Barriers to innovation – how SILK is informing the discussion at the highest level Emma Barrett from SILK was invited to an Innovation Roundtable on the 21st Sept, a half-day workshop coordinated by the Cabinet Office and facilitated by John Craig, the Director of the Innovation Exchange, at the Innovation Unit. Twelve ‘innovators’ from different sectors from around the country were invited with representation from Dance United, NAAPS, Ibixinsight, Love Lewisham campaign, Keep Britain Tidy, the Prince’s Trust and Connect MK. The ‘innovators’ discussed the common barriers to scaling up innovations from their own personal experiences in their respective organisations with a view to feeding a summary back to the national Innovators Council. The main themes identified were: • LACK OF TRANSITION SUPPORT The lack of “transition support” for innovations moving from initial start-up phase into the mainstream means that it feels easier to start a new project than to scale out. • CURRENT DELIVERY MODELS Innovations typically bring together two or more existing practices often generating savings in one place, which due to public service accounting, accrue elsewhere. No motivation for certain parts of the system to embrace innovations and in sometimes there are specific disincentives. • REGULATION Regulation of public service systems is too often driven by exceptional failures in search of incremental improvement. Many regulations have unintended consequences and yet no-one seems to take ownership/responsibility for undoing past mistakes. • POORLY DEVELOPED OFFER The lack of clarity/understanding/communication about the role of Innovation Hubs and Innovation centres. The absence of any clear promise to innovators from government. • CULTURE Organisations undervalue individuals and do not empower them to make personal decisions. Consequently, personal expectations of achievement are low. Creative people exist but often get contained and limited. Innovators within the public sector can be put in positions of considerable personal risk when developing their innovations. • PERFORMANCE MEASURES Government too often requires forms of proof that are not appropriate for small scale innovations and in general government’s evidence gathering and evaluation lacks sophistication. There is a lack of clarity about what constitutes good evidence. New approaches face an unpredictable and unbounded set of demands and a heavy burden of proof when compared to existing services, sometimes making it impossible for them to compete. Dialogue between innovators and commissioning agencies as a sector about the forms of evidence that they are likely to demand is currently poor. Performance data is often of poor quality (not timely, not actionable) and inspection regimes are poorly designed. Much more could be achieved with “real time” data flows and management and the application of common technologies and social networking protocols to community engagement. The plethora of targets makes it hard to know which to hit and sample sizes of innovative projects are often too small to draw conclusions from. • FUNDING, BUDGETING & AUDITS Silo funding means no budget for ideas that are cross cutting and not already considered. No “dragons den” for innovations in public services. Organisations do not accept each other’s audits of the social value of innovations placing a considerable burden on innovators to keep proving their worth time and time again.
SILK was invited back to attend a lunchtime session with the Innovators Council on the 14th October at the Design Museum in London to have the opportunity to raise the profile of SILK with the Innovators Council. Liam Byrne, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, attended for the first part of the lunch and led a discussion around the barriers to innovation notably raising issues about how you frame the problem; the reconnection between the front line and the policy-makers; the capabilities of the innovators and how institutions breed dependence. Innovators Council members (see http://www.hmg.gov.uk/innovation/membership.aspx) had an informal lunch and were able to discuss with the ‘innovators’ their experiences of setting up and growing projects and how barriers to scaling innovation could be addressed. It was good to have a catch up with Christian Bason, Head of Innovation at MindLab in Denmark (http://www.mind-lab.dk/en), the original inspiration for SILK; many of our experiences in Kent are similar to the challenges he faces in Denmark and we have much to learn from each other. Nigel Tyrell, the Head of Environment at the LB of Lewisham and spearheading the ‘Love Lewisham’ campaign in partnership with Keep Britain Tidy and Andrew Coggins the Executive Director of Dance United project http://www.dance-united.com presented their projects in the afternoon session. Others in attendance included Ginny Lunn, the Director of Policy and Development at the Prince's Trust; Brian Johnson, the Director of The Hub at Keep Britain Tidy; Lisa Bailey, Operations Manager at Connect>MK; and Ben Jupp, Director of Public Service Strategy and Innovation, Cabinet Office. We await to hear further outcomes of the session and will post when we do.