WRITTEN ON December 1st, 2007 BY Ruth Kennedy AND STORED IN Design: Co-creation, Design: user-oriented, What do we want?

A noisy and energetic group met somewhere for an Ideal Gov dinner on the theme of innovation. There’s much talk about innovation in public services, but it’s hard to move beyond the platitudes into understanding how innovation is supported, enabled and scaled. Sir David Varney called for ‘creative deviants’. Does innovation always have to be bottom up, or is there a central innovation agenda as well?

Innovation matters not for its own sake, but for its effect on the citizen or service user, and front-line service deliverers. We need to learn to listen better, and use creativity and innovation to improve services. We need to let teachers, doctors and practitioners to lead change. We should work with people as active “agents” in their own lives as opposed to passive recipients of a set of disparate services. Users can subvert and change products and services to improve them, as von Hippel describes in “Democratising Innovation”.

Guests agreed that the strategy should be called service transformation not transformational government. IT is a powerful strategic enabler, irrepressibly innovative and inspiring, but it’s the involvement of staff and service users that gives the clearest direction and has the most valuable potential for innovation.

Government is committed to ‘user insight’, but doesn’t really know how to do it. It needs carefully crafted techniques to understand how people really live their lives. The service design community can offer these insights, or firms such as Ideo in San Francisco which designs product by watching what people do.

Public servants often need a compelling event to take on the risk of change. Without something like a war, financial crisis, or threat of climate change the risks seem too big. The end of the Northern Irish troubles provided such a compelling event, but so too should the realities of poor service in schools or hospitals.

We also need to create “safe places” for innovation as the Innovation Unit is trying to do.

What does this mean for professionals? You can’t just leave everything to service users, or they’ll game the system. We have to close the gap in language between those who run services and those who sit outside talking about innovation. In education we need technology which makes the system reliable, works at scale, and is immensely people orientated.

There are many ways to innovate. Government can listen, and innovate centrally. But it can also enable and empower people – often just with better information – so front-line practitioners can innovate. In that case scaling up is the challenge.

The aim of the police should be to help create a society that is more self-policing. And we want a society that is more effectively self-educating and better at maintaining its own health. This is the approach which was shown at Design of the Times (DOTT 07) in Newcastle. There are super innovations which have such aims at their heart – such as the Design Council’s ActivMobs, Google personalised services or the Microsoft HealthVault. This raises a clear tension between a transforming government strategy that is based on large-scale databases which do things to people, and the proven effectiveness of innovation which is bottom-up and user-centric.

Can government do both? Some innovation is about central support – eg epidemiology, creating overall data sets, or tracking behaviours so we know when to act; or national services like Land Registry, which has led some of the most impressive innovations, in which government has taken a system and published information, creating an astonishing rendering of transparency. But it’s stifling to take successful user-led or bottom-up innovations and replicate them less successfully and in a manner which crushes the social enterprise (cf Patient Opinion and NHS Choices).

We have to challenge public service providers when they don’t align themselves with service users, and give credit where due for those that are listening to customers/ citizens and align transformation with frontline staff who can actually make things happen. In a delivery-focused world people need to step back from the day-job, build networks and have conversations which can lead to innovation and change. We need more positive deviants – people who know the system well enough to move it forwards. The problem with seeking innovation in the public sector is that there is no blueprint. But that’s what’s exciting.