Thanks for your post, I think those are excellent and extremely important values that will serve your organisation well. In particular I like your impact focus which, at the end of the day, is our reason to exist.

Christian

We are currently drafting our purpose and values for The Australian Centre for Social Innovation that i’m happy to share and welcome feedback on.

Our core purpose is to identify and support the innovative ideas, methods and people that will contribute to and accelerate positive social change.

Our core values are:

• People-centred – we believe that ideas alone do not change the world; people with ideas do. People lay at the heart of our thinking and approach to innovation. We do ‘with’, not ‘to’ people.
• Impact focussed – we pursue innovation for the positive impact it can have on people’s lives and will focus on achieving the greatest impact where it’s needed most.
• Brave – we welcome risk-taking, experimentation, and learning from our experience and encourage others to do so too. We are biased towards action, insatiably curious, and willing to challenge the status quo.
• Open-source – we are transparent in our dealings, share our thinking and learning, welcome dialogue, encourage collaboration and use the collective intelligence of society.
• We are ethical in everything we do.

Brenton

1. Better outcomes, such as increased employment, health or growth as results of a public service, programme or regulation.

2. Better service experience for citizens or business, such as degree of satisfaction when using a specific public service.

3. Culture change amongst the civil servants we work with, to place citizens at the center of policy development, and to work more collaboratively across the public sector.

4. Creation of new knowledge, by conducting PhD research and sharing our methods and insights.

5. Recognition (‘branding’) of MindLabs and our three ministries’ efforts to strengthen innovation.

At MindLab we measure these five types of value through a coherent performance management model. It includes systematic quantitative and qualitative questionnaires and follow-up with all our project partners, annual reporting to our Board, and on-going sharing and narrative techniques to facilitate our own learning.

Because at the end of the day, it is value for citizens and society we are here to create.

As the EU Commission President José Manuel Barroso has put it, the current crises (financial, economic, social) are also a crisis of values of our societies.

I think, however, there are different uses or levels of value definition: Values for the team itself (like the one of mindlab – for our team we defined trust, results, hapiness and work/life balance as the core values) and the broader purpose values (societal, environmental, …)
Perhaps innovation labs need both.
Peter