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Posts Tagged ‘Innovation’

Rasmus Kolding

Easy Innovation?

By June 21st 2011

Creating an innovative group of people is easy but expensive – that was the main point of a talk I heard the other day. Since innovation is usually thought to be difficult – why, after all, would we hire consultants to do it all the time – I think that the statement deserves further thought. The speaker was PhD-candidate Vaughn Tan of Harvard Business School, who does sociological research on highly innovative work groups; currently at high-end restaurants like the Danish Noma. Since in today’s haute cuisine there is a constant pressure to innovate, how do they create a group that will spawn new ideas continuously?

The reason that innovation then is expensive begins with the hiring process. According to Vaughn, innovative groups do not form if people are hired through a process where the seemingly best candidate for the job impresses in tests and interviews and thus selected accordingly. Rather Vaughn suggested that people enter the group through a process he calls “negotiated joining”, meaning simply that the candidate is given responsibility and works with the group for a lengthy period of time (like 2-3 months) before actually getting hired. This helps defining roles, clarifying mutual expectations and loosens up the work flows because it requires a flexible mentality and approach to the work. This is an expensive process, but pays off well according to Vaughn. Indeed, some of the worlds top restaurants work in this way.

Since this is expensive but easy, where comes the hard part? During the talk, I became increasingly aware of Vaughn’s emphasis that really innovative organisations have a tactical rather than strategic approach to their work processes. Tactical manoeuvring means that you as an organization constantly respond to how the world changes – and that means that decision making in the organization must be rapid and not constrained by bureaucratic structures. However, besides an organisational culture that allows this to happen, Vaughn also emphasised that all levels of management must endorse this for innovation to lead to success. This is what the top restaurants of the world have understood and it is reflected in their hiring processes.

I think Vaughn’s observations resonate well with our own experiences with public innovation. Setting up the team, identifying problems and developing insights is not the hard part. The difficulties enter when you need your insights to bloom within organisations, when large organisational change is necessary in order to achieve results, and when innovation carries risks to organisation and managers. This is not to say that it is impossible – indeed a well defined strategy can set a direction that may handle this. Incidentally, here at MindLab we have revised our own strategy to improve and foreground our work with organisational change. These are, however, baby steps in a complex process that requires much thought and skill along the way. We all know the societal challenges ahead, but which public organisation will be the first Noma of government?

Christian Bason

Why is innovation a terrible word?

By July 12th 2010

I’ve had my government-issue HTC smartphone for a while, but it wasn’t until recently that I noticed that the phone maker has written ‘htc innovation’ with miniscule letters on the side of the unit. As if the company wanted to make really sure that I realise I am holding an innovative piece of technology. Probably the wording was slashed on last-minute by the marketing people. ‘It can’t hurt’, they might have been thinking. Who doesn’t want innovation?

Innovation is everywhere, and everyone is claiming it. From my phone maker to producers of washing detergent to space agencies and national governments, innovation is something many people agree is somehow important, but few can really express how. ‘Innovation’ becomes a panacea for any problem because, in essence, it expresses that whatever the challenge is, it is being dealt with successfully. But like a wet bar of soap, ‘innovation’ somehow eludes a firm grip. Paradoxically, we want it, but can’t really express it. That is why, when we at MindLab drafted our communication strategy three years ago, it stated that “‘Innovation’ is a terrible word. But there’s nothing wrong with its content”.

How does innovation become a terrible word? In organisations that are not used to working in new ways, which do not enthusiastically embrace new ideas, and which do not necessarily thrive on on-going change, innovation can become a diffuse, abstract and perhaps even dangerous term. Innovation may be perceived as  anything from wild creativity, ‘letting your hair down’, to a management fad, or to loosing control to risky experimentation. No wonder that some people, and in my experience in particular people in government, dislike the word.

However, if ‘innovation’ wasn’t part of our vocabulary, we’d have to invent it. Innovation is the only term we have that captures the notion of creating something new that works. It embodies the dialectic of inspiration (generating the new ideas we need to create the future we want) and execution (the practice of getting things done to create value).

As opposed to ‘creativity’ or ‘invention’, innovation is therefore, and perhaps surprising to some, highly practical. The best of  the (vast) literature on innovation not only offers extremely useful perspectives on strategy, leadership and organisation. It offers a set of professional approaches, tools and methods which can help make the process of creating the new solutions we need, whether it be a new product or a public service, conscious, strategic and systematic.

