| Notes |
Ruth Puttick, Peter Baeck & Philip Colligan
The teams and funds
making innovation
happen in governments
around the world
Bloomberg Philanthropies’ mission
is to ensure better, longer lives for
the greatest number of people.
The organization focuses on five
key areas for creating lasting change:
Public Health, Environment, Education,
Government Innovation, and the
Arts. Bloomberg Philanthropies
encompasses all of Michael R.
Bloomberg’s charitable activities,
including his foundation and his
personal giving. In 2013, Bloomberg
Philanthropies distributed $452
million. For more information,
please visit bloomberg.org.
Design
SEA
Nesta is the UK’s
innovation foundation
An independent charity, we help
people and organisations bring
great ideas to life. We do this by
providing investments and grants
and mobilising research, networks
and skills.
www.nesta.org
©Nesta 2014
2 Foreword
4 Introduction
8 The i-teams
98 What we have learnt
about the i-teams
110 How to create an i-team
Foreword
James Anderson
Lead, Government Innovation Programs
Bloomberg Philanthropies
From city halls to public agency front lines, governments are thinking
more and more about how to create innovative solutions to their most
pressing problems. It makes sense given the challenges governments
face – dwindling budgets, increased citizen expectations, morphing
societal needs.
But there’s something beyond that happening, too. Government
officials at every level are increasingly thinking of innovation
as a process. And, increasingly, as an essential capability they
wouldn’t want to govern without.
It’s a notion Mike Bloomberg has always taken to heart. As mayor,
he used special teams to develop and then deliver new approaches
on issues ranging from climate change to poverty to education. Two
of these teams – the Center for Economic Opportunity and the iZone –
are profiled in this report. As a philanthropist, he’s built on this legacy
by spreading effective models that local leaders can use to generate
and implement bold ideas. Bloomberg Philanthropies’ most significant
investment in this area supports cities’ use of the Innovation Delivery
Model, which combines rigorous data analysis, best-in-class idea
generation techniques, and strong performance management. No city
has showcased the Model’s potential more clearly than New Orleans,
also featured herein.
When we hear from city officials about innovation, they often come
with questions. What kinds of resources are needed? Are there certain
approaches best suited to our local needs? Is there a reliable method
– one that produces better ideas more often? What are the costs and
benefits of these approaches?
We loved partnering with Nesta to begin answering these questions.
The fact is that innovation practice in city and national government
is spreading and evolving. Still, best practices are emerging and
successful teams tend to share particular attributes. We need to
be more diligent in capturing these lessons and sharing them;
there’s no reason for every city to start its efforts from scratch.
Perhaps the most important question for local leaders to ask is how
to make innovation the norm rather than the exception. How can
they establish a routine practice that enables them to consistently
and effectively prepare for the biggest challenges of tomorrow?
As this research reveals, it requires dedicated capacity, specific
skills and methods, and consistent political support. Here you will
find some of the ways these elements have been combined successfully
by government leaders.
We hope you enjoy the report and benefit from its findings. Even more,
we encourage you to report back as your own i-team takes root. We still
have much to learn.
“There’s no reason
for every city
to start its efforts
from scratch.”
James Anderson
2
Geoff Mulgan
Chief Executive, Nesta
You might think that governments at every level have little choice but
to innovate. They face intense fiscal pressures and demands from citizens
who want governments not only to tackle complex problems, but also
to be as effective at using new technologies as the best businesses.
Yet in much of the world public sector innovation continues to be
organised haphazardly, with disparate short-term initiatives, and
the odd consultancy report or conference rather than focused effort.
The best mayors and ministers recognise this, and know that, however
brilliant they are, they need better ways of generating new ideas:
better ways of tapping the brainpower not just of their staff but of the
communities and businesses they exist to serve and support; and better
ways of helping new ideas flower.
That’s where i-teams come in. There are brilliantly innovative public
servants all over the world. But the natural stance of bureaucracies
is to stifle ideas. Bureaucracies exist to bring predictability and
order. Indeed that’s one of their strengths. Cities and nations
where everything was in flux would be a nightmare to live in.
But predictability isn’t enough. Without energetic and systematic
innovation, stability turns into stagnation.
That’s why all governments need institutions to catalyse innovation.
As this report shows a new generation of innovators is taking shape
around the world. They’re all different from each other, but there are
some common themes from the emphasis on citizen insight and data,
to rapid learning by doing.
Not all of this is new. There have been excellent innovation teams in
governments in the past – from examples like Minnesota in the USA,
to Amsterdam in Europe, and New York’s Center for Court Innovation.
The UK’s Social Exclusion Unit in the late 1990s was very like today’s
i-teams, involving many outsiders, using rapid prototyping, a strong
emphasis on data, and holistic solutions, and achieving impressive
results, like dramatic cuts in street homelessness.
Not all i-teams have succeeded. The Helsinki Design Lab couldn’t find
the patronage or resources it needed to survive. Australia’s DesignGov
didn’t survive a pilot phase. Yet despite these false starts, there are now
more live examples than ever before, doing important work at scale, and
i-teams are becoming smarter about the tactics and alliances they need
to thrive.
The caricature thinking which says that public servants are by their
nature hostile to innovation is out of date. But public organisations need
help, skills and better processes if they are to resist the tendency to inertia.
Hopefully this report will not only provide inspiration; it will also provide
guidance on the building blocks that a new generation of mayors and
ministers can use to solve problems faster and more effectively.
“All governments
need institutions
to catalyse
innovation.”
Geoff Mulgan
Foreword 3
Introduction
4
Governments have pioneered some of
the greatest innovations in modern history.
Driven by entrepreneurial and visionary
leadership, city and national governments
are capable of amazing things.
But while governments can be pioneering and innovative, they can also
struggle to find the space and time to invest in the future when they are
responsible for delivering the services that people rely on today. Too often,
hard pressed executives focus on the performance of the current system,
mainstream budgets sustain incumbent approaches, and bureaucracies
reject experimentation and change.
Smart political leadership recognises this tendency and creates the
structures, capabilities and space needed to allow innovation to happen.
These are the i-teams: the innovation teams, units and funds that are
helping transform governments around the world.
Our objective has been to learn from the new practices being developed
and implemented by city and national governments around the world
– to understand their different approaches, their successes and their
limitations. We wanted to create a field guide for political leaders and
executives who have the vision to innovate and need to create the capacity
to make it happen. Most of all, we wanted to learn from the practitioners
who are shaping a rapidly evolving field.
This report tells the stories of 20 teams, units and funds established
by governments and charged with making innovation happen. They
work across the spectrum of innovation – from focusing on incremental
improvements to aiming for radical transformations.
These teams take different approaches, but all are part of a movement
that is building momentum fast, and that is bringing knowledge and
practices developed in other fields into the heart of public service. By
drawing on the disciplines of design and user engagement, open innovation
and cross- sector collaboration, and mobilising data and insights in new
ways, the i-teams are creating a new kind of experimental government.
To find the 20 i-teams featured in this report we undertook an extensive
horizon scan and talked to a wide range of experts. The main criteria
for selection were that the team was not just an idea – it had already
been established and was demonstrating impact. The 20 hail from
developed and emergent economies, countries of varying sizes, and
all levels of government, from the city, regional to national level.
We have only featured innovation units, teams and funds that are inside,
set-up by, or funded by government. We recognise that this excludes
many non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and institutions that are
actively supporting public and social innovation, but we wanted to focus
our research on what governments are doing, enabling us to make direct
recommendations to public sector leaders.
We recognise that innovation teams often have limited lifespans, either
because of changes in political leadership resulting in a loss of patronage
or because their ideas and expertise become mainstreamed. We have
deliberately featured those that are currently active.
Introduction 5
At the moment, the greatest concentration of i-teams is in Europe and
North America, but the number in Asia is rising fast. There are fewer
in Africa, where the leading innovation organisations tend to be NGOs,
and beyond the scope of this study.
We are conscious that there are many examples of i-teams that haven’t
made it into this report. Their exclusion is not intended as a comment
on the quality of their work or the impact they are achieving, but instead
reflects the space available in this study. We hope that this report can be
the beginning of a conversation about i-teams in government, and can
help to surface examples of other great i-teams around the world.
The research has involved more than 80 interviews with the i-teams,
their patrons and partners, as well as site visits, observations and surveys.
We have analysed information about their resources, strategies, operations,
team structures and skills, impact and approaches to measurement, and
their culture and capabilities. Alongside primary research, we undertook
six months of desk research, reviewing a wide range of secondary sources
and literature.
Based on our analysis, the activities of i-teams fall into four categories:
1 Creating solutions to solve specific challenges These i-teams focus
on solving high priority problems, and developing usable and scalable
solutions, often in collaboration with colleagues in government agencies.
These i-teams are developers and creators of innovations.
2 Engaging citizens, non-profits and businesses to find new ideas These
i-teams focus on opening up government to voices and ideas from outside
the system, often adapting the open innovation and challenge-led
approaches more commonly seen in the private sector and making use
of strong communications and engagement strategies. These i-teams are
enablers, creating the conditions for innovations from outside government
to thrive.
3 Transforming the processes, skills and culture of government These
i-teams focus on transforming the way that government approaches
innovation, often through consultancy services and training, as well as
through secondments and placements, to develop the skills and mind-sets
of mainstream government departments. These i-teams are educators,
providing the insights and knowledge needed to empower others inside
government to innovate.
4 Achieving wider policy and systems change These i-teams focus on
bringing about transformation, looking beyond specific interventions
to the wider policy context and complex systems that need to change,
for example in healthcare, energy or education. These i-teams are
architects, creating the designs and blueprints that others can follow.
Most of the i-teams featured in this report work across several of these
categories, deploying different methods and capabilities relevant to the
focus and mode of operation required.
Although they vary significantly in context, size, structure and strategy,
we have identified six key elements common across all of the 20 i-teams,
these are shown in the table on the opposite page.
Throughout the report, we highlight how each i-team prioritises different
combinations of these features to create results and the lessons others can
take from their approaches.
6
The lessons learnt
There are ten main lessons from our study summarised here, with further
details and pointers for anyone wanting to set up an i-team in Chapter 4.
1. The type of i-team you create should be driven by your ultimate goal –
whether that goal is to generate specific solutions, engage citizens, grow
innovation capacity in the public sector, or encourage system level change.
2. Forge strong links to executive power inside government, leveraging
internal and external partnerships, resources and insights, to achieve goals.
3. Build a team with a diverse mix of skills and a combination of insiders
and outsiders to government.
4. Develop a lean funding model for the team itself, and attract secure
funds from partners for implementation.
5. Continually demonstrate and communicate the i-team’s unique value.
6. Employ explicit methods, drawing on cutting edge innovation skills
and tools, alongside strong project management to get work done.
7. Have a bias towards action and aim for rapid experimentation,
combining early wins with longer term impacts.
8. Be clear on handovers early on, tasking implementation and delivery
to government.
9. Relentlessly measure impacts, quantify successes, and be sure to stop
what isn’t working.
10. Celebrate success and share credit.
Partnerships
The key relationships with
government, and external
agencies, groups, and
citizens
Resources
How the team is financed,
including leveraging funds
from external sources, as
well as how resources are
allocated and spent
Impact measurement
The use of data to inform
strategy development,
as well as evaluation
frameworks to measure
impact
Leadership
How the team is led and
managed, including by the
team’s director, and political
sponsorship and buy-in
Methods
The tools, techniques, and
approaches that the team
uses, as well as the outputs
produced
Team
The size, skill set, dynamic
and culture of the staff, as
well as specific recruitment
and staff development
strategies
Introduction 7
The
i-teams
14
Barcelona
Urban Lab
17
Behavioural
Insights Team
22
Centre for Public
Service Innovation
26
Centro de Innovación
Social
29
Fonds d’expérimentation
pour la jeunesse
32
Investing in Innovation
Fund (i3)
37
La 27e Région
41
Mayor’s Office of
New Urban Mechanics
46
MindLab
51
Nesta Innovation Lab
56
New Orleans
Innovation Delivery
Team
61
New York City
Innovation Zone (iZone)
66
NYC Center for
Economic Opportunity
71
Open Mexico
75
Performance
Management
& Delivery Unit
(PEMANDU)
80
PS21 Office
84
Seoul Innovation
Bureau
87
Sitra
91
The Australian Centre
for Social Innovation
(TACSI)
95
VINNOVA
Who are the i-teams?
The Americas
Centro de Innovación Social
Investing in Innovation Fund (i3)
Mayor’s Office of New Urban
Mechanics
New Orleans Innovation
Delivery Team
New York City Innovation
Zone (iZone)
NYC Center for Economic
Opportunity
Open Mexico
Europe & Africa
Barcelona Urban Lab
Behavioural Insights Team
Centre for Public Service
Innovation
Fonds d’expérimentation
pour la jeunesse
La 27e Région
MindLab
Nesta Innovation Lab
Sitra
VINNOVA
Asia & Australasia
Performance Management
& Delivery Unit (PEMANDU)
PS21 Office
Seoul Innovation Bureau
The Australian Centre for Social
Innovation (TACSI)
Investing in
Innovation
Fund (i3)
Washington D.C.
