Overview of The Innovation Unit

Who are we?

We are an innovation intermediary for public services, with a strong track record supporting innovation in education and children's services, the third sector and local government.

We work in partnership with organisations from the public, private and third sectors to stimulate, incubate and accelerate innovation in public services that delivers significantly better outcomes for significantly lower costs.

The Innovation Unit is a not-for-profit company limited by guarantee.

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Vision and Mission

Our vision is to create an environment where the public and practitioners in public services work together to successfully tackle intractable and complex social problems.

Our mission is to enable practitioners in public services to generate innovation that is radical, scalable and delivers significantly better outcomes for significantly lower costs.

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What do we do?

There are three major strands to our work:

1. Innovation in schools, children's services and youth services
2. Innovation in the third sector
3. Innovation in local government

We seek to influence government policy in each of these areas, as well as influence government's overall policy on innovation. Our aim is to create better system conditions for innovation to flourish at scale.

A further important element of our work is our approach to knowledge management. We aim to bring communities of innovators together through our events, publications and our own online Next Practice Acceleration Space.

We are proud to work internationally with a range of state and federal governments and we continue to work closely with the OECD.

We are seeking to help people innovate at a local level, but the innovation challenges we face are national and sometimes international. We believe the top priorities for innovation in public services are:

1. Health - we have a growing obesity time bomb, woefully inadequate mental health provision, chronic diseases; all in a time when our current system is already over-stretched.
2. Social Care - we have an ageing population to care for but with ever increasing strain on available resources and vast inequalities in access and local provision.
3. Youth Challenge - we have a large disengaged youth population with rising numbers of NEET's and youth unemployment and educational outcomes greatly affected by social class and low aspiration.
4. Welfare dependency/long-term unemployed - we have increasing levels of unemployment as a result of the recession but with a large number already dependent on state welfare, how can we tackle potential and existing long-term reliance?
5. Crime - we have limited provision across the whole system but increasing levels of violent youth crime and gangs, persistent reoffending rates, and more low level criminal activity as a result of the recession.
6. Immigration and social cohesion - we have an apparent reluctance to discuss this issue leading to growing ethnic tensions and increased lack of community cohesion, particularly in light of the economic downturn.
7. Environmental crisis - we have an urgent need for widespread behaviour changes to lessen the effects of climate change but could be problematic as we are seeing less investment in green technologies and businesses.
8. Public service cutbacks - as the recession bites and money continues to spent rescuing banks, we are facing significant cutbacks in funding and resources to public services, across the board.

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What do we value?

Collaboration - we believe that collaboration is essential to fostering a culture of innovation. We share our ideas in a spirit of openness and work in partnership with other organisations.

Support and challenge - we believe that innovators and leaders benefit from external support and challenge when trying to achieve radical innovation. We provide consultancy support and coaching to innovators and we seek to stimulate debate, argument and new thinking.

Learning - we believe that innovation requires a learning mindset. We embrace different ideas, perspectives and backgrounds. We systematically learn from our experiences, and contribute to an evolving knowledge base.

Discipline - we believe that turning new ideas into action requires a disciplined approach to innovation. We have developed a disciplined process that seeks to turn inspiration, knowledge and ideas into action on the ground.

Creativity - we believe in the creativity of the people who use public services and the practitioners who work with them. We help innovators to engage deeply with the public, their colleagues, research and external expertise.

Action - we believe that new ideas are not enough - innovation is about turning new ideas into action. We help innovators to create the conditions locally and nationally for change to happen.

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Our history 

The Innovation Unit was originally established in the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) under the Education Act 2002. It was launched by the then Prime Minister Tony Blair, Estelle Morris and Sir Michael Barber. It has pioneered work on personalised learning, parental involvement, federations and clusters of schools, system leadership, and communities for learning.

Since November 2006, The Innovation Unit has been a separate and independent entity from the DCSF (formerly DfES) and we receive no grant funding.

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