Creative Councils - How to Innovate in Local Government

Editor's Notes

• #2: Nesta was set up in 1997 with a £320m endowment from the National Lottery. We became a charity last year and our mission is to help people and organisations to bring great ideas to life. We do this by providing investments and grants, and mobilising our research, networks and skills.
• #4: how do we support innovation?At Nesta, we’ve developed a theory of innovation which sets out the process for turning a great idea into something real that grows and achieves impact.We’ve drawn on methods used in many fields, from business to science, to the third sector and public services. Each field has a distinct way of doing innovation, but they overlap in terms of the tools they use to make innovation happen, and the way they think about what needs to happen at each stage of the process. Hopefully some of the tools and methods that I talk about will be useful to you in thinking about how you might go about innovating in your own service.Exploring opportunities and challenges:- The aim of this work is to get a well understood and clearly defined problemSo, we start with the prompts for innovation. These can take many forms. The prompt could be a crisis or problem. It could be a political pressure – the demand for something new, like the pressure from disabled people for better access to buildings and transport facilities. Or it could be new evidence, like the evidence that investment in early years support and education has a higher return than almost anything else a government could do. We systematically prompt innovation? – trend spotting, collecting and analsying data, foresight, system mapping, understanding problems, generating insights into a problem….gaining different vantage points Othersdraw inspiration from the perspectives of different groups. Frontline professionals, consumers, as well as practitioners and experts, all have different kinds of knowledge to bring to the understanding of an issue or problem. You might use methods for insight generation to better understand the context of people’s lives and the realities of people’s behaviour. For example, ethnographic researchers shadow people and observe their habits and routines to generate new insights. A number of our Creative Councils used ethnography to test and develop their innovations – for example, Derbyshire County Council used it to test their ideas about how to raise aspiration amongst children in care.From this develop ideas. So lets do little exercise. I would like you on tables to share a miserable moment of using a service. Share one each and choose one to share. Right now oyu have done that I want you to think of as many solutions as possible to the challenge you haveh heard….how many have you collected 1 to 5, 5 to 8, 8 to 15 15 plus. The point here is generate as many ideas as possible and as paulus lining said>>
• #5: KATYAn idea or set of ideas to test. There is a very famous comment by the American Chemist, Linus Pauling – still the only person ever to have won two Nobel Prizes. He says the best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas and discard the bad ones. What you’re trying to do here is to maximise creativity and the menu of options and ideas.
• #6: Ultimately we are looking to turn a promising idea into mainstream policty and take all these elements.In the public sector, turning a promising idea into a mainstream policy or programme involves budget allocations, training of staff, and sometimes changes to law and regulations to allow – for example – a new way of providing primary care service to patients, or a new way of running secondary schools so that they become sustainable.
• #7: We ultimately are lookiing to ensure they scale and can be replicated….that we get system change. For example, in the field of waste and recycling over the last 20-30 years our whole systems have shifted from filling landfill sites to much higher proportions of recycling or use of waste for energy. If we look at what makes this sort of systemic change happen, it turns out they require many things to change in tandem. Some of them are about laws and regulations such as EU directives requiring 60% of paper to be recycled. Some of them are about new technological models for incinerating waste. Some of them are about organisational models – so how do you actually collect different categories of waste from households and businesses? Some of them too are about behavioural change – Large scale recycling will only work is householders are willing to use separate bins for paper, glass, and organic waste. The same things applies in other fields from criminal justice to long term care for the elderly where there is change on a whole series of fields at once and change usually takes a long time to happen as a result. So systemic change is a transformation in the way we do things – and that’s what we’ve been aiming to achieve through programmes like Creative Councils
• #9: In today’s presentation, I’d like to focus on four things:A brief overview of the Creative Councils programme.The process we’ve been through over the past two years.A quick run through of the five councils’ ideas which we are supporting to come to lifeAnd finally – some of the key themes of learning that are emerging through our work.
• #11: We know about the austerity measures. – if we think we can service improve or increementally change our way out of this we arer wrong. Demographic also changing. So demand on services even greaterBut important we don’t forget also demographic and also idea of self determinism and the broader definiton of value. What we did post war was needed to reward country for war effort. It was an innovation in its own right but we have changed and moved but the services have not as much. So if we feel we can just do more even haerder than we do now, we still wont get the difference we want. Einsteein said doing the same thing over and over in the hope it will willwrk is the sign of maddness.
• #12: We started the Creative Councils programme with a set of assumptions – That incremental change is not going to be good enough to solve the critical financial and social challenges that local government is facing.That local councils are in the best position to solve these challenges but need support, knowledge and skills development in order to do so.We believed that the sector needed to get better at replicating the best innovations – at the moment good news doesn’t travel fast – and that this needed to be built into our work with a small group of councils.And finally, we thought that we should focus on codifying innovation methods – working out the building blocks that support successful innovation in councils and sharing these in a systematic way across the sector.In terms of the process - We launched an open call for ideas in summer 2011. We asked councils to tell us about a medium to long-term challenge that they knew demanded a transformational new approach and what they would like do about it. We received 137 responses, which represents around 38% of the councils in England and Wales.We then selected 17 councils with the most promising ideas and took them to a two-day Creative Councils Camp, where we introduced them to Nesta’s innovation methodology, worked on ideas development, and connected them to the innovation coaches who would be working with them over the next six months.As well as coaches, we gave each council a small grant of £30k and access to other forms of support, such as ethnography, legal advice and support with community engagement, as well as regular opportunities to get together as a cohort at Creative Council Camps.In May last year we carried out the selection process for the final phase of the programme. We were particularly looking for councils with a highly innovative and transformational idea, good potential to scale, and a strong, capable team, and we selected a small number of councils to receive support for a further year including a bigger grant and more significant non-financial support.