Centro
de Innovación
Social
Bogotá
Barcelona
Urban Lab
Barcelona
MindLab
Copenhagen
La 27e Région
Paris
Open Mexico
Mexico City
Mayor’s Office
of New Urban
Mechanics
Boston
NYC Center
for Economic
Opportunity
New York City
Seoul
Innovation
Bureau
Seoul
New York City
Innovation Zone
(iZone)
New York City
Centre for
Public Service
Innovation
Pretoria
VINNOVA
Stockholm
Sitra
Helsinki
Behavioural
Insights Team
London
Fonds
d’expérimentation pour
la jeunesse
Paris
Nesta
Innovation
Lab
London
New Orleans
Innovation
Delivery Team
New Orleans
The Americas Asia & Australasia
Europe & Africa
The Australian
Centre for Social
Innovation
(TACSI)
Adelaide
PS21 Office
Singapore
Performance
Management
& Delivery Unit
(PEMANDU)
Kuala Lumpur
10 11
MindLab
2002
Barcelona Urban Lab
Fonds d’expérimentation pour la jeunesse
La 27e Région
2008
Behavioural Insights Team
Investing in Innovation Fund (i3)
Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics
New York City Innovation Zone (iZone)
2010
Centre for Public Service Innovation
VINNOVA
2001
PS21
1995
Sitra
1967
NYC Center for Economic Opportunity
2006
Performance Management & Delivery Unit (PEMANDU)
Nesta Innovation Lab
The Australian Centre for Social Innovation (TACSI)
2009
Centro de Innovación Social
New Orleans Innovation Delivery Team
2011
Seoul Innovation Bureau
2012
Open Mexico
2013
City
Barcelona Urban Lab
Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics
New Orleans Innovation Delivery Team
New York City Innovation Zone (iZone)
NYC Center for Economic Opportunity
Seoul Innovation Bureau
Regional
La 27e Région
The Australian Centre for Social Innovation
(TACSI)
National
Behavioural Insights Team
Centre for Public Service Innovation
Centro de Innovación Social
Fonds d’expérimentation pour la jeunesse
Investing in Innovation Fund (i3)
MindLab
Nesta Innovation Lab
Open Mexico
Performance Management & Delivery Unit
(PEMANDU)
PS21
Sitra
VINNOVA
Location in Government Date Launched
1967—2013
12 13
“An opportunity for
entrepreneurs and
innovators to develop
real pilots in real places
with real citizens.”
Josep Pique, CEO, Office of Economic
Growth, Barcelona City Council1
Where they are based
Barcelona, Spain
(population of Barcelona: 1.6 million2
)
Location in government
City government
Mission statement
“Urban Lab is a tool to facilitate the use
of public spaces in the city of Barcelona to
carry out tests and pilot programs on products
and services with an urban impact. The idea
is to use the city as an urban laboratory.”
What they do
Work with businesses to design
and launch prototypes
What defines them
Urban experimentation
Size of team
3
Annual spend
£185,000 (2013)3
Launched
2008
Example of impact
Supported 16 pilots to date, with many
turning into businesses in Barcelona and
other cities around the world.
Methods
Interesting Features
Resources
Barcelona
Urban
Lab
Barcelona
Image courtesy of
Barcelona Activa
(Barcelona City Council)
14
Background
In 2008, the city of Barcelona created the Barcelona
Urban Lab with the goal of turning the city into
an urban laboratory. The Urban Lab is part of 22@
Barcelona,4
a project to convert 200 hectares of
industrial land in the city centre into a district that
fosters innovation through new collaborations among
the public, private and not-for-profit sectors.
How can entrepreneurs with ideas to improve urban life
test them in a city environment? Barcelona Urban Lab was
created in response to this challenge. It opened up the city
as a site for experimentation, enabling entrepreneurs to
pilot products and services.
What it does
At its simplest, the Barcelona Urban Lab enables
businesses to run pilots and experiments in real urban
settings. Pilots must be aligned with the objectives
and priorities of Barcelona City Council, demonstrate
benefits to the public and have an ability to solve
unanswered needs. The Urban Lab focuses on new
products and services, not those already in the market,
and requires that all costs of testing be covered by the
company.
The Urban Lab aims to achieve four main objectives:
• Foster business innovation in 22@ Barcelona
• Enable companies to test innovative products
and services so that if they prove their value they
can subsequently be commercialised
• Grow the pipeline of innovative products and
services that can be procured by the city
• Create new products and services that improve
urban life for the citizens of Barcelona.
All of the Urban Lab’s projects are on streets and in
open spaces, and most involve the use of sensors.
For example, Urbiotica6
is experimenting with sensors
to measure waste levels in public bins to make waste
collection more efficient. In partnership with the city
and the provider of waste management, Urbiotica
has installed sensors on bins along Barcelona’s
Avenue Diagonal.
The Urban Lab sees itself as a gateway for companies
to approach the City Council about running pilots or
experiments that can improve the city. Companies with
ideas for a pilot submit a proposal to the Urban Lab
Board, which is comprised of staff from 22@ Barcelona
and representatives from City Hall.
How the Urban Lab works in practice:
a company’s experience
Marc Fàbregas, CEO of Zolertia, one of the companies in the Urban
Lab, describes its involvement, “We wanted to install microphones
and sensors on the lamp posts to measure noise and sound. The
Urban Lab introduced us to the department at the City Council in
charge of the lamp posts and they helped us set it up”.5
Zolertia was also introduced to the department in charge of
noise control in the city, who helped with refining the prototype.
Following this, Zolertia worked directly with the Urban Lab
technicians responsible for the city’s lamp posts to install their
microphones along the city’s Rambla de Prim.
Barcelona Urban Lab 15
If the project is selected, the Urban Lab identifies
places where it can be tested, and pairs the team
with ‘city technicians’, the civil servants who manage
the locations where the pilot will be based. City
technicians participate in the Urban Lab because
they are interested in improving the area of the city
for which they are responsible.
One of the main areas of impact is helping Barcelonabased businesses to grow, but some projects have already
created international demand. For example, Bitcarrier,
a company specialising in sensor technologies, piloted
a traffic sensor network in the Urban Lab in 2012,
which help automate traffic decisions for the city and
allowed city traffic managers to make smarter decisions.
Bitcarrier has since sold this solution to cities around
the world, including Panama City and Nice.7
To date, none of the businesses have become vendors
to the city of Barcelona and most have left the city
to locate in other cities in Spain or internationally.
This reflects one of the main challenges of this
approach to open innovation.
Impact
To date, the Urban Lab has helped to launch 16 pilots.
Of those, Barcelona’s Office for Economic Growth
estimates that 90 per cent have gone on to develop
a business based on their pilot project.
The Urban Lab measures its impact through the
number of pilots it generates, and their duration,
public satisfaction with the pilots, the number of
pilots purchased in Barcelona or other cities, as well
as company performance, such as growth and turnover
of employees. The Urban Lab assesses impact using
administrative data, user feedback surveys and cost
effectiveness analysis.
The Bitcarrier Urban
Lab pilot uses sensors
to automate traffic
decisions
Image courtesy of
Barcelona Activa
(Barcelona City Council)
Interesting features
Methods
The Urban Lab uses open innovation methods with the
twin goals of achieving better outcomes for citizens and
supporting commercially successful local businesses.
By using the urban environment as a platform for
innovation, the Urban Lab has found a way to create
value without a significant investment of taxpayer
resources.
Whilst many Urban Lab projects are trying to find
solutions to a specific challenge, like parking congestion
or air pollution, others are much more exploratory.
The Urban Lab highlights the importance of these
projects in expanding understanding amongst civil
servants of the potential application of new technologies
and how these can help reveal unknown urban
challenges (and their potential solutions).
One example is a noise and sound measurement project
by Zolertia. In this project, there was no clear challenge
related to sound and noise, but from the pilot the city
identified a number of potential applications, such as
better understanding of noise pollution around bars
and restaurants and the impact of measures
to reduce it.
Resources
The Urban Lab has developed a low cost model,
mobilising the assets of the city to encourage private
sector investment in innovation. The only direct cost
associated with running the Urban Lab is an annual
spend of just under £185,000, which funds the staff.8
16
Behavioural
Insights
Team
“Creating services
which are easier
to use and more
effective.”
David Halpern,
Chief Executive, Behavioural
Insights Team9
Where they are based
London, UK
(population of UK: 65 million10)
Location in government
National government
Mission statement
“To help organisations apply behavioural insights
in order to support people to make better choices
for themselves and society”
What they do
Design trials to test policy ideas that could help
solve government problems
What defines them
Behavioural economics and randomised
controlled trials (RCTs)
Size of team
32
Annual spend
£1m (2014) from UK Cabinet Office, with additional
consultancy revenue expected from the private and
social sectors, as well as international governments11
Launched
2010
Example of impact
Achieved government savings of around
22 times the cost of the team in the first two
years of operation12
Partnerships Impact measurement
Interesting Features
‘Shard and Oxo tower,
London’ by Rob Taylor is
licensed under CC by 2.0
17
The Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) is the world’s first
government unit dedicated to applying insights from
behavioural science to policy challenges. Over four years,
the team has implemented low cost, high impact changes
in fields as diverse as taxation, healthcare, employment
and environmental sustainability. The Team also pioneered
the use of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) as part
of implementing policy change across government.
BIT operated a classic ‘skunkworks’ model, working
with government departments on specific commissions,
but deliberately maintaining a low profile as it
developed and honed its method.
As BIT started to show results from its early projects
on tax, debt collection and employment, demand for
the team’s work grew across UK Government and the
wider public sector, as well as internationally and from
non-profits and commercial businesses. In 2012, the
Team launched its first international collaboration
with the government of New South Wales in Australia,
where BIT now has a team led by one of the original
UK team members.15
The increased demand for BIT’s work and the
potential to achieve much greater impact ultimately
led to the decision to spin the Team out of government,
with BIT becoming an independent social-purpose
company in 2014. The UK Government is a
shareholder and important strategic client for BIT,
maintaining a continuity of service, but the Team now
has the flexibility and capacity to work internationally,
and with private companies and non-profits.
Background
The Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) was launched
in 2010, but its story really started in the early 2000s
when BIT’s founder David Halpern worked in the UK
Government Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit and coauthored a series of papers about behaviour and
culture change.
Nothing much happened as a result of those early
papers, but the ideas were picked up again in
2009, when the then Head of the Civil Service, Gus
O’Donnell, commissioned the Institute for Government
to produce a report on how insights from behavioural
science could improve outcomes in different policy
domains at a significantly lower cost than conventional
policy tools. The resulting MINDSPACE report
provided a blueprint for policymakers who wanted
to apply knowledge from the behavioural sciences.14
Professors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein
popularised the idea of behavioural economics in
their book Nudge. The newly elected Prime Minister,
David Cameron, asked David Halpern to create
a team at the heart of government to put the ideas
from MINDSPACE and Nudge into practice. BIT –
often referred to as the “nudge unit” – was created in
the UK Government Cabinet Office, reporting directly
to a board chaired by the Cabinet Secretary, with an
additional office inside Number 10.
18
The EAST framework, launched in 2014, is the result
of BIT systematically developing and documenting
its approaches.
BIT has developed a four-step methodology for its work:
• Define the outcome: consider the behaviour to
be influenced, timeframe, and plan for reliable
measurement
• Understand the context: design interventions after
the situations and perspective of the people involved
have been considered
• Build the intervention: the EAST framework is used
to help guide this phase, helping apply behavioural
science to solution development (see text box).
• Test, learn and adapt: measure and evaluate the
intervention, through approaches such as RCTs.
The EAST framework
The EAST framework is a simple four-step process to
guide policymakers and practitioners to design and
adapt services that are easier and more pleasant for
citizens to use, while being cheaper and more effective.16
Here is a summary:
1 Make it Easy
Make the option the default, and reduce the ‘hassle’
factor of taking up the service. Simplify the messages,
breaking down complex goals into easier actions.
2 Make it Attractive
Attract attention by using images, colours or
personalisation, or by designing rewards and incentives.
3 Make it Social
Show that the majority already perform the desired
behaviour to encourage others to do the same; and
tap into the power of networks so that behaviours are
encouraged through mutual support and peer-to-peer.
4 Make it Timely
Prompt people when they are likely to be most receptive,
and consider the immediate costs as we are more
influenced by those that take effect immediately than
those delivered later.
Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT) process
(Source: Behavioural Insights Team (2012) ‘Test, Learn,Adapt:
Developing Public Policy with Randomised Controlled Trials.’)
Intervention
Control
Population
is split into
2 groups by
random lot
Outcomes
for both
groups are
measured
What are behavioural insights?
Ideas from across behavioural economics, psychology and
social anthropology that help explain how individuals
make decisions, and how they respond to options. BIT
uses these ideas and thinking to redesign policy and
interventions, helping support citizens to make better
decisions for themselves and society.
Government Innovation Group
BIT was established within the UK Cabinet Office,
and formed part of the Government Innovation Group,
a division of the central department, that has been
responsible for leading innovation across the UK
Government since 2010.
With teams like the Government Digital Service,
Centre for Social Action and the Centre for Social
Impact Bonds, the Government Innovation Group has
spawned a wide range of units, teams and institutions
that are at the forefront of innovative government
practice.13
What it does
BIT applies insights from academic research in
behavioural economics and psychology to public
policy and services. It undertakes policy development,
advises on the best ways of running trials, supports
organisations in developing behavioural insights
capabilities, and delivers workshops and training
for civil servants in the UK and around the world.
The Team is organised around areas of impact –
including health and well-being, education and
environmental sustainability – with a Principal Adviser
responsible for overseeing the team’s work in each field.
It is supported by a research function that manages
the development and execution of trials.
Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) 19
The EAST framework helps the Team to design
interventions that draw upon and benefit from
behavioural science. In most projects, the Team focuses
on the “small details” of policy, as David Halpern, BIT’s
Chief Executive says, “these small details turn out to be
incredibly consequential and actually very rich territory
for doing both experimentation and policy change”.17
One of BIT’s most famous projects involved making
minor changes to tax letters sent out by the UK
Government. By simply changing letters to say that
most people in their local area had already paid their
taxes, they were able to boost repayment rates by
around 5 percentage points. This trial is part of a
range of interventions that have collectively helped
bring forward over £200 million in additional tax
revenue to HMRC, the UK’s tax authority.18 The only
cost associated with the intervention was the time
of the Team to structure the trial and collect the data.19
In another project the Team focused on how to reduce
the number of people failing to pay their court fines
on time. Two members of the Team spent time with
the Courts Service to better understand the process
and shadowed a bailiff seizing property from the
homes of people who had failed to pay their fines.
