It isn’t that easy (is it?)

Coming back from maternity leave, it’s almost like starting a new job or perhaps like starting a new year at school.  I’m continuing some things, but also picking up new threads.

One new-ish area of focus for me is innovation.  I was fortunate enough to be a commenter on the Audit Commission’s report on innovation (Seeing the Light) before I left and Adrian Barker and the report’s author Alistair Evans did some fantastic work on an IDeA and Audit Commission sponsored competition for local government innovation.

I’m even more fortunate that I’m going to be looking at this in a bit more detail over the coming year - and how the creative spark becomes the good idea and then good practice and then widely accepted practice in the public sector.   Saying that almost makes it sound like it’s a smooth path.

But, of course, it isn’t that easy.

But there must be some ways of cultivating ideas to make it easier to deliver new and better things or good things in new and better ways.   The Social Innovation Camp, which kicked off earlier this month, is one example of a way of getting bright heads together to bring invention to fruition. 

 David Wilcox sums it up on his blog:

First the simple story: six projects were chosen from 80 ideas, and project promoters came together with web developers, social change activists and others to work on them for two days. At the end one project and a runner up were chosen. Aleksi Aaltonen has done a great job of pulling together the many blog post here, with more here from one of the organisers Dan McQuillan and from Roland Harwood of NESTA Connect, who were one of the funders.

And Christian Kreutz does a great summary of advantages of the approach and the final projects, which ranged from personal development for young people, help for families of prisioners, to a project called Enabled by Design: A resource for anyone looking to make adjustments to their lives, be it as a result of disability, injury or impairment.

To me, this shows that creating the space for creativity can bring some amazing results over a short period of time.

In some respects, the IDeA sponsored Communities of Practice are meant to be online spaces for local government practitioners to have that kind of interchange that supports innovation (among other things). 

But, of course, it isn’t that easy.

David Wilcox sums up another event (one I also attended) which was all about facilitating the CoPs to be spaces for collaboration and innovation in a post called: Requested: Permission to Innovate.

Steve Dale designed the CoP platform that enables local government officers to share knowledge across a wide range of topics - and it has an excellent set of functions, and support. That in itself does not, of course, mean people can easily steps outside the confines of their institutions.

Steve writes about this through capturing memorable quotes from the day:

“I’m not sure that we have permission to innovate in our organisation”

I’d like to think that CoPs do empower people to make change, but the heavy hand of command and control is still evident in many organisations, and could in some cases snuff out that spark of innovation that is in all of us.

I think that will always be an issue in terms of public sector innovation. In my view, we can’t always get away from the careful and cautious approach when we’re talking about public money and outcomes which are really all about people’s lives. But I also know that we can be too risk averse - and the key is to strike the right balance.

But, of course, it isn’t that easy. (Or is it?)