• #14: Derbyshire’s Uni-fi project focuses on developing aspiration amongst children in care. Its starting point was looking at the attainment of those children – only 3% of care leavers go to university and they are over-represented in unemployment, crime and mental illness statistics. They are also more likely to have children that come into the care system. The council decided that this pattern was morally wrong and resolved to fundamentally change its approach to corporate parenting. They are doing this in three main ways:Changing the culture of the council in relation to young people so that they always start from the perspective of ‘if this was my own child, what would I do?’ rather than treating them as a service recipient.Creating a financial entitlement for children in care, up to the value of a medical degree, for them to direct towards their key life goals.Establishing a network of mentors to support them to develop and achieve these life goals.
• #15: Monmouthshire’s starting point for their ‘Your County Your Way’ project was their belief that the whole relationship between citizen and state is broken and that the council needs to transform its culture so that it listens and responds more creatively to the needs of its communities. A key part of this approach is an internal training programme, the Intrapreneurship School, which focuses on building innovation skills amongst the council’s staff. The next stage is to start to apply these skills in a real scenario and they are about to start prototyping this with one of their local communities in Abergavenny.
• #16: Rotherham’s project is about developing enterprise learning in schools so that young people are equipped with the kind of entrepreneurial skills and knowledge they need for the future. The project started as a small section of the council which offered training for teachers in Rotherham and has now ‘spun out’ from the council as a social enterprise which is gradually expanding its reach across the country. It is a great example of councils adopting new models of service delivery.
• #17: Wigan’s project aims to create a new economic model for social care. It recognises that the current system of council-led support is expensive, unsustainable and sometimes fails to meet the needs of users. Their new approach aims to incentivise a social care market that is based on local micro-enterprises and more volunteering, and they are exploring how to use a local currency to ensure that the value of these many care interactions stays in the local economy.
• #18: Stoke’s project aims to make the city energy self-sufficient by moving towards local ownership of energy supply. Stoke is a great centre for the pottery industry in England, which is heavily reliant on energy and therefore badly affected by fluctuations in energy prices. Stoke are looking at setting up an energy ‘holding company’ which can undertake a range of projects to generate and redistribute local energy.For example, this diagram shows how this might work for biogas. This could be created by the council through collection of food and green waste which is then converted into methane gas. The methane gas could be passed onto the pottery industry for use, with any excess heat captured and used to heat local houses.It is a really ambitious project that is already generating significant interest from other local authorities.
• #26: Two years into the Creative Councils programme, we’re gaining some rich insights into the experience of innovating in local government and the barriers and enablers of successful innovation.
• #27: So, starting with some of the factors that make local government innovation difficult.Firstly, there is the issue of capacity. It’s rare to find councils that offer dedicated time away from people’s day jobs to develop new ideas. This means that innovation work is squeezed in between other tasks and so doesn’t get the attention and careful planning that it needs.A second challenge is around remaining faithful to user insight. Through the programme, we’ve encouraged councils to use ethnography to gain deep understandings of the lives of service users and citizens and to use this as a starting point for developing their innovations. What we’ve noticed though, is that while they’re inspired by these at the start, it’s quite easy for them to revert back to the view that ‘I’m the professional and I know best’. Next, there’s the issue of strategy vs culture. You can have the best strategy in the world for doing something innovative but if the culture and behaviours in the organisation don’t support this, it probably won’t get very far. This is why projects like Derbyshire’s are looking at simultaneously changing the behaviours of staff working with young people in care as well as developing a new financial strategy for supporting them.And finally, there is the innovation paradox. At the moment, with significant budget cuts and rising demand, innovation is needed more than ever in public services. But at the same time these external factors cause massive flux, with high staff turnover and changing roles, which makes it incredibly difficult to find the time, energy or commitment to focus on innovation.
• #28: Moving onto the enablers…Firstly, without the right leadership and team it’s very hard for innovation in local government to succeed. Councils by their very nature are hierarchical, politically-led organisations and if innovations that are risky, involve financial commitment or potentially decommissioning of services are not fully supported by the leadership at the top, it will be very difficult for them to continue and succeed. Innovation needs consistent, committed leaders and a willingness to embrace risk.Another important enabler is having the right skills to innovate. We’ve spent quite a bit of time supporting our councils to develop new skills in key innovation techniques like ethnography, prototyping and service design. But, we’ve also learnt some more general points about the skills it takes to be a successful innovator. It’s not just about entrepreneurialism, creativity and empathy – although these are important – it’s also about planning, implementation, political nous; seeing innovation as a tough, rigorous process.Next, we’ve found that building wider coalitions and movements around an innovation project are really important in giving it sticking power. With some of our projects, there has been a tendency for the person who initiated it or led it at the start to want to remain ‘in charge’ and manage all the work streams themselves because it’s the bit of their job that they enjoy the most or it’s the thing that gains them recognition within their organisation. But what actually works is where the project leads start to bring in wider groups of people within the organisation and build support beyond it. For example, in Rotherham the project is working with teachers, parents and local businesses to co-design their new community-based approach to enterprise learning.A final enabler has been the non-financial support that we’ve offered through the programme. This has included Creative Council Camps, coaching and access to expert support on areas like ethnography, prototyping and business modelling. The council participants have told us that this has been hugely beneficial in moving their projects forward – it has helped to demystify innovation and make it real, given them space and support to experiment, and made sure that they maintain their focus on co-designing services with users.