They noticed that the homes visited by the bailiffs
would often have a stack of unopened post, including
their final reminder payment letters, which meant that
many were not expecting the bailiffs to visit. As Owain
Service, Managing Director, BIT, said, “if you’re sat in
your office that’s not something that you would think
about, but it’s quite an obvious problem to solve”.20
It was one of the court-appointed Fine Support
Officers who helped to develop the solution. This
officer mentioned that he would send text messages
to inform clients he was working with that “the bailiffs
are coming round in a few days’ time – you might
want to pay up”. He felt it was effective, but lacked
the structures and support to properly test it.
Taking this idea, BIT worked with the Court Service
to run a controlled trial to measure the effect of
prompting people with text messages. The Team
applied insights from academic studies to generate
different variations of the text message, testing whether
more personalised messages or messages stating the
amount owed would have a better effect. They found
that messages prompting payments ten days before the
bailiffs were due doubled the proportion of payments,
avoiding the need for further intervention.21
In another project, BIT is working with Jobcentre
Plus (the UK’s national network of services for
unemployed people) to improve the success rate of
people finding employment. Again, the Team spent
time in a Jobcentre learning from the lived experience
of staff and customers.
They observed that jobseekers have to complete up
to nine forms, with many waiting two weeks for their
details to be processed before they could see an advisor
and discuss their options. The Team worked with a
job centre in Essex to create a new approach, with
each client discussing his or her plans for getting back
to work with an advisor on their first visit to the job
centre, as well as changing the format of the meeting
to look at future progress, rather than a retrospective
discussion about the past job search. This approach
helped jobseekers plan for the coming weeks and make
specific commitments about their job search activity.
During the first trial, 2,000 people were randomly
allocated to either the first floor of the Jobcentre,
where they would receive the new service, or to the
ground floor, where they received the standard service.
Those receiving the new approach were significantly
less likely to still be on benefits 13 weeks after first
visiting the Jobcentre.
After this pilot, the Team wanted to scale up the
new Jobcentre support offer. To help spread the new
approach, the Team involved the Jobcentre staff who
were involved in the original trial, starting with a trial
in a cluster of Jobcentres, and then added more a few
weeks later, and repeated this until eventually all
the Jobcentres in the trial had a small team of people
training colleagues on the new approach. This started
in Essex county, and eventually spread across the rest
of England.
“Trials are really, really
cheap when you’re already
measuring the outcome
and you’ve already got
the systems in place.”
Owain Service, BIT
20
JobCentre Plus Trial
‘JobCentre Plus’ by
HelenCobain is licensed
under CC BY 2.0
Key Outputs
More people paid their
tax on time
Key Outcomes
£200m brought
forward to the
Exchequer in 2013
Key Impacts
HMRC changing its
approach to tackling
outstanding debts22
Key Outputs
Increased the number
of citizens signing
the organ donor
registration
Key Outcomes
100,000 extra
registrations in one
year
Key Impacts
Year-on-year
improvements in organ
donation23
Key Outputs
Decreased the number
of people claiming
Jobseeker’s Allowance
(JSA)
Key Outcomes
Increase in
employment compared
to the control group
(in the pilot phase
jobseekers in the
treatment group were
significantly more
likely to be off benefits
13 weeks after signing
on)
Key Impacts
The Department for
Work and Pensions
has changed how it
sets up Jobcentre
interventions24
Reduce Fraud, Error
and Debt: tax trials
Applying
Behavioural Insights
to Organ Donation
Redesigning the
employment
services and support
provided by UK
Jobcentres
Impact
BIT aims to achieve impact in three ways:
• Improve outcomes for individuals and society in
fields including healthcare and wellbeing, education,
energy, and sustainability
• Reduce costs to taxpayers by improving the
effectiveness of public service transactions and
preventing unnecessary demands on public services
• Increase the effectiveness of government and public
services through the wider adoption of behavioural
insights and evidence-based approaches to policy
making.
To scope projects, the Team draws on ethnographic
techniques, and then utilises low-cost RCTs to test
the effectiveness of solutions. These trials often draw
on existing administrative data to reduce the cost of
data collection.
The table below shows the outputs and outcomes
measured, and the impacts achieved, in three of
BIT’s projects.
Interesting features
Partnerships
After four years as a unit inside the UK Government,
BIT span out of government in 2014 to become
an independent social purpose company. The new
company is jointly owned by management and staff,
the UK Government and Nesta, the UK’s innovation
foundation. The Team continues to work closely with
UK Government and public services, but now has
the ability to work internationally and with private
companies and non-profits.
Impact Measurement
BIT has pioneered the use of RCTs across government.
It has done so by honing a lower-cost approach, more
closely resembling A/B testing used by technology
businesses than clinical trials used in healthcare. This
lower-cost model involves making incremental changes
and drawing on existing data collection systems. As
Owain Service explained, “trials are really, really
cheap when you’re already measuring the outcome and
you’ve already got the systems in place”.25
Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) 21
To create an
innovation
culture across
the South
African
Government
Where they are based
Pretoria, South Africa
(population of South Africa: 52 million26)
Location in government
National government
Mission statement
“The function of the Centre for Public Service Innovation
is to entrench a culture and practice of innovation in
the public sector through a) research and development;
b) unearthing, demonstrating, sharing and rewarding
innovation; c) testing, piloting, incubating and supporting
replication and d) partnering with public, private,
academic, and civil society sectors”
What they do
Identify, develop and promote solutions
for government problems
What defines them
R&D, incubation and awards
Size of team
20
Annual spend
£1.3 million27
Launched
2001
Example of impact
The Multimedia Innovation Centre showcases
innovative ideas and methods, with 1,000 public
officials visiting in 2013.
Centre for
Public Service
Innovation
South African ministers
visiting the MMIC.
Image courtesy of Centre
for Public Service Innovation
Partnerships Leadership
Interesting Features
22
Background
The Centre for Public Service Innovation (CPSI) was
created in 2001 by the South African Government to
develop partnerships with foundations and the private
sector to drive innovation in government, and to provide
the minister of Public Service Administration with
independent, diverse, and forward-looking research
findings and advice on service delivery. When originally
established, CPSI was a not-for-profit agency funded
by foreign aid and operated with a small staff, and
all project delivery was outsourced. In 2008, a new
operating model was developed and CPSI transitioned
back into central government as an in-house team.
What it does
CPSI supports innovation across the entire South
African Government. It encourages departments to
approach with problems and challenges they are facing.
It then helps to solicit and develop possible solutions.
There are four elements to the CPSI model:
• Research and development to investigate and
recommend sustainable models and solutions
for innovative service delivery.
• Incubation, testing, piloting and demonstrating
innovative solutions for the public sector.
• Promoting innovation by identifying and promoting
innovative solutions being developed through award
programmes, and helping spread these across the
public sector.
• Programme management to provide corporate
support, including managing the shared services
arrangement with CPSI’s principal department,
the Department of Public Service and
Administration (DPSA).
The Centre for Public Service Innovation (CPSI) is part of the
South African Government and is tasked with creating a culture
and practice of innovation to help overcome government
challenges, ranging from improving hospital services through
to reducing crime. CPSI aim to improve service delivery through
research and development, incubating innovations, and forging
private sector partnerships.
Centre for Public Service Innovation 23
CPSI also facilitates collaboration between the
government, the private sector, non-governmental
organisations (NGOs) and academic institutions.
One example is the Honeydew Policing Cluster
Nerve Centre. This initiative began when the cluster
commander of six police stations was experiencing a
number of challenges, including high crime rates, and
realised that thoroughfare routes enabled criminals
to commit crimes and quickly evade detection. The
districts approached CPSI for help. CPSI brought
together experts from the police and commercial
technology sector to develop and test possible solutions.
The resulting Nerve Centre, equipped with a dashboard
to aggregate intelligence information with CCTV
surveillance, helps to draw links across datasets and
disseminates information more effectively. Microsoft
and MTN, a mobile phone company, are the private
sector partners providing the technological capabilities,
attracted by the opportunity to test and pilot in a real
life setting. CPSI is in the process of evaluating the
impact and, if successful, the plan is to roll out the
model to other areas in South Africa.28
Another element of CPSI’s work is sharing innovation
methods and ideas. This is managed by their MultiMedia Innovation Centre (MMIC), an innovative
learning facility for public servants.29 The Centre aims
to act as a neutral space, taking civil servants out of
their everyday working environments and exposing
them to innovation case studies, tools and methods. By
2013, three years into the MMIC’s operation, the Centre
had been visited by over 1,000 public servants from a
number of departments and institutions, including the
Department of Correctional Services, the South African
Revenue Services, the South Africa Police Services,
the North West Environmental Department, Gauteng
Department of Rural Development and Agriculture, and
Ekurhuleni, Johannesburg and Tshwane metros.30
Over time, the MMIC has expanded to become
an international hub for decision-makers and
implementers to interrogate challenges and an
incubator of new innovations. As part of this work,
the MMIC has hosted an array of international visitors:
from the India-Brazil-South Africa Partnership (IBSA),
the Australian Public Service Commission, Kenya,
the Democratic Republic of Congo, Singapore, the
World Bank, Microsoft USA and working groups of
the Conference of African Ministers for Public Service.31
The case studies presented in the MMIC aim to
highlight cutting edge innovation ideas and methods.
To collate these examples, CPSI runs an Innovation
Award, receiving around 150 entries each year from
across the national government, the nine provincial
governments, municipalities and other public entities.
CPSI aims to build a repository of innovation practices
from across the country, and to celebrate the success
of individuals, teams and departments. Submissions
are presented in CPSI’s ‘Ideas that Work’ Journal,32
with finalists receiving certificates, training and
support to further develop or replicate the project.
CPSI also runs an annual conference, bringing together
500 government practitioners to share best practices
and explore where innovations can be replicated and
scaled. CPSI is currently planning an evaluation to
assess if sharing these examples has an impact on
their replication.33
There are indications that the CPSI Awards help
finalists attract funding for their solutions. One example
is a 2008 finalist project, a diabetic retinal screening
project in Cape Town, which after winning received
over £1 million from Cape Town city government for
expansion into the surrounding rural areas.34
The award is starting to have an impact on internal
government culture. The 2013 winning project came
from a government agency in which the leadership
has actively encouraged staff to innovate and enter the
competition, recognising and rewarding this internally,
with other departments now inspired to follow suit and
regularly enter too.35
2013 Innovator of the
Year Award winners
Image courtesy of
Centre for Public Service
Innovation
24
Key Outputs
Number of entries
received and
rewarded
Key Outcomes
Received 100 entries,
which are evaluated,
identifying those for
sharing and possible
replication
Key Impacts
At least two finalist
projects were
replicated36
Key Outputs
Multi-year project to
develop integrated
policing for local
conditions and
dynamics
Key Outcomes
Improved real-time
policing ability,
resulting in reduced
crime
Key Impacts
Evaluation still in
progress
Annual Innovation
Awards
Policing Nerve
Centre to enable real
time policing
Impact
CPSI measures its impact on a project-by-project basis.
Prior to testing and piloting, CPSI collects baseline
data, both quantitative and qualitative, with an
appropriate methodology developed by the R&D unit.
Methods typically include administrative data, focus
groups, participant observations, qualitative
interviews, questionnaires, and cost-benefit analysis.
The table below shows how CPSI structures the
outputs and outcomes in two of their projects:
Interesting features
Partnerships
CPSI acts as a broker and convener of networks, with
a strong focus on corporate engagement. For each
project, CPSI works with government to identify the
root causes of an issue. They then set up a stakeholder
team drawn from the public, private, and academic
sectors to explore potential solutions and develop
appropriate funding models. The private sector’s role
can vary depending on the project, from sponsor to
direct collaborator. In most instances, the corporate
partner will approach CPSI with a solution, through
the Innovation Platform,37 in the hope that CPSI will
help the company to test and showcase its innovation.
CPSI manages these collaborations to ensure any
Intellectual Property (IP) issues are dealt with, often
using nondisclosure agreements to protect both parties.
Leadership
When CPSI was established by the South African
Government in 2001, it was as a non-profit organisation.
In 2008, CPSI was incorporated into government,
although the team has kept its physical offices outside
of government and retained its branding and identity.
CPSI found that the move into government has enabled
the team to better foster cooperation across the
South African Government, and to continue to
leverage outside partnerships.
Centre for Public Service Innovation 25
Centro de
Innovación Social
(Centre for Social Innovation)
“Focused on social
innovation to benefit
the most vulnerable
people in Colombia.”
Natalia Currea Dereser,
Centro de Innovación Social38
Where they are based
Bogotá, Colombia
(population of Colombia: 47.1 million39)
Location in government
National government
Mission statement
“The Centre for Social Innovation of the National
Agency to Overcome Extreme Poverty (ANSPE) works
with partners inside and outside of government to
generate innovative and scalable solutions for those
living in extreme poverty across Colombia.“
What they do
Work directly with communities to develop new
solutions to reduce poverty
What defines them
Engaging citizens and external partners
Size of team
16
Annual spend
£2.3m (2013) (£1.4m from government,
and £0.9m from other sources)40
Launched
2011
Key achievement
The Centre for Social Innovation has leveraged
60 per cent of its government funding in private,
international, and from other public institutions,
to develop its pilot projects.41
‘One Laptop Per Child’ by
Ryanne Lai is licensed under
CC by 2.0
Team Resources
Interesting Features
26
One of the projects is to develop computer games that
will empower children aged seven to 12 to make positive
changes for their families and communities. The games
focus on specific issues such as health, nutrition,
or issues in their family life, such as preventing child
abuse, and were downloaded more than 40,000 times
in 2013. One of the pilots is in Chia, a town just outside
of Bogotá, the country’s capital, where ANSPE’s data
highlighted that the community was experiencing
problems with malnutrition and complex family
dynamics. To help develop a response, the Centre
is running pilot programmes with 175 families to
identify and test the most effective interventions
in partnership with the organisation One Laptop
per Child.46 Another project, developed in Antioquia,
a department of Colombia, is installing innovative
water filters to ensure access to clean water, in
alliance with the EPM Foundation.
