Ripple effect
innovation - and doomsday
Tuesday, 24 March 2009
The tide may be turning on innovation in local government. Or at least it may be about to turn. The launch of NESTA/IDeA’s More Than Good Ideas: the power of innovation in local government report on Monday was interesting, and the report contains some good new examples of innovation by, or facilitated by, local government.
There’s a very consistent narrative now – dare I say a consensus? – on the barriers to real innovation, particularly the pressure for risk avoidance and compliance, rather than understanding and managing risk. And, though some of us will put different emphasis on different things, there’s little disagreement on the roles that local government can play in developing local service innovation and some of the techniques that can be employed. NESTA’s new Public Services Innovation Lab is also helpful in this respect.
The main way in which government and others try to encourage innovation currently seems to be through competitions: the best (most innovative) ideas are selected and given some funding and/or profiling. NESTA’s Big Green Challenge is an example of this approach. This approach draws on the fact that innovative ideas – and the capacity to free the potential - are out there in the community and within local government and need to be incubated.
More challenging still, as the report recognises, is developing the culture within local government and communities so that there is an ‘innovation infrastructure’. To this end, I’m encouraged by the interest that HR specialists in local government are now taking in this agenda, which I’m not sure has been widely acknowledged yet.
So how is this ‘innovation agenda’ going to take root across the local government family? Well, one thing that’s clear is that real innovation is more likely when the drivers are particularly stark. (In fact, my main interest in the agenda is around service re-design in response to the need to mitigate and adapt to climate change). In this light, SOLACE and CIPFA’s work on the putative local response to a ‘doomsday scenario’, where public finances are critically affected by the drying up of funding for public debt, is pertinent.
This is the type of pressure to which major innovation is an inevitable response. Like it or not, a major rethinking on the outcomes we commission locally, and how to deliver them, might be just around the corner.
