funders" who will develop solutions to the identified needs.

This addresses the supply side question and, by responding to school need, partly the demand side.  Usefully added into this, though, is a rigorous evaluation process that identifies those solutions which work, with a promise to buy licenses for these across the NYC school system. (Increasing 'smart demand' for learning technologies was also a feature of the digital promise initiative that never got funding, the argument that both assume is that there is some form of market failure at work in this space.)

Narrower models of development

In contrast to the relatively open sounding approach to development of the InnovateNYC project is the DARPA model where development is carried out by a curated team of leading experts focused on transformative goals. 

It will be interesting to see if this approach is carried through to the Obama announced ARPA-ED (or a DARPA for education) that "will invest in game-changing approaches to teaching and learning". 

Models that offer outside support to nurture the idea, team or enterprise

In our report The Start-up Factories we have been exploring the role of Accelerators in nurturing technology start-ups.  One feature of such programmes is that they provide "time-limited support comprising programmed events and intensive mentoring."  This model has been applied to education, for example by Strartl who describe their programme as a "three-month immersion program to take your education start-up to market with the best and brightest in business and education at your side"

This model of providing support and mentoring is one that Nesta is very familiar with, used, for example, in the different context of supporting innovation at a council level, and one which I think will be especially important in an education setting where you want to ensure that technologists have support to understand, and act on, the insights that the learning sciences can offer (by the way, my favourite phrasing of this injunction is 'inspired by technology, driven by pedagogy'.)

Models that offer an incentive

Nesta is establishing a Centre for Challenge Prizes which will act as a "hub for expertise in designing, setting up and running challenge prizes to tackle social and technological challenges in the public interest" (a challenge prize offers a reward to whoever can first, or most effectively, meet a defined challenge and is an effective way of incentivising action).

One of the areas we are interested in applying this model to is that of learning, where we want to see the movement of insights from the neurosciences, for example the work of Paul Howard-Jones on neuroscience, games and learning , or Paul Kelley's Spaced Learning, into products that can be used in schools and there be tested for effectiveness.

So these are some examples I know of.  If I have missed something, or if you have a view on the appropriateness or success of these approaches, then I would be keen to hear from you.  You can reach me at - education@nesta.org.uk