Once pilots have been developed and shown to be
effective, the Centre for Social Innovation plans for
the successful models to be replicated across Colombia47.
The Centre is already working with the relevant
government departments to plan for future transition
so that they are ready to implement and deliver these
solutions at scale.
The Centre for Social Innovation is focused on
disseminating and sharing ideas to build the social
innovation community in Colombia. As part of
this, the project Hilando48 is mapping innovations
and innovators across the country, helping connect
challenges with solutions and fostering the exchange
of best practice and knowledge.
The Centro de Innovación Social (Centre for Social Innovation)
is dedicated to improving the quality of life for people facing
extreme poverty across Colombia. Drawing on government
data and through leveraging resources from private, public and
international partners, the Centre works directly with communities
across the country to develop and scale innovative solutions.
Background
The Centre for Social Innovation was created in
2011 as part of the newly formed National Agency
to Overcome Poverty (ANSPE) with the remit to apply
social innovation to tackle extreme poverty.42 It is the
first innovation unit of its kind in Colombia,43 and
was described by another government agency as
“doing things that no one else will dare to do”.44
What it does
The Centre for Social Innovation’s work is driven by
data. It develops projects that respond to the priorities
identified by ANSPE’s poverty indicator database.
These cover a broad range of areas that impact on
poverty, from education to family dynamics.
Projects tend to cost between £48,000 to £158,00045
and are funded through public-private partnerships
and in collaboration with other public bodies. All
projects are developed with the communities in the
areas identified as having high levels of poverty, and
are always delivered by the Centre for Social Innovation
team in collaboration with partners. The team works
directly with these communities in the geographic areas
where challenges are identified; reflecting its belief that
successful solutions “empower the people that are going
to receive them”. The Centre uses structured methods
of citizen engagement, including design thinking, social
cartography – a method to map issues in a geographic
area – and positive deviance, where the team seeks
out individuals in a community who are able to
generate effective solutions.
The Centre is currently developing 33 pilot projects
in the areas of housing improvement, nutrition, health,
income and employment, family life, and banking
and savings.
Centro de Innovación Social (Centre for Social Innovation) 27
Impact
As all projects are still in the pilot stage, the Centre
for Social Innovation is currently planning its formal
evaluation strategy and has not yet generated impact
data. To develop this evaluation strategy and measure
its impact on reducing poverty, the Centre for Social
Innovation is creating qualitative and quantitative
baseline indicators. It plans to bring in external
experts in order to achieve the best and most rigorous
multidisciplinary measurement approach.
Alongside developing these evaluation frameworks to
track their projects, the Centre for Social Innovation
team is receiving training on the theory of change and
monitoring and evaluation processes from partners
in the Department for National Planning, and the
Multilateral Investment Fund of the Inter-American
Development Bank.
A programme to
improve public health
Image courtesy of Centro de
Innovación Social
Interesting features
Team
The Centre for Social Innovation provides government
with a dedicated team for innovation and applying
novel methods to problem solving. There are 16 staff
members, half of whom work on project development
and management, five of whom focus on diffusion,
knowledge management and research, and three staff
members support the rest of the team’s operations.
Around a third of the team has a background in
government, while all the others previously worked
in the private sector. This is a deliberate recruitment
strategy to inject a new dynamic into government.
As well as explicitly recruiting from the private sector,
the team also brings diverse skills, many of which are
unique to the Colombian Government, including an
anthropologist, a sociologist, and a designer who work
alongside lawyers, public managers, and business
managers. Nazly Frias from the National Planning
Department credits this “unique” team as enabling
them to “really think outside the box and to try to do
things differently”.49
Resources
The Centre for Social Innovation leveraged 60 per
cent of its government budget in external funds in
2013 and by 76 per cent in 2012.50 This was made
possible by the Centre being part of the Pioneers for
Social Innovation Alliance, a partnership of about 15
companies contributing to a dedicated social innovation
fund. There is an agreement in place that enables
government and the alliance of companies to jointly
select topics to work on, and once project areas are
agreed, the Centre for Social Innovation co-funds
their delivery. As well as enabling the Centre for
Social Innovation to leverage additional resources,
the Pioneer’s fund has helped the team navigate the
complexities of Colombia’s Government procurement
processes, which have been described as “very, very
complicated”,51 enabling projects to be more easily and
quickly developed.52
28
“The fund aims to
inspire evidencebased policies related
to youth.”
Mathieu Valdenaire,
Fonds d’expérimentation
pour la jeunesse53
Where they are based
Paris, France
(population of France: 66 million54)
Location in government
National government
Mission statement
“The Fonds d’experimentation pour la jeunesse is
designed to promote student success and improve
the social and professional integration of young
people under 25 years of age.”
What they do
Funding experimental youth programmes
and their evaluation
What defines them
Rigorous evaluation, particularly randomised
controlled trials (RCTs)
Size of team
12
Annual spend
£37.8 million (2013) (£30.8m from government,
£7m from other sources)55
Launched
2008
Example of impact
Supported more than 554 projects and
experiments, which have served an estimated
498,000 young people.56
Fonds
d’expérimentation
pour la jeunesse
(Experimental Fund for Youth)
Resources
Interesting Features
Impact measurement
‘Paris’ by Christian Scheja is
licensed under CC by 2.0
29
Fonds d’expérimentation pour la jeunesse, or the Experimental
Fund for Youth, was set up to help the French Government
understand which services improve young people’s educational
achievement and social and professional integration. Having
funded 554 experimental projects and 295 evaluations since
2008, the Fund is helping to demonstrate the value of applying
rigorous methodologies, such as randomised controlled
trials (RCTs), to assessing policy impact.
Background
In December 2008, a law initiated by the French
Government created the legal framework for
establishing the Experimental Fund for Youth.
In March 2009, the Ministry of Youth convened a
group of experts to analyse the situation of young
people in France and make joint propositions for
building new youth policies. One of the primary
findings was that interventions should focus on
‘transitions’ for youth, defined as a path between the
end of mandatory school (at 16 years old) and social
and professional stability.57 To understand which
initiatives and policies would be most effective, the
group called for Parliament to regularly review youth
policies and to develop an experimental method to
guide social policy development.
What it does
The Experimental Fund for Youth characterises itself
as a “public policy laboratory financing innovative
interventions for young people, implemented at a
small scale and evaluated rigorously, with the aim to
influence future public youth policy”. The fund supports
the mainstreaming of experimental, particularly
randomised, methodologies into the policymaking
process to help promote student achievement and
improve the social and professional integration of
young people.
Support from the Fund partly covers the cost of
developing new experiments within services related
to youth with the rest being covered by the organisation
in charge of delivering the service. Each experimental
project is evaluated by an independent evaluation team.
Examples of current evaluations include studying
the impacts of providing young people with a
driving license at reduced cost to improve their job
opportunities and exploring whether volunteering
increases young people’s chances of finding a job.58
The Fund holds open calls for proposals, with 16
held to date. Each call is focused on a specific youthrelated theme, such as reducing school drop-out rates.
Proposals can come from NGOs, public institutions,
schools, universities or local authorities. The Fund
convenes The Scientific Council, which includes
academic researchers, to give guidance on the calls
for proposals, particularly on issues related to
evaluation methodologies.
Proposals are reviewed by a committee of experts on
the specific focus of the call, before being put before the
Management Council, which includes representatives
from government, and external financial contributors,
which makes the final selection of projects. Once
projects are selected, the fund oversees the delivery
of the experiments and their evaluations, and
disseminates the results.
30
Impact
Between 2009 and 2013, the Experimental Fund
for Youth ran 16 calls for proposals, and received
more than 1,700 applications. These have led to 554
experimental projects, which are set to generate 295
evaluation reports. The Fund estimates that 498,000
young people have benefited from the projects they
have helped develop and evaluate so far.59
Within these trials there is often a mix of both
quantitative and qualitative research methods.
For smaller programmes that are not being tested
at a sufficiently large scale, evaluators may use only
qualitative methods, but the Fund makes clear that
this is not an assessment of impact, as this would require
a control group to form part of the evaluation design.60
Interesting features
Impact measurement
The central feature of the Experimental Fund for
Youth is its rigorous approach to impact measurement,
undertaking RCTs wherever possible to test the
effectiveness of different interventions. As well as
helping demonstrate which solutions are working, the
Fund has helped build capacity across the academic
and corporate evaluation community to undertake
randomised evaluations of this kind, as well as
helping to stimulate demand for evidence, particularly
generated through RCTs, across government.61
Resources
A mix of private and public money supports the Fund’s
innovation experiments and evaluations. The fund has
a budget of £189 million over 2009 to 2014 (equivalent
to £37.8m per year).62 Whilst the majority of funding
comes from government, the fund was designed to be
endowed with contributions from the state and private
organisations. A result of this is that the fund has
attracted private financial contributions of around
£35 million to date, from business and philanthropic
organisations.63
One trial explored the
impact of reducing
the costs of obtaining
a driving licenses on
young people’s job
opportunities.
‘Driver’s License - Teen
driver’ by State Farm is
licensed under CC BY 2.0
Fonds d’expérimentation pour la jeunesse (Experimental Fund for Youth) 31
“Creating a real innovation
pipeline, that starts off with
lots of ideas, figures out
whether they are actually
impactful and then provides
resources for them to go
to the next level.”64
Jim Shelton, Deputy Secretary,
U.S. Department of Education
Where they are based
Washington D.C., USA
(population of USA: 314 million65)
Location in government
National government
Mission statement
“To provide competitive grants to expand innovative
practices that are demonstrated to have an impact
on improving student achievement or student growth,
closing achievement gaps, decreasing dropout rates,
increasing high school graduation rates, or increasing
college enrolment and completion rates.”
What they do
Grant funding for education programmes
What defines them
Awarding grants against a rigorous standards
of evidence framework
Size of team
10
Annual spend
£82 million (2013) ($135 million, with an additional
anticipated private sector match of £9.7m ($16m)
to be secured by July 2014)66
Launched
2010
Example of impact
During 2013, i3 ran its fourth competition, selecting
25 programmes to receive more than £82 million
High school students
develop their math
and science skills as
part of an i3 backed
programme.
Image courtesy of U.S.
Department of Education
Investing in
Innovation
Fund (i3)
Impact measurement Partnerships
Interesting Features
32
The Investing in Innovation Fund (i3) is a competitive
grants programme to improve student achievement
and attainment through investing in proven interventions.
Funding is awarded based on the strength of grantees’
evidence on education outcomes, with evidence assessed
against a rigorous three tier framework.
What it does
The i3 Fund is situated in the Office of Innovation and
Improvement within the US Department of Education,
with grants distributed nationally. The main aim is
to expand the implementation of innovative practices
that are demonstrated to have an impact on student
achievement, achievement gaps, drop-out rates, high
school graduation rates, or college enrolment and
completion.69
i3 defines innovation as having two dimensions, and
these form the criteria for grantees to meet in order
to be eligible for a grant. First, the intervention has
to be significantly better than the status quo, and
second it has to be something that is scalable.
i3 funding is allocated as ‘competitive’ grants. Eligible
grantees are non-profit organisations working in
partnership with either one or more Local Education
Agencies (LEA) or a consortium of schools.
Competitions are held annually, and in order to be
eligible, applicants must:
• Improve achievement for high-need students
• Serve kindergarten-through-grade-12 students
• Have a record of achievement
• Demonstrate that a private sector partner
will match funds
• Meet the relevant evidence standard for the grant type
Background
From the beginning of the Obama Administration
in 2008, senior officials at the Office of Management
and Budget (OMB) were planning several initiatives
to advance the use of evidence based programme
models.67 The i3 Fund was launched in 2010 as part
of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The
Fund is structured with a deliberate focus on growing
and spreading innovations, as Jim Shelton, Deputy
Secretary at the Department for Education, and
the architect of i3, noted, “in the private market the
incentives drive people to borrow, steal, [and] pay for
people’s ideas and spread them as quickly as possible.
Those incentives are not as powerful in the social
sector. In fact they’re quite the opposite. There are many
incentives to distinguish yourself as unique, and not
repeat what someone else has already done”.68
Investing in Innovation Fund (i3) 33
the team] to learn how we build learning communities
amongst similar grantees so they can accelerate the
pace of their learning and disseminate the learning
of those grantees to the field more quickly.” 71 Due to
the Department of Education’s structure and decision
making power, the i3 team does not select grantees
themselves; instead, an external review panel makes
all selection decisions.
One initiative that received an i3 Validation grant
is the Virginia Initiative for Science Teaching and
Achievement (VISTA). VISTA is a student-centred
programme to improve science education, and has
served more than 250 elementary school teachers.
The grant provides coaching and research-based
teaching coursework for secondary school science
teachers, with the objective of building the
infrastructure to support intensive science teacher
professional development across the state of Virginia.
The i3 grant is also funding a randomised controlled
study to gauge the impacts of the VISTA programme
on outcomes for both teachers and students.72
There are three types of grants available, ‘Scale up’
grants, ‘Validation’ grants and ‘Development’ grants.
The amount and criteria for each grant is detailed in
the table above.
A team of 10 people manage the Fund; all based
within the Office of Innovation and Improvement.
Team members help to design, run and oversee each
competition and support each cohort of grantees. They
typically spend 50 to 60 per cent of their time focused
on designing and running new grants70, with the rest
of their time dedicated to learning from grantees,
helping them stay on track and overcome barriers,
and helping to mobilise additional resources.
