The team and funds making innovation happen in governments around the world

developersenablerseducatorsarchitects

Transforming the processes, skills and culture of government

• Focus on transforming the way that government approaches innovation.

• Consultancy, training, secondments and placements, to develop skills and mind-sets.

• Educators, providing the insights and knowledge for insiders to innovate.

Achieving wider policy and systems change

• Focus on bringing about wider transformation beyond specific interventions to the wider policy context and complex systems.

• Architects, creating the designs and blueprints that others can follow.

Creating solutions to solve specific challenges

• Focus on solving high priority problems by developing usable and scalable solutions.

• Collaborate with colleagues in government agencies.

• Developers and creators of innovations.

Engaging citizens, non-profits and businesses to find new ideas

• Opening up government to voices and ideas from outside.

• Strong communications and engagement strategies.

• Enablers, creating the conditions for innovations from outside government to thrive.

Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics (MONUM)

Based: Boston, USA

Mission statement: “The Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics is Boston’s civic innovation group. We partner with entrepreneurs inside and outside of City Hall to explore better ways to serve and collaborate with people. We do this by running discrete experiments, understanding their impact, scaling what works and learning from what doesn’t.”

What defines them: Technology-led civic engagement

Size of team: 5

Example of impact; MONUM’s Citizen Connect mobile app is used by residents to report problems such as graffiti to City Hall, with around 300 cases across Boston reported each week. The app has been replicated by other cities across the nation.

Barcelona Urban LabBased: Barcelona, Spain

Mission statement: “Urban Lab is a tool to facilitate the use of public spaces in the city of Barcelona to carry out tests and pilot programs on products and services with an urban impact. The idea is to use the city as an urban laboratory.”

What defines them: Urban experimentation

Size of team: 3

Annual spend: £185,000 (2013

Example of impact : Supported 16 pilots to date, with many turning into businesses in Barcelona and other cities around the world.

PS21 Office Based: Singapore

Mission Statement: “PS21 is the Change Movement of the Singapore Public Service. It encourages every public officer to be open to change, and to find better ways, ideas and possibilities to bring about improvement and innovation in their individual work or the work of the public service.”

What defines them: Staff-led innovation

Size of team: 43

Example of impact; An evaluation of PS21 estimated that over a year it generated 520,000 suggestions from staff, of which approximately 60% were implemented, leading to savings of around £55 million

SitraBased: Helsinki, Finland

Mission Statement: “Sitra is building a successful Finland for tomorrow’s world.”

What defines them: A combination of impact investment, research and practical programmes

Size of team: 110

Example of impact: Sitra estimates that its work on sustainable energy has led to around £1 billion in savings for the Finnish government

10 lessons for setting up an i-team

1The type of i-team you create should be driven by your ultimate goal

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Nesta Innovation Lab is now an independent charity but continues to work closely with government, with over half it’s work, such as the Centre for Social Action designed and co-funded with government.

2Forge strong links to executive power inside government, leveraging internal and external partnerships, resources and insights, to achieve goals

3Build a team with a diverse mix of skills and a combination of insiders and outsiders to government The Australian Centre for Social

Innovation (TACSI) recruited service designers internationally due to a lack of available talent in Australia.

4Develop a lean funding model for the team itself, and attract funds from partners for implementation

Centro de Innovación Social (Centre for Social Innovation) is part of the Colombian Alliance of Funding Pioneers to leverage corporate funding, helping side step complex government procurement to more easily develop programmes

5Continually demonstrate and communicate the i-team’s unique value Sitra has reinvented the organisation

and its purpose three times throughout the fund’s lifespan to stay relevant to current challenges to Finland.

6Employ explicit methods, drawing on cutting edge innovation skills and tools, alongside strong project management to get work done

New Orleans Innovation Delivery Team has a structured four-step model to apply to all solution development and implementation

7Have a bias towards action and aim for rapid experimentation combining early wins with longer term impacts

The Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics (MONUM) has a rapid prototyping methodology, developing solutions in a matter of weeks

8Be clear on handovers early on, tasking implementation and delivery to government

Fonds d’experimentation pour la jeunesse funds the evaluation of projects, helping government select the most successful to adopt and scale

9Relentlessly measure impacts, quantify successes and be sure to stop what isn’t working

The NYC Center for Economic Opportunity actively decommissions ineffective or redundant programmes to free up resources to be used elsewhere

10 Celebrate success and share credit

PS21 organises the annual ExCel awards for the best staff-driven innovation project in the Singaporean public service

Thank you

www.theiteams.org

@philipcolligan