Because the concept and practice of innovation offers us something valuable, or even essential, we need to take very seriously those who dismiss it. Rather than just slapping the word on everything we, as scholars and practitioners, say or do, we must take care to give it the meaning and content needed for the sceptics to become curious and, eventually, embrace it.

But to place the practice of innovation more squarely at the heart of government, we need to continue to show what it is, and how it works in practice. That is why we at MindLab spend so much time documenting and sharing our cases with others within the ministries we are part of, and beyond — online and in person. To be convincing, innovation has to be concrete.

As for my phone? Well, it works OK. But honestly? There are more innovative models out there.

Rasmus Kolding

Speech by Bill Moggridge

By June 25th 2009

Bill Moggridge of IDEO gave a speech at MindLab last week, and this is the full video. Please share and enjoy!

Jesper Christiansen

Should we aim to create urbanity in public governance?

By June 25th 2009

How to think about change in the public sector: thoughts from the CBS-conference ’Contemporary Issues in Public Management’

The urban city is often presented as a place of significant segmentality which makes self-presentation a complex matter with varied ways of making one known to others. It is not only a place with segregation of roles in different groups and networks. It also segregates moral judgements. In the city people can, at least situationally, slip out of their existing social settings and participate in different groups and partnerships with different expectations and values (see Hannerz 1980). In this respect, urbanity provides an interesting frame of thought when trying to grasp the concept of change in the public sector.

The public welfare sector is often seen as a problematic and unlikely place for significant change and innovation. The way forward is by many claimed to be based on the creation of new partnerships which are able to combine and take advantage of different competences in close interaction and cooperation. This is thought of both in terms of public-private innovation partnerships and public-public partnerships between different public actors.

In both cases, the new organizational setting aims to develop new possible solutions which the different actors otherwise wouldn’t be able to develop. And in both cases, the goal is to enhance what Professor Garth M. Britton at the CBS-conference ’Contemporary Issues in Public Management’ called ‘change capability’. He understood this as an individual’s or organizational group’s “capability to change capabilities”.

Central to his argument was that he saw public value as the basic strategic driver for the partnerships aiming to change the public sector. He argued for an understanding of the relevant units and linkages between them in terms of values, operational and administrative capability, and the authorizing environment. As he puts it: “The interrelationships between formal and informal actors in chains of public value creation (complex and fluid) are a fundamental source of adaptability and change capabilities”.

One of the issues of these interrelationships is the question of agenda and experience of the actors involved. Going into a partnership which has a new, defined purpose gives possibilities in terms of generating new roles and identifications in the particular partnership. However, this process is difficult if existing professional agendas are strictly maintained in the partnership and the individual thus feel a strong obligation to keep certain ideas about for instance work practice. In other words, the interrelationships of one individual can collide with each other when he or she has to take different agendas into account.

This issue was among other things the concern of Adina Dudau who in her presentation at the CBS-conference focused on the interactive identities in welfare partnerships. Her argument evolved around negotiation when public or public-private actors cooperate about the change of welfare issues as it depends on one or more of the interdependent levels of motivation. The catalysts and obstacles of the partnership are to be found in the ‘complex whole’ consisting of individuals, professions and organisations. The most productive and innovative partnership, she argued, occurred when the partnership worked as a new established organization and a ‘cross professional identity’ was created. In comparison, longer standing organizations tended to be more resistant to change.

So that creates a dilemma. On one side you want to draw upon the existing experience of the different actors, but on the other you want to have them forget where they came from in order to abolish existing ties and make worth of their experience in the new organizational setting.

This leads us back to the concept of urbanity. For the urban individual it is legitimate and accepted when he or she separates his or her engagement in different networks and groups without making one known to the other. Whether you are a representative of a company or a public unit you are in the same way participating in different types of network with different levels of importance to your main work place. The difference is that here you are often obliged to keep your main role which make your participation on other networks a complex matter.

To think urban living into innovation partnerships is interesting because it leads to following questions: what if the individual participating in a welfare innovation partnership wasn’t confronted with his or her particular role in that partnership? What if the only parameter of moral judgement was the one inside the partnership? What if innovation in the public sector becomes a matter of temporary roles in new established organizations and cross-professional identities instead a matter of doubt in terms of confronting the new establishment with one’s existing organizational setting?