Other programme teams in the Office of Innovation
and Improvement typically manage a few competitive
grant programmes, whereas the team working on i3
is solely dedicated to the fund. This enables managers
to work more closely with grantees and foster
connections between their programmes. The aim is
to “help the grantees learn from each other, [and for
Evidence required
Evidence of promise or strong theory
• There is the potential for efficacy for at least some
participants and settings
• Evidence of promise refers to available empirical
evidence to support the theoretical links between
the component and at least one relevant outcome
• Strong theory means a rationale for the proposal,
including a logic model
Scaling required
To the level of scale identified in the application
Evidence required
Moderate evidence of effectiveness, with two options:
Option 1
At least one study that meets What Works
Clearinghouse (WWC) standards, involving a
measure of strength of causal conclusions; a
statistically significant favourable impact on a
relevant outcome; and includes a large sample that
overlaps with populations or settings that would
be served in the proposed intervention, providing a
measure of generalisability
Option 2
At least one study that meets WWC standards,
involving a measure of strength of causal
conclusions; a statistically significant favourable
impact on a relevant outcome; includes a large
sample and a multi-site sample that overlaps with
populations or settings that would be served in
the proposed intervention, providing a measure of
generalisability
Scaling required
To the national or regional level
Evidence required
Strong evidence of effectiveness, with two options:
Option 1
At least one study that meets WWC standards,
involving a measure of strength of causal
conclusions; a statistically significant favourable
impact on a relevant outcome; and includes a large
and multi-site sample that overlaps with populations
and settings that would be served in the proposed
intervention, providing a measure of generalisability
Option 2
At least two studies that meets WWC standards,
involving a measure of strength of causal
conclusions; a statistically significant favourable
impact on a relevant outcome; and include large and
multi-site samples that overlap with populations
and settings that would be served in the proposed
intervention, providing a measure of generalisability
Scaling required
To the national level
Funding available per grant
Up to £1.8m ($3m)
Funding available per grant
Up to £7.3m ($12m)
Funding available per grant
Up to £12.2m ($20m)
Development Validation Scale-up
Types of i3 grants
34
“Apparatus of support” for grantees
As well as financial support, a wider package of
support is provided to grantees, including a monthly
phone call with their designated programme officers
for the first year.
If things go well, the frequency of their calls decrease,
but their designated member of the i3 team is on hand
to act as a ‘one stop shop’ for advice and guidance.
Grantees also have access to two sets of external
experts.
The first are third party evaluation experts, partnered
with grantees, helping support and troubleshoot
the evaluation. The second set of experts focuses on
technical support and facilitation. They help grantees
think through issues like recruiting, scaling, and
communicating with the media. The i3 team and
external experts are focussed on ensuring grantees
learn from each other, sharing lessons, stories, and
connecting grantees.
Another i3 grantee is the National Math and Science
Initiative (NMSI) which seeks to improve college
readiness through preparing teachers; waiving student
exam fees; upgrading classroom equipment; and holding
additional Saturday study sessions for students. During
the 2012-13 school year, the 13 schools supported by
NMSI’s grant partner, the Colorado Legacy Foundation
saw a 70 per cent increase in Advanced Placement
scores, increasing college readiness.73
During 2013, i3 ran its fourth funding competition,
selecting 25 programmes to receive more than £82
million74 to expand innovative practice. As in previous
years, the majority of grantees were in the Development
category with 18 awards. The remaining seven grantees
were in the Validation category.75
During 2012 and 2013, i3 did not fund any programmes
in the Scale-up category. Instead, the Fund selected a
higher number of the best Validation and Development
applications, with the aim of growing a diverse portfolio
of grantees. i3 hopes that over time the Development
and Validation grantees will build a more rigorous
evidence base to increase the number of Scale-up
applications in future competitions.76
A previous evaluation of i3 highlighted that focusing
on both innovation and evidence of what works in
education could be problematic for the fund and exclude
more radical innovation. The evaluation noted, “at its
heart, the i3 program had two important goals that were
fundamentally in tension: ‘innovation’, which implies
new ways of doing things; and ‘scale’, in which things
that have been demonstrated to work are replicated and
disseminated. To create real change, both innovation
and scale are required, but implementing them well
requires different decision-making and support systems,
as well as different people and matching processes.
For example, requiring a ‘proven track record’ may have
shut out applicants that could have delivered more truly
break-the-mould innovations”.77
i3 appears to be helping focus national attention on
the need for innovation in education, and increasing
recognition of the role that government plays. As Nadya
Chinoy Dabby, the Department of Education’s Assistant
Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement,
notes, “fail quickly, learn your lesson and move forward
is very much part of our American ethos around
innovation, [yet] it is absolutely not a common ethos
in the education world”.78
“Fail quickly, learn
your lessons and
move forward.”
Nadya Chinoy Dabby, Department of Education
Investing in Innovation Fund (i3) 35
i3 science, technology
and maths programme
at a US high school
‘05082014 - AD - Skyline
High School 166’ by US
Department of Education is
licensed under CC BY 2.0
Impact
The goal of i3 is to improve the educational outcomes
for K-12 students. Grantees have their programme
impact assessed through an independent evaluation.
The methods are determined by the level of application,
and include assessing progress against a logic model
or theory of change, experimental methods, such as
randomised controlled trials (RCTs), and the use of
administrative data. Grantees are required to make
the results of these evaluations publically available.
Alongside requiring and supporting specific
evaluations for each grantee, the i3 Fund also tracks
its performance at an aggregate level against three
performance measures. The data for each of the
following three measures is collected by grantees and
provided to i3 during an annual performance review:
• The percentage of grantees that reach their annual
target number of students as specified in their
application
• The cost per student served by the grant
• The percentage of grantees that have ongoing
evaluations which are providing high-quality
implementation data and performance feedback,
assessed against the number of evaluations meeting
the WWC evidence standards.
Interesting features
Impact measurement
A key feature of the i3 is its standards of evidence
framework, which enables the Fund to support projects
with strong evidence, as well as those with less evidence
but strong potential. RCTs are conducted on several
of the largest i3 grants.79 This rigorous use of evidence
in the allocation of funding is innovative in itself; such
a stringent use of evidence at the centre of funding
decisions is not often seen in many other government
initiatives.
Partnerships
Another interesting features of the design of i3 is the
requirement for matched funding. This was introduced
partly to leverage taxpayers’ dollars with philanthropy
and other sources of capital, but also in recognition
that securing co-investment builds cross-sector
relationships that support the work and help assure
that the innovation is worth backing. There have been
additional benefits from engaging the philanthropic
community. Jim Shelton says the engagement has
helped created a “secondary market”, with foundations
funding promising interventions that missed out on i3
support,80 helping build closer working relationships
between government and philanthropy.
36
Leadership
“Transforming
administrations requires
not only new methods,
but also new kinds of
alliances able to generate
radical reflexivity from
within. That is what we
call Friendly Hacking.”
Stéphane Vincent, Director,
La 27e Région81
Where they are based
Paris, France
(population of France: 66 million82)
Location in government
Regional government
Mission statement
“La 27e Région explores new ways to improve
the design and implementation of public policies.
In partnership with the Regions, it implements
programmes of action research, which mobilise
methods from the humanities, design services
and social innovation.”
What they do
Provide a consultancy service to government
to design new services
What defines them
The Friendly Hacker methodology
Size of team
7
Annual spend
£0.6 million (2013) (£0.4m from government,
£0.2m from other sources)83
Launched
2008
Example of impact
La 27e Région has helped to design more than
20 social innovation pilots across 9 French
Regional Governments
La 27e
Région
A group of civil
servants working
on the future
implementation
of their ‘in-house’
innovation lab as part
of the Transformation
programme.
Image courtesy of La
27e Région, licensed
under CC BY 2.0
Interesting Features
Team
37
Background
Created in 2008, La 27e Région aims to increase French
Provincial Governments’ capacity to innovate. The
founders of La 27e Région, which includes Presidents
from French Regional Governments and former civil
servants, wanted to explore and demonstrate how
public administration could more effectively draw
on a culture of co-creation and user-centered design.
The focus on Regional Government, which in France
has responsibility for high schools, universities,
research, economic development, transportation, culture
and tourism, was a deliberate choice. The Director
of La 27e Région, Stéphane Vincent, says, “with
regional Governments we thought it would be easier
than working for the national government and more
challenging than working with cities. We find it
a very interesting middle level to work with.”84
In the early stages, La 27e Région projects were
designed to demonstrate proof of concept for the service
design and social science approaches utilised by the
team. For the first three years, La 27e Région was
incubated within another not-for-profit organisation,
the French think-tank, Next-Generation Internet
Foundation (FING). In 2011, La 27e Région moved
out of the ‘incubation’ at FING and became a formal
non-profit organisation.
La 27e Région works with French Regional Governments to
increase their capacity to innovate, helping them to tap into
the potential of social innovation through working with citizens
on the design and delivery of public services. To date, the
team has launched 20 projects in nine different regions across
France, and since 2003 has started to work with
Central Government, counties and metropolitan areas.
What it does
La 27e Région has a core team of seven employees
with an additional 40 design and sociologist associates
spread across France. From its base in Paris, it operates
as an innovation lab for the 26 French Regional
Administrations.
The core aim of La 27e Région is to create a culture
that supports social innovation and enables civil
servants to develop user-driven models. This focus
is a direct response to the New Public Management
(NPM) approach that dominated French public
administration throughout the 1990s and 2000s.
La 27e Région believe the NPM approach helped
make public services more efficient, but did not allow
civil servants to tap into the potential of involving
service users in public service design and delivery.
La 27e Région runs two programmes, Territoires
en Résidences (The Residencies) and La Transfo
(The Transformation), which are currently being piloted
with four regions. Across both programmes, regional
governments and other local authorities co-fund the
projects, with the La 27 Région team acting as a
partner to government, rather than as a delivery agent
or subcontractor.86
38
1 Being both inside and outside
Immerse civil servants together with the La 27e Région team in
the area, communities and services it is trying to understand,
such as a school or train station, for intense periods of time. This
approach gives insiders (the civil servants) and outsiders (people
who use services) a different perspective.
2 Being both neutral and activist
Find the right balance between being neutral (e.g. everyone can
participate, all opinions are valid) and being an activist promoting
particular values (such as freedom of speech, democracy, or the
importance of citizen participation). In all of its contracts with
regions, it emphasises that it is a partner and not a subcontractor.
3 Doing before thinking
Advocate high levels of experimentation and prototyping before
scaling-up solutions.
4 Engage multiple stakeholders
Recognise that no single organisation has all the answers
or capacity to drive change. Always try to include multiple
stakeholders from diverse backgrounds, from both within and
outside of public services.
5 Use design thinking
To mobilise people around what can often be quite hard change
projects, the La 27e Région team will always seek to deploy design
skills to develop prototypes and scenarios that can help illustrate
what future services and policies could look like.
6 Capture learning
Document as much of the process as possible through blogs, short
films and research papers. This creates lessons for future ‘hacking’
projects about successes and failures from past projects.
Principles of The
Friendly Hacker85
The Friendly Hacking concept (see text box) is at
the heart of the La 27e Région model, outlining six
principles to help challenge civil servants’ existing
understanding of public services. This challenge can
initially make some civil servants feel uncomfortable,
but Stéphane Vincent notes, “we’ve got many
testimonies of top managers in the beginning saying
‘well, I don’t know what you are doing or what you want
me to do, I know my staff, I know my users’, then we help
them to use a new approach and they use it, and nearly
every time something happens and they say, ‘well,
I see things differently now’.”87
The Residencies programme enables La 27e Région
to develop and test out its methods and build legitimacy
with regional governments, with sixteen run to date
across nine regions of France. In each Residency,
La 27e Région deploys service designers, social
researchers and urban planners to work with regional
civil servants. Together they find new ways of
developing projects through using ethnographic,
co-design and prototyping methods. Residencies focus
on a diverse range of issues, such as how to repurpose
a disused railway station or how to upgrade libraries
for the future. The railway station project was near
Nevers in the Region of Burgundy, and involved
researchers and civil servants camping in the station
for a week to get a better sense of the local community
and how they were using and thinking about the site.
A workshop session
with staffers
Image courtesy of La
27e Région, licensed
under CC BY 2.0
La 27e Région 39
The Transformation programme builds on the insights
and lessons generated from Residencies to create
sustainable solutions and to explore the feasibility
of the regional government creating its own social
innovation lab.
One Transformation project was in the ChampagneArdenne region. La 27e Région worked with 12 civil
servants from the region for 18 months to build
their social research and service design skills. Once
finished, the regional government began creating a
permanent lab for the region, supported by the hiring
of a permanent service designer for the regional
administration.
Impact
To date, La 27e Région, as part of the Residencies and
the Transformation programmes, has designed and run
20 social innovation projects across nine French
regions. While The Transformation programme is still
ongoing, La 27e Région estimates that, on average, six
pilots are created in each residency, with at least one
of these turning into a long-term project for the regional
government to implement and deliver.
La 27e Région reflects on the process of its projects,
but does not measure the impact of its work beyond
measuring the number of pilots it generates. The
team reflects on its process throughout, continuously
observing and learning from the government officials
it works with, and going forward plans to develop more
rigorous methods for measuring their impact
on innovation skills and capacity in government.
Interesting features
Leadership
Although La 27e Région is an independent organisation,
it has developed strong ties to regional government
through its governance and funding structures. The
La 27e Région Board consists of four presidents and
four vice presidents from eight different regions in
France. In addition, La 27e Région receives £41,00088
annually from the Association of French Regions (ARF).
This ensures that La 27e Région’s work is aligned with
government priorities and helps to foster buy-in from
senior stakeholders, which provides useful leverage in
overcoming regional barriers and difficulties.
