Innovation Labs

The Innovation Challenge

Many public service organisations are striving to be more innovative. They want to offer services that are more effective and better value for money, develop a more innovative culture, and transform they way they work. They also want to design services that are popular, easy to use and recognised as leading edge.

Achieving all of this is incredibly difficult: inspections, performance management, local accountability, risk management, procurement, recruitment, budgeting, planning, and the scrutiny of the media combine to make it hard to build an innovative and entrepreneurial culture.

Our approach

Innovation Unit has seven years experience of enabling innovation in the public services. We have made lots of mistakes and have learned the hard way about making innovation happen on the ground. We work with Local Authorities, regional government and foreign governments to help them overcome the barriers to innovation. We help organisations:

• use innovation systematically to deliver better performance and outcomes as well as better value for money;
• bring coherence and discipline to the often messy reality of running many innovation projects across the organisation;
• create a stronger culture of innovation;
• be more rigorous in closing down the less successful innovation projects while sustainably scaling up the most successful innovations.

We are inspired by the work of a range of different models in the private and public sector including Social Innovation Lab Kent, Peterborough Solutions Centre, DWP Solutions Centre, Mindlab in Denmark, Skunk Works at Lockhead Martin, and the incubation of innovations at RNIB and Mencap.

We can help organisations to build such an Innovation Lab. Innovation Labs designed to change the culture and performance of their organisation, build the capability for innovation across the organisation, draw innovations into the organisations from all around the world and spin out innovations commercially or otherwise.

We can provide core intellectual property on innovation methodologies and disciplines. We have developed a number of products and tools that support innovation projects, and an approach to Knowledge Management and Learning that enables innovations to go to scale, and to demonstrate impact. We support and enable leaders to make innovation happen within their community.

Every organisation has different needs, and is at a different stage in development. Before building anything we would use a diagnostic to assess innovation capability and innovation results.

Project contacts

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