Innovation, innovation everywhere, but what to think? Ex-Head of Policy and Strategy at No.10 and now Chief Exec of the RSA, Matthew Taylor, is a big thinker and says in his recent blog that he has 'spending time recently with some amazing social innovators'. He mentions Oli Barrett who we've come across in connection with Susbtance's Plings project and an organisation called Ashoka. Ashoka say they are 'innovators for the public' and describe what they do as working on three levels:
- we support individual social entrepreneurs-financially and professionally-throughout their life cycle.
- we bring communities of social entrepreneurs together to help leverage their impact, scale their ideas, and capture and disseminate their best practices.
- we help build the infrastructure and financial systems needed to support the growth of the citizen sector
and facilitate the spread of social innovation globally.
It is interesting and stimulating stuff, but how this kind of thinking fits with the British Goverment's approach in Innovation Nation is not at all clear. However, what Matthew says in his blog fits very well with Cadence's thinking in this area. He says 'the problem with social capacity is not an aggregate lack of commitment, time or effort but that the available capacity is massively under-utilised. We don't use people's skills effectively, we don't collaborate as well as we should and we don't learn from what works (and what doesn't)'.
How we've putting it, particularly in relation to public services, is that a lot of innovation is already happening at the interface between front-line workers and users, but that it is not recognised as innovation by those at the top or bottom of the organisations. If it's not acknowledged then it can't be replicated and so on ...
Matthew also picks up on the need to stop doing things that don't work, something that public services always struggle with and this is often where the politics can get difficult. Hopefully that is what David Miliband was getting at yesterday when he said 'must be more humble about our shortcomings' in his hand grenade-like Guardian article?
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