Team
La 27e Région has a networked and multidisciplinary
team of more than 40 associates across France who
are contracted to contribute specific expertise, including
sociology, urban planning, design and social research.
This networked staffing model helps the team adapt
to shifting demand. The La 27e Région Board and the
French Association of Regional Governments insisted
on this networked approach; they made it clear that
they did not want La 27e Région to grow into another
typical administrative body.
A workshop about the
future of villages in
Région Bourgogne
La 27e Région is licensed
under CC BY 2.0
40
Mayor’s Office
of New Urban
Mechanics (MONUM)
“Creating a context in
which risks can be
taken to enable and
sustain a culture
of innovation”
Nigel Jacob,
Co-chair, MONUM89
Where they are based
Boston, USA (population of Boston: 636,50090)
Location in government
City government
Mission statement
“The Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics is Boston’s
civic innovation group. We partner with entrepreneurs
inside and outside of City Hall to explore better ways to
serve and collaborate with people. We do this by running
discrete experiments, understanding their impact, scaling
what works and learning from what doesn’t.”
What they do
Develop pilots that engage citizens, civil servants,
academia and others in government problem solving
What defines them
Technology-led civic engagement
Size of team
5
Annual spend
£0.5m (£0.3m from government and £0.2m
from external sources91)
Launched
2010
Key achievement
MONUM’s Citizen Connect mobile app is used by residents
to report problems such as graffiti to City Hall, with around
300 cases across Boston reported each week. The app has
been replicated by other cities across the nation.
‘Adopt A Hydrant’
– residents claim
responsibility for
clearing hydrants
out of snowstorm
Day Fifty Three’ by Jason
Napolitano is licensed
under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Partnerships Methods
Interesting Features
Resources
41
Background
The Mayor’s Office for New Urban Mechanics
(MONUM) was launched in 2010, at the start of Boston
Mayor Menino’s fifth term.92 It was the result of the
Mayor’s growing interest in accelerating the pace of
innovation within the city administration, gaining
him the nickname, The Urban Mechanic.
MONUM was created to enable busy City Hall staff
members to run innovation projects, often done in
collaboration with external entrepreneurs and internal
government policy experts. This ability to focus
exclusively on innovation projects was something that
existing senior managers, consumed with the day-today work of government business, couldn’t easily do.
MONUM has survived a change of mayoral leadership;
Mayor Martin Walsh, the new Mayor of Boston, has
deepened the City’s investment in the program and
expanded its role in the city.
The seeds for MONUM were sown before it was
launched. The two co-heads, Nigel Jacob and Chris
Osgood, worked in Boston City Government for three
years prior to starting MONUM, giving them deep
connections with individuals across the departments,
and providing them with a “good sense of where
there were some really compelling opportunities” for
innovation. They focused on this subset of existing
partners, innovators and entrepreneurs within the city
departments. Chris Osgood remarks, “what was terrific
is that we worked with them, showed success,[so] more
departments became interested” leading to MONUM
engaging with a wider range of departments, “so we
just saw this as a way of accelerating and supporting
those entrepreneurs who are already ready to go”.93
The Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics (MONUM) aims
to accelerate the pace of innovation in Boston City Government.
The small team facilitates and strengthens connections between
entrepreneurs and government, acting as the ‘front door’ for
city innovators. Using a rapid prototyping methodology, they
work with innovators to pilot quickly and cheaply, developing
solutions for city challenges in a matter of weeks.
What it does
MONUM has been described as the Office of Research
and Development for the City of Boston.94 Its team
of five staff, with a range of skills, focuses exclusively
on new experimental approaches to delivering services
with and for residents. When describing its approach,
Chris Osgood quotes the urban planner, Jane Jacobs,
who wrote, “Cities have the capability of providing
something for everybody, only because, and only when,
they are created by everybody.” MONUM’s core idea
is to engage and empower residents and City Hall
to partner to collaboratively transform the city.95
Their work is divided across four ‘labs’:
• The Streetscape Lab, which - in partnership with
the Public Works & Transportation Departments -
focuses on making Boston’s streets more green, smart,
multi-modal and awesome.
• The Transparency & Engagement Lab, which - in
partnership with a range of departments - focuses
on deepening trust and collaboration between city
residents and city staff by increasing engagement
and transparency.
• The Education Lab, which - in partnership with the
Boston Public Schools - explores new tools for parents,
educators and students.
• The New Economy Lab, which - in partnership with
a range of departments - experiments with new ways
to improve the business climate of Boston.
42
One resident said, “When I call City Hall I think I’m
complaining, if I send in a problem I feel like I’m
helping”.98 Citizens Connect has been successful in
reporting and resolving problems, leading to a positive
impact on the delivery of services.99
Another project is Street Bump, an app that detects
and maps rough patches of roadway. Users have the
app running on their smart phones as they drive around
the city. It detects and reports issues in the road surface
back to City Hall, helping city government to plan road
maintenance. An interesting finding is that potholes are
not the major problem. Instead, sunken manhole covers
and other castings are the most significant cause of
bumps along Boston’s streets. This information helped
the City’s Public Works Department broker a new
collaboration with the utility companies both to repair
the worst existing castings and to experiment with
new repair materials that may last longer. While it is
refining the app’s algorithms in partnership with area
universities, Boston is also in discussions with cities
around the world, including London, about how
to adapt the technology to deploy it internationally.
MONUM has a great deal of flexibility to allocate both
time and resources to new experiments, and to work
with a range of partners from across city government,
residents, local universities, individual entrepreneurs,
start-ups and large businesses. Their experiments are
quick, with pilots being undertaken cheaply, in an
iterative way, to learn and create value. MONUM aims
to have a working beta version of the solution within a
few months, with an urgency to test and get feedback
on what is being developed.
Goal
Identify entrepreneurs
inside and outside
government with
original ideas for City
service delivery
Goal
Pilot high potential ideas
with maximum public
impact and minimal
public cost
Goal
Scale most effective
pilots and share findings
with other cities
Support
and Study
Projects
Source
Ideas
Scale
& Share
The MONUM Process96
Since its creation, MONUM has run around 50
experiments, with a strong focus on using technology
as a means of engaging the public. In each lab, the
team builds partnerships with relevant city staff,
constituents, academics, entrepreneurs, and non-profits
to design, develop and evaluate pilots. The team does
not apply a structured framework or method to project
development; instead, it acts as a network broker and
facilitator, with its level of involvement in each project
varying. The MONUM process is shown below.
Urban Mechanics Fellowship: creating a culture
of innovation
To ensure there is a flow of highly skilled staff with entrepreneurial
flair in City Hall, MONUM recruits top graduates through City
Hall’s New Urban Mechanics programme and appoints them as
direct advisors to the mayor.
There are two strands to this, a summer programme which enables
those in graduate school to work on a small government project
over eight weeks, and a year-long fellowship programme for
graduates with experience in the public and private sector.
After their placement in the mayor’s office, city departments are
keen to take the Fellows on, with around 90 per cent of Fellows
staying on in city government.
Projects include Citizens Connect, a mobile app for
residents to upload photos and messages of problems
like graffiti, and send these directly to the relevant
person at City Hall. Residents can track the issue they
report and receive a notification when it is fixed, as well
as tracking other reported problems in their area.
There has been a rapid uptake of this channel as well
as the companion phone and web channels, with 2.5
million issues being reported. Boston has a population
of less than 1 million, so this indicates that there are
people using the system many times, reporting around
300 cases a week.97
Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics (MONUM) 43
The team typically receives at least one request a day
from external entrepreneurs. While many are relevant
to MONUM’s labs, most do not align with government
needs. Occasionally, however, MONUM receives
“a gem”. One such story is Marie Duggan, a mother
of a severely autistic child who has worked with the
MONUM team to develop AutiKnow, an app to help
support children with autism.100
The majority of the support MONUM offers to most
innovators is non-financial, including coaching,
connections with researchers, developers and others
who can help advance the idea, and links to other key
players in city government.
With the smaller subset of ideas that become projects,
MONUM usually plays a significantly hands-on role.
The team works with departments across City Hall to
help scale and implement solutions. MONUM has
found this scaling phase challenging, encountering
issues in ensuring that departments have the ability,
time and resources to integrate the innovation into
existing operations.
“We never really want to be
engaging in total blue sky
work that can never fit with
the existing operations.”
Chris Osgood
StreetBump App
Image courtesy of Nesta
Ensuring innovations can be incorporated into the preexisting structures and operations of government have
raised interesting questions about how radical MONUM
can be. Chris Osgood notes, “we always want to be sure
that we’re pushing the envelope, but there’s this delicate
balance between going too far into fundamentally new
areas, and at the same time making sure that if they are
successful there is a way of incorporating them into city
operations. So, we never really want to be engaging in
total blue sky work that can never fit with the existing
operations”.101
MONUM’s model recognises that not all supported
projects will succeed. That is why the office structures
its experiments “in a short and smart and low investment
way” enabling it to quickly learn lessons. Despite this
high appetite for experimentation and risk, Nigel Jacob
notes that his colleagues “don’t have the freedom to do
stuff that’s off topic”, and they don’t have the licence
to run projects unless there is an experiment behind
tracking progress. In essence, all the work must help
them “understand better how we can be a better city”.102
44
Impact
MONUM has had a number of impacts, including:
• Citizen Connect has enabled 70,000 neighbourhood
issues to be reported by residents, empowering them
to improve the condition of their neighbourhoods.
A number of cities in Massachusetts and across the
country have now adopted similar products.103
• Street Bump is providing Boston City Hall with
new intelligence on the state of the roads, with over
1,250 problems identified and fixed through a new
partnership with utility companies. Early results
show that Street Bump could lower the cost of road
inspection.104
MONUM has two categories for measuring impact,
a set specific for the team overall, and a set specific
for each project. For the team overall they track
how many entrepreneurs they meet with, also using
this as a proxy for how well they are sourcing new
ideas; how many projects are supported; how many
projects are documented to show how well they are
disseminating and sharing their work; how many
projects are formally evaluated; and how many
projects are scaled. For individual projects, measures
include the depth of civic engagement, with MONUM
seeking an external research partner to undertake
the evaluation. Across both categories MONUM uses
administrative data, user feedback surveys, focus
groups, participant observations, qualitative interviews,
and questionnaires.
To support impact measurement, MONUM has
two key partnerships with universities. The first is
with Harvard University as part of the Boston Area
Research Initiative, in which a range of social scientists,
psychologists, scientists and economists study behaviour
change in the areas where solutions are deployed.
The second research collaboration is with Emerson
College and is focused upon action and participatory
research methods. In these research partnerships, the
academics are not contractually obliged to report on
data and receive no financial benefits from evaluating
the MONUM programmes, providing the research
findings with additional credibility.105
Interesting features
Partnerships
MONUM’s position in the Mayor’s Office helps to
ensure that it is aligned with both executive priorities
and the needs and issues across city departments.
The founders were from City Hall and already had
strong networks and relationships with colleagues,
which provided the foundations for building a broad
base of support and trust across city departments. They
work hard to be seen as a source of resources, expertise
and support to help departments achieve their goals.
Methods
The key successes behind the MONUM method are
the dedicated staff, its position in the Mayor’s office,
and its lean, partner-driven approach. The first allows
the internal capacity to take on experimental projects;
the second allows for those projects to have some degree
of risk; the third allows that risk to be well managed.
MONUM’s use of communications is also key to its
method. The team is credited with helping protect
risk-takers by managing relationships with the Mayor,
media, peers, employees and the public. If a venture
is falling short of its goals, the team steps in quickly
to help the innovator “navigate and manage and
message”.106 Rather than it being a one-off exercise,
this translation role between the different partners
is a key part of MONUM’s work.
Resources
MONUM receives funding from a range of sources.
Salaries of core staff are paid by City Hall, alongside
funding from the city government to provide
risk capital. Additional programme funding is
secured through grants. For example, the State of
Massachusetts grant-funded the development of
Commonwealth Connect, while private foundations,
such as the MacArthur Foundation and Bloomberg
Philanthropies, fund more thematic programmes with
partners. If an agency comes directly to MONUM with
a challenge, the team helps think through exactly what
is required, and offers advice on how a solution could
be developed, with the agency ideally providing some
of the funding.
Rather than thinking about the resources just available
within Boston’s government, such as budgets and
human capital, MONUM looks to the city at large and
leverage resources through assembling a network of
partners who can take on these challenges. Tapping
into the capabilities of entrepreneurs, researchers, nonprofits, government officials, and others enables a very
different set of resources and perspectives to be brought
into the work of departments. As Nigel Jacob notes,
“as much as we are housed in government, we’re very
much an urban innovation lab”.107
Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics (MONUM) 45
“Stimulating the
dialogue in Denmark
on transforming our
public sector and
creating a different
interplay between the
state and local level.”
Christian Bason, Director, MindLab108
Where they are based
Copenhagen, Denmark
(population of Denmark: 5.6 million109)
Location in government
National government
Mission statement
“MindLab works with its owners to create change
which generates the desired value for citizens,
businesses and society”
What they do
Engage civil servants and citizens in identifying
problems and developing policy recommendations
What defines them
Human-centered design (HCD)
Size of team
12
Annual spend
£1 million (2012)110
(£0.9m from Danish government, and £0.1m from
other sources)
Launched
2002
Key achievement
MindLab’s project to help businesses to find the
right industry code for registrations demonstrated
a 21:1 return on investment in savings to
government and businesses
MindLab’s coworking spaces for
collaboration with
government and others
Image courtesy of MindLab
MindLab
Methods Leadership Team
Interesting Features
46
Based in the Danish Central Government, MindLab is tasked
with bringing a human-centred design approach to public
sector challenges. MindLab draws on the perspectives of
citizens, businesses and government staff to redesign services
around their experiences.
