Published

04/07

Innovation in public services

December 2006
Geoff Mulgan
 What I’ll cover

• What – examples, definitions

• Why – importance, future relevance
• How – methods, tools
• Challenges …
 What?

Definition: new ideas

that work …
• NHS Direct; Learn Direct; Open
University; Drug Courts; Police
Community Support Officers; online
tax transactions; restorative justice;
cognitive behavioural therapy for
prisoners; Surestart; Connexions;
criminal assets recovery; congestion
charges; carbon trading …
All depended on …

- supply
- diffusion and
- demand
Why?
For organisations: the three horizons of
current practice, emerging, future
practice
For the public sector:

• 50-80% of business economic growth from

innovation and most big productivity gains
come from new entrants, not from
incumbents, or efficiency drives
• Innovation key to lasting improvement
• Health becoming largest economic sector,
education, care not far behind – public
innovation becoming increasingly important
to economy
For society, areas of major challenge:
• Climate change
• Ageing and isolation
• Diversity and conflict
• Chronic disease and disability
• Transitions to adulthood
• Crime, criminal justice, anti-social
behaviour
How?
• Politics – fathers rights,
extended schools
• Bureaucracy –
Surestart, egovernment
• Social enterprise –
microcredit, homeless,
Teachfirst
• Business – new model
prisons
Ensuring flows of new ideas
 New methods for supply

• Innovation funds, prizes, zones,

incubators
• Competition (NASA)
• Decentralisation
• Scanning, adapting multiple sources
• Expert patients, pupils &c
• Design on the edges
• fast testing, assessment & adaptation
 New methods for demand

• Outcome based performance

management
• Collaboratives and learning
networks
• Benchmarking
• Joined up training
• User voice and choice
 Involving users – eg child-centred
public hospitals

Philips Design Jos Stuyfzand 2005-03-04 77

New tools for rapid learning for providers
Challenges
Handling unpredictable Horses v
cars?
results
Handling multiple
routes to change
• Supporting social enterprise
• Small scale experiments
• Making the public sector porous
• Mobilising local government role – and
national/local partnerships on innovation
Neighbourhood Fix-It
Pilot in 2 areas in 06/07
Leadership
Cheongyecheon in Seoul, South Korea
Government Effectiveness
 Exemplars

• Denmark: MindLab; Ministry of Finance;

Ministry of Social Affairs
• Finland: shifting focus of innovation policy
to include social
• Singapore: government role in design,
incubation of innovations
 Managing the tensions

• Handling risk – portfolios; choice of fields;

experiment vs national risk
• Handling accountability – political and
media
• Handling metrics – when to performance
manage
• shaped UK welfare state
• creator of over 60
organisations
• pioneer of patient led health,
consumerism, neighbourhood 10

governance, lifelong learning,

anti- age discrimination …

9
His success attributed to ..

• ability to straddle government, civil

society, research, business
• insider and outsider
• ‘sheer persistence, a kind of benign
ruthlessness even, clutching onto
an idea beyond the bitter end,
always taking ‘no’ as a question’
• ‘the trick was to look for small
changes that have potentially big
leverage’
The Future?

• 19th century science relied on

energetic individuals – Edison,
Bell, Curie
• 20th century science became
organised, structured,
professionalised with substantial
private and public investment
• Public and social innovation
going through a parallel transition
– by 2020/30 may have a similar
range of institutions to those that
exist in science and technology
• DCLG as innovation channel?
Schopenhauer:

‘Every truth passes through three

stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it
is violently opposed. Third, it is
accepted as being self-evident’