What it does
MindLab is now owned by three ministries – the
Ministry of Business and Growth, the Ministry of
Education and the Ministry of Employment – as well
as one local authority, Odense Municipality. MindLab
provides an innovation lab function for its work across
employment, education, business and growth, and
government modernisation.114
Across each of these areas, MindLab has three
strategic objectives:115
1 Public sector innovation
MindLab will strengthen the outcomes of public policies
through systematic insight into the perspective of
citizens and businesses, and active involvement of the
stakeholders which can turn new ideas into practice.
2 Change capacity
MindLab will build knowledge about new approaches
to public problems. This knowledge shall enhance
the owners’ competencies to take courageous change
initiatives.
3 Visibility and legitimacy
MindLab will work actively to qualify the public sector
innovation agenda and to share the owners’ role as
co-creators of one of the world’s leading innovation
environments.
Background
MindLab was launched in 2002 by the Danish Ministry
for Business Affairs as an internal incubator for
invention and innovation. The permanent secretary’s
inspiration for MindLab was Skandia, a Swedish
insurance company, which created a similar innovation
lab, the Skandia Future Centre. Another source of
inspiration was prominent business school academics
wanting to know what role innovation played within the
Ministry for Business Affairs.111 The existence of an inhouse lab holding such a vision of creativity was in itself
innovative and unique for the Danish Government.112
As it has developed, MindLab has embraced humancentred design (HCD) as its method for innovation.
MindLab has expanded its remit to work with other
ministries. These strategic partnerships with new
government departments are a deliberate attempt
to create more systematic change, arising from the
view that public sector innovation does not come from
a single project, but instead needs to be sustained
and spread through cross-cutting partnerships.113
From National to City Government
As well as working with Danish central government,
MindLab is now collaborating with the Municipality of
Odense. This is a strategic move to increase the scale
of impact across the government.
Odense views itself as a platform for experimentation
for innovations that can be rolled out across the
hundred or so other municipalities of Denmark. This
partnership enables Odense to tap into the methods
and expertise of MindLab, and enables a rethinking
of the governance structure between local and central
government.
MindLab 47
Analysis
Identifying insights
Visualisation
Pattern recognition
Synthesis
Ideation
Concept development
Selection
Creating
Protoyping
Testing
Implementing
Knowing
Project scoping
Challenging the problem
Citizen-centred research
MindLab’s Process Model
(source: MindLab website)
To meet these objectives, MindLab develops projects
and change programmes in collaboration with each
of its government owners.116 Human-centred design
methodologies, and an ethos of listening to and
learning from users, are the central elements of
MindLab’s work.117 To understand user experiences,
MindLab draws on a range of techniques and methods,
interviewing users, applying various workshop formats
to structure group discussion, asking users to narrate
their experience by taking photographs or keeping
a diary, as well as undertaking ethnographies with
MindLab staff living alongside service users for a
period of time. These insights are then collated to be
communicated back to the ministries, and in some
instances are used to prototype potential solutions.118
The diagram below shows the MindLab process.
In one project, MindLab worked with the National
Board of Injuries to try and improve the re-entry
of young victims of industrial injury back into the
workforce. MindLab used ethnographic research
to reframe the question and understand the issues
from the perspective of service users. This involved
MindLab visiting seven young people and discussing
their experiences. From these observations, MindLab
found that young people experienced different types
of bureaucracy depending on the service, that they
used, from healthcare to social work, and that they
often struggled to understand the forms, letters, and
questionnaires sent to them, and were often frustrated
by the red tape that they experienced when trying
to get back to work.
These insights were presented back to staff at the
National Board of Industrial Injuries, with one project
manager commenting, “The videos showed us that
much of what we believe to be the case looks completely
different through the eyes of the victim of an industrial
injury. Our awareness of the reality experienced by
someone who has suffered an industrial injury was
significantly sharpened as a result.”119
MindLab used the research to work with staff from
the National Board of Industrial Injuries, leading
to a reframing of the agency’s core mission, from just
managing legal case processes to focusing much more
heavily on employment outcomes for citizens. Against
this background, four specific ideas and solutions
were developed, helping simplify how services are
communicated and making it easier for young people
to re-enter the workforce.
Another MindLab project involved getting businesses
involved in the development of proposed reforms to
the food industry. The Danish Government recognised
the food industry as a future growth sector, but one
that was highly regulated. As part of its work with the
Ministry of Business and Growth, MindLab interviewed
four companies to understand their experiences of
current legislation. The insights were presented by
MindLab at a government growth meeting, helping
the government consider the experiences of companies
on the ground when developing future policy.121
Another project involved MindLab working with the
Danish Business Authority to help businesses navigate
the “labyrinth” of bureaucracy when trying to register
their industry code. Too often, start-ups registered
incorrectly, resulting in statistical errors, taking up
government time to resolve, and leading to erroneous
company inspections.122 As a result of the collaboration,
the Business Authority launched a new website
to simplify this process.123 This project resulted
in a 21:1 return on investment.124, 125
48
Alongside providing a research and design facility,
the MindLab office is also purposefully designed
to act as a physical space for cross government
collaboration, providing what they call a safe space
for experimentation. MindLab regularly host events,
including seminars and workshops.126
As part of MindLab’s objective to change government
culture, it previously ran courses with civil servants to
help increase the use of design methods. Despite demand
from colleagues in government, MindLab recognised that
these courses did not lead to a sustained change in the
culture. As a result, training has been reframed; instead
of a standard curriculum, the training is bespoke and
embedded into each project. This helps to structure and
focus the training around the demands of the challenge
that a ministry is experiencing.
As a result of MindLab’s work, the Ministry of
Employment is now reviewing how it creates and
implements policy, and is drawing on MindLab’s
methodology in its future policy implementation
strategy. MindLab is dedicating a large amount
of resource to work with the ministry to support
this change by putting design principles into the
mainstream culture of decision-making and policy
implementation. Similarly, MindLab is working
closely with the Ministry of Education to support a
new Implementation Secretariat, sharing experiences
from the Employment Ministry and co-developing an
Implementation Academy for policymakers.
Impact
MindLab focuses on measuring the value created for
its partners, assessed against four factors:
• Creating new knowledge that is useful for
the organisation
• Giving the organisation a new understanding
of its challenges and possibilities
• Contributing to changes in policies, services
and/or strategies
• Contributing to the implementation of new solutions
Impact measurement of projects is predominantly
qualitative. In addition, MindLab undertakes a
questionnaire, usually supplemented with qualitative
interviews, with the departments and collaborators
partnered with on projects to gain an understanding
of their experience of working with MindLab, and
to assess whether the organisation has changed policy
or ways of working as a result.
To track their overall progress, MindLab collects
quantitative information for reporting to their
governance board, including hours spent on each
project, number of citizens or businesses involved,
and the activities carried out in relation to each project.
This management information helps the board to
manage and allocate MindLab’s resources.
The table below shows the outputs and outcomes
measured by MindLab’s project to make it easier
for businesses to register.
Young people and personal finance
In recognition that young Danes’ knowledge of
personal finance is poor, the Ministry of Taxation,
Employment and Economic Affairs approached
MindLab for help. MindLab interviewed students,
teachers, education experts and government officials to
understand the situation.
These interviews generated five new insights into what
young people think about finance and the intentional
and unintentional choices they make that affect their
financial circumstances.
The result was concrete suggestions on how the
ministry could communicate economics, tax and
employment information in a way that is relevant to
young people, as well as specific suggestions on the
information secondary schools provide to students in
these areas.120
National Injury
Board project
Image courtesy of
MindLab
Key Outputs
A new website to help businesses find the right
industry code
Key Outcomes
• Increased ease for businesses
to find the right industry code
• Decrease in wrong choices of industry code
reducing administrative errors
• Decrease in inquiries to public authorities
Key Impacts
Business case conducted by external consultants
demonstrated a 21:1 return on investment127,
128, 129
Impacts for government:
• Lower spend on advising businesses on
industry codes
• Lower spend on cross-agency coordination
Impacts for businesses:
• More time spent on core business activities
• Increased satisfaction with government service
New industry code website
MindLab 49
Leadership
MindLab’s Governance Board is made up of the
permanent secretaries from each parent ministry
and the Chief Executive of Odense Municipality. The
board agrees to MindLab’s annual work programme,
ensuring that MindLab are focused on priorities for their
sponsors, and that allocate the team’s time to specific
tasks, with 80 per cent of their time pre-committed
and the remaining 20 per cent left open for flexible and
ad hoc requests. The aim is both to provide complete
transparency in how resources are allocated and to move
from “projects to partnerships”,130 working collaboratively
over a longer period to effect greater change.
Team
The MindLab team includes a mix of skills that
reflects the organisation’s ethos and method, including
social research, design, public administration, project
management, organisational development and creative
facilitation.131 There is a strong emphasis on hiring
people who are adept at working with both citizens
and colleagues in the ministries.132 Christian Bason,
Director of MindLab, emphasises how important
recruiting the right team has been to MindLab’s
success: “we’ve been fortunate in being able to create
a blueprint for who we wanted and why”.133 The team
is relatively stable, with the majority working at
MindLab for over six years, developing deep craft
knowledge and close relationships with civil servants.
Interesting features
Methods
MindLab has a very clear focus on a central method
of human-centred design (HCD): an approach that
helps link the perspective of the end user to government
decision making. HCD provides a clear structure
for projects, whilst also creating an identifiable
brand for MindLab. To help maintain a robust
methodological foundation for its work, MindLab takes
on a number of professional academic researchers on
secondment, bringing to MindLab the latest thinking
of ethnography, anthropology and other relevant fields.
The post-doctorate (Ph.D.) work conducted at MindLab
has provided legitimacy for its work, as well as
enabling reflection and improvements to its projects
and ways of working.
MindLab’s office
space for creativity
and innovation.
Image courtesy of MindLab
50
“To incubate and scale
disruptive innovation
for the public good”
Helen Goulden, Executive
Director, Nesta Innovation Lab134
Where they are based
London, United Kingdom
(population of United Kingdom: 65 million135)
Location in government
National government
Mission statement
“Supporting innovators to develop ideas
that can solve big social challenges”
What they do
Challenge prizes, practical programmes
and grant funds combined with wider policy
and systems change
What defines them
Connecting social innovators, front line
public services and policy makers
Size of team
65
Annual spend
£15.4 million (2013/14) (£4.9m from
government, £10.5m from other sources)
Launched
2009
Example of Impact
The People Powered Health programme developed
new approaches for managing long-term health
conditions that have the potential to save the health
system in England £4.4bn. These innovations are
now being adopted at scale.
Nesta
Innovation
Lab
Code Club
Image courtesy of Nesta
Partnerships Resources
Interesting Features
Methods
51
Nesta Innovation Lab works with individuals and organisations
to generate, develop and test radical new ideas to address
social problems. Through developing and applying leading edge
innovation practices and methods, it supports innovators in the
public, private and social sectors, and links innovative projects
to advocacy and policy change to transform whole systems.
Background
Nesta is the UK’s innovation foundation with a mission
to support innovation for the public good. Established
in 1998 by central government, Nesta transitioned to
an independent charity in 2012.136 Nesta is backed
with an endowment originally provided from the UK
National Lottery and works through a combination
of research, investments, networks, grant funding
and practical support to innovators.
The Innovation Lab was launched in 2009. Originally
called the Public Services Lab, it was rebranded in
2013. Over that time it has grown from six to 65 people
and has developed a wide-ranging portfolio that brings
together different disciplines to advance innovation in
priority fields.
What it does
The main focus of the Innovation Lab’s work is
supporting the creation of new ideas and helping
promising innovations to reach and benefit more people.
They combine this with a focus on wider policy and
systems change to enable more and better ideas to
flourish.
The Innovation Lab supports innovators working in
fields like health and ageing, opportunities for young
people, public service reform and digital arts and media.
They consciously work with organisations from different
sectors, from front line public services and earlystage social entrepreneurs to government agencies,
established non-profits and commercial businesses.
This creates the risk of being spread too thin, but being
able to straddle different sectors and disciplines is seen
as essential to the Innovation Lab’s model.
The interdisciplinary approach is reflected in the
leadership and make-up of the team, with staff from
central and local government, non-profits, consultancy,
social enterprise and commercial backgrounds. The team
is co-led by Philip Colligan, a former senior official with
12 years’ experience in central and local government, and
Helen Goulden, who has a background advising global
businesses and government on digital innovations.
The Innovation Lab works through three main
approaches:
1 Grant funds supporting a portfolio of innovations that
work towards a common goal
2 Challenge prizes applying open innovation to social
problems
3 Practical programmes cohorts of organisations
supported through a structured innovation process
to develop and implement innovations that address
a shared goal
52
One example of a grant fund is the Digital Makers
Fund which backs ideas that get young people involved
in activities like coding.137 The fund is a partnership
between Nesta, the Nominet Trust, Mozilla Foundation
and Autodesk and invests in the growth of programmes
like Code Club, a network of after school coding clubs
for children aged nine to 11 run by volunteers. Over
two years the Digital Makers Fund has awarded grants
to 14 organisations totalling £520,000, to date enabling
more than 30,000 young people to access opportunities
to get practical experience of digital making.
Alongside the Digital Makers Fund, the Nesta
Innovation Lab launched the Make Things Do Stuff
campaign that brings together organisations committed
to getting more young people involved in digital making
to engage with policy-makers, teachers, parents and
young people.
An example of a larger grant fund is the Centre for
Social Action Innovation Fund, a £14 million fund to
help grow the impact and reach of innovations that
get citizens more involved in the delivery of public
services.138 The fund, which is a partnership with the
UK Government Cabinet Office, provides bigger awards
to later stage innovations that have the potential to
reach many more people.
In its first year, the Centre for Social Action Innovation
Fund made 20 grants totalling over £5 million, helping
projects spread to over 500 new locations reaching an
additional 128,000 beneficiaries, engage more than 30,000
new volunteers and increase the evidence of their impact.
The Nesta Innovation Lab’s second approach is
challenge prizes. Nesta has a track record of applying
open innovation to social problems, including through
the Big Green Challenge one of the world’s first social
challenge prizes that in 2010 awarded £1 million to
community projects that reduced carbon emissions.139
The Innovation Lab built on that experience to
launch the Centre for Challenge Prizes140 which uses
competitions to stimulate new solutions to social and
environmental challenges. In partnership with the
UK Government’s Open Data Institute, the centre is
running a series of prizes to find solutions that mobilise
public data to address challenges in fields like crime
and justice, education and energy. They bring together
industry experts and data providers with start-up and
early-stage companies to create financially sustainable
businesses with a social purpose.
The challenges start with an intensive research
and engagement phase to ensure that they are well
designed and respond to real public needs. Once the
challenge opens, teams respond with their ideas and
the most promising are selected to take part in
a creation weekend where the best three ideas receive
a £5,000 grant plus incubation support and the chance
to compete for a £40,000 prize.
The winner of the Crime and Justice challenge was
Check that Bike, an open data service available on
smart phones that enables cyclists to check whether
a second hand bike they want to buy is stolen.
Stages of Innovation
(Source: Nesta)
Changing
Systems
Growing
and Scaling
Delivering and
Implementing
Making
the Case
Developing
and Testing
Generating
Ideas
Opportunities
and Challenges
Nesta Innovation Lab 53
Impact
The Innovation Lab measures long term impact
across four dimensions:
• Creating new solutions that solve specific
social challenges
• Supporting innovations to reach and benefit more people
• Effecting wider policy and systems change
• Increasing capacities to innovate
One persistent challenge is how to measure impact
in the short term when backing early stage and
disruptive innovations that often take years to
demonstrate results. To combat this, the Innovation
Lab interventions have a theory of change that sets out
the long-term goals and metrics alongside short-term
indicators against which they can track progress.
The Innovation Lab also uses Nesta Standards of
Evidence as a framework for understanding whether
innovations are having the intended impact (see
diagram above).142 As Helen Goulden noted, “It’s really
important to have a nuanced approach to evidence,
most innovations will take time to develop and expecting
too much too soon kills innovation. But that can’t be
an excuse for lazy thinking.”143
The third approach is programmes, which bring
together cohorts of similar organisations which are
supported through a structured process to develop and
implement innovations that address a shared goal.
These programmes emphasise the development of
innovation skills and involve training public servants
in methods that can be used at the different stages of
innovation, like ethnography and rapid prototyping in
the early stages and supporting them to develop business
models and scaling strategies at the later stages.
People Powered Health was a programme focused
on long-term health conditions. Over 18 months the
Innovation Lab worked with teams of doctors, hospitals,
community organisations and patients in six locations
to design and implement new approaches that actively
engaged patients, communities and social networks in
managing conditions like diabetes.
The teams were supported to co-create and prototype
the solutions with patients, as well as develop robust
business cases to win support for implementation.
The findings demonstrated the potential for the
interventions to deliver significantly better outcomes
for patients and £4.4 billion in savings to the health
system in England.141 The programme ended in 2012
and the Innovation Lab has continued to work with
policy makers, national health organisations and
patient groups to take the ideas to national scale.
Nesta Innovation Lab in numbers
In 2013/14 the Innovation Lab ran 30 funds, challenges
and programmes across its priority fields and covered
all parts of the UK. From a total 3,341 proposals,
the team awarded grants to 69 innovations, with an
average value of £145,000, and continued to provide
practical support to an additional 70 innovations that
had received grants in previous years. They held 102
events reaching 4,624 delegates with a major focus
on developing innovation skills and their web pages
received over 450,000 page views.
54
Interesting Features
Partnerships
Although Nesta is now an independent charity it
continues to work with government departments and
agencies. Over half of the Innovation Lab’s work is
designed and co-funded with government bodies; one
of the Lab executives serves as Government Advisor
on Social Innovation and the team includes several
staff members on secondment from government.
Being outside government also enables the Innovation
Lab to have a much broader set of collaborations,
including with other foundations, philanthropic
organisations, corporations and other mainstream
funders.
These partnerships are important in providing
additional resources to support innovation, but are
also critical to the Innovation Lab’s ability to make
a difference on a national scale; providing access to
policy makers, funders and brands that can help
innovations enter the mainstream.
Nesta Standards of Evidence
Level 1
You can describe
what you do and
why it matters,
logically, coherently
and convincingly
Level 2
You capture data
that shows positive
change but you
cannot confirm you
caused this
Level 3
You can demonstrate
causality using
a control or
comparison group
Level 4
You have one or
more independent
replication
evaluations confirm
these conclusions
Level 5
You have manuals,
systems and
procedures to ensure
consistent replication
Resources
Funding is one of the main things the Innovation Lab
does, providing grants to what are often early stage ideas.
The leadership is clear that they aren’t just a grant giving
organisation and strive to “act more like an investor,
working alongside the ventures and teams we back to
leverage our knowledge, networks and other assets to help
them succeed”. That practical support can cover everything
from help with recruitment, skills development, and
advice on financial and business models, connecting to
potential customers or collaborators, finding mentors and
supporting evaluations.
In all their grants, money is staged to manage risk,
with lower awards for earlier stage ideas and more
significant grants to innovations that have a longer
track record and better evidence of impact.
Methods
Nesta Innovation Lab has developed distinctive
methods to go beyond interesting pilots and projects
and influence wider systems change. With People
Powered Health, the team started by analysing the
broader systemic challenges of shifting healthcare
towards more peer-support, social prescribing and
prevention, engaging key decision-makers in these
discussions. They then chose experiments on the
ground that could demonstrate the building blocks
of a transformed system, and brought together
stakeholders to consider the implications for issues such
as workforce development, finance and technology. The
team then brings together a coalition of organisations
that can help maintain momentum, in the case of
People Powered Health this lead to the development
of the Coalition for Collaborative Care. And finally, they
work with policy makers at a national level to change
key policies. This ability to iterate between micro
experiments and macro policy conditions, practical
demonstrations and advocacy, has become increasingly
important as they tackle more complex challenges.
Nesta Innovation Lab 55
“Dedicated capacity for
innovation and delivery
has transformed the
way we solve big
problems in New
Orleans”
Mayor Mitch Landrieu144
Where they are based
New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
(population of New Orleans: 0.4 million)145
Location in government
City government
Mission statement
“To apply the Innovation Delivery Model
to develop and implement innovative solutions
to high priority issues facing the city”
What they do
They work with government agencies to
redesign services and tackle specific challenges
What defines them
The Four-Step Innovation Delivery Model
Size of team
8
Annual spend
£0.7m146 (2013)
Launched
2011
Example of impact
New Orleans’ public safety efforts led to
a 19% reduction in the number of murders
in 2013 compared to the previous year;
2013 saw the fewest murders in New
Orleans since 1985, and the lowest murder
rate the city has seen since 1999.
56
New Orleans
Innovation
Delivery Team
Get Involved is a
part of New Orleans
Innovation Delivery
Team’s murder
reduction strategy
Image courtesy of New
Orleans Innovation
Delivery Team
Leadership Team Methods
Interesting Features
56
New Orleans
Innovation
Delivery Team
New Orleans’ Innovation Delivery Team was established by
Mayor Mitch Landrieu to provide the city with the capacity and
expertise to systematically innovate and develop solutions to
top mayoral priorities. Serving as an in-house consultancy,
New Orleans’ Innovation Delivery Team is currently one of five
in the United States supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies.
Background
In 2011, just one year into Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s
first term as mayor of New Orleans, he secured one
of five inaugural grants from Bloomberg Philanthropies
to hire and fund an Innovation Delivery Team. The
purpose: to bring rigour, extra horsepower, and a set
of tested tools and techniques to the business of
innovation in government. The Innovation Delivery
Model, provides a structured and deliberate approach
to innovation, combining data and analytical insight with
design principles in a rigorous way; the Model helps cities
generate, test and implement “smart solutions to tough
problems” for “dramatically better municipal policy”.147
New Orleans secured its spot in the programme due
to the fact that it’s a large American city, has a strong
executive governance, and has leadership committed
to shaking things up and trying new things.148 When the
team was fully staffed and ready to begin work, Mayor
Landrieu had more than two years remaining in his
first term in office and an aggressive innovation agenda
focused on reducing the city’s murder rate – the mayor’s
highest priority – and improving customer service.
What it does
The New Orleans Innovation Delivery Team is a
unit that develops and delivers new approaches in
top mayoral priority areas. The team of eight, led by
a director and reporting directly to Mayor Landrieu,
includes data analysts, project managers and policy
analysts with a mix of experience in private consultancy
and the government sector. The Innovation Delivery
Team works exclusively on two or three priority
areas at a time, a deliberate tactic to maintain focus
on producing tangible, meaningful results in an
accelerated timeframe.
Mayor Landrieu charged his Innovation Delivery
Team with two of his greatest first-term priorities:
“reducing violent crime and improving customer service,
delivering a better quality of life for our residents.”149
Innovation Delivery Teams remain actively engaged
from idea generation through initiative planning,
implementation, and the measurement of results.
Once priority areas are tasked, the Innovation Delivery
Team uses a four-step model150 to generate and
implement innovative solutions.
New Orleans Innovation Delivery Team 57
Each city receiving an inaugural grant from Bloomberg
Philanthropies employed the Innovation Delivery Model
to achieve impact, implementing the four key steps
while customizing and adapting to their own context.
In New Orleans, the Team was charged by the Mayor
with tackling the imperative issue of public safety.
In particular, the Team set out to make dramatic
reductions in the murder rate. New Orleans had long
held the unwelcome distinction of being the most
murderous city in the country. For five consecutive
years between 2008 and 2012, New Orleans had the
highest murder rate of any United States city with a
population greater than 250,000 people. In 2011, New
Orleans’ murder rate was nearly 20% higher than that
of the next highest city.
The Team started by deeply analysing existing data,
interviewing stakeholders, conducting focus groups,
and reviewing best practices in other cities. Team
members worked collaboratively with the Mayor’s staff
to research historical trends in crime and policing in
other cities, cross-referencing crime data to other data
sets such as population density, as well as identifying
successful violence prevention strategies from other
jurisdictions. In addition, the Team collaborated with
the police department to thoroughly analyse the specific
circumstances of each murder that occurred in the city
within the last three years. This deep dive into data
surfaced several core realizations, including that the
majority of murders in the city resulted from disputes
among groups, and that a relatively small, identifiable
set of people were responsible for most acts of violence.
• Step one – Investigate the problem: the first stage
involves exploring the problem in-depth, with meetings
held with leaders across city hall, as well as interviews
and observations with stakeholders in the wider
community, to help reflect upon and understand the
problem. The effective use of data is a major element
of this stage, with the Innovation Delivery Team
exploring existing data to help understand the problem
and identify trends or patterns.
• Step two – Generate new ideas: once the problem has
been defined, potential solutions are sought using
techniques like idea competitions, expert roundtables,
end-user interviews and brainstorming to solicit ideas
from government departments, citizens, and other
stakeholders.151
The Innovation Delivery Team also looks outside
its own city, scanning for best practices across the
U.S. and around the world. The goal of this “horizon
scanning” is to explore whether there are potential
solutions being used elsewhere, either in the public
or the private sector, that have application to the
problem the Team is trying to solve at home.
• Step three – Prepare to deliver: at this stage in the
process, the Team filters down the list of potential
solutions to those with the strongest likelihood of
delivering results, sets targets for each initiative,
and works with the relevant department heads
to develop an implementation plan.
• Step four – Deliver and adapt: at this stage, much
of the work of implementation is being led by the
relevant city agencies. The Innovation Delivery Team
is responsible for monitoring progress and pushing
for results. It also sets up “stocktakes” and other
routine meetings to keep track of progress and adjust
strategies as necessary. Gradually, the Team hands
over responsibility for on-going implementation to
the “sponsors” and “owners” in the relevant agencies.
Participants in the
NOLA FOR LIFE: Invest
in Prevention initiative
Image courtesy of New
Orleans Innovation
Delivery Team
58
To support the generation of new, innovative solutions
to this problem, the Innovation Delivery Team convened
a working group of experts on public safety and murder
reduction; five of the leading national experts worked
for a full-day with the Mayor and the Team to weigh the
issues and consider appropriate responses. The Team
also reviewed existing strategies in other cities around
the country, and engaged local partners in health and
education to draw out new ways of thinking about the
problem. The Team held focus groups with young men
in its target population (African-Americans between the
ages of 16 and 24) to understand the motivation behind
their actions and, to hear their ideas about the kinds of
interventions that might be most effective.
Coming out of these activities, the New Orleans Team
identified a basket of potential initiatives, and worked
with its agency partners to prioritise a set of eight with
the highest potential for impact. The initiatives were
rolled out in May 2012. From there, the Team helped
drive and manage a disciplined delivery process. They
organized frequent check-ins with a broad group of
partners, and reviewed the various moving pieces of
the murder reduction strategy at regular “stocktakes”
with senior leaders in city hall. The Team collaborated
with city partners to continuously and reliably monitor
progress to stated targets. In this way, they were able
to diagnose challenges in delivery and respond, before
initiatives were allowed to fail.
As a result of these efforts, New Orleans has
dramatically impacted the murder rate. In 2013,
there were 156 murders, representing a 19% drop
when compared to 193 from the year before.152 This
was the lowest annual total in New Orleans since 1985.
The murder rate in 2013 dropped to 42 victims per
100,000 people, the lowest rate the city has seen since
1999. Among the cohort of U.S. cities that recorded the
highest murder rates in 2010, New Orleans was one
of only five cities that saw a reduction in the murder
rate between 2012 and 2013.
In New Orleans, the other initial priority for the
Team was improving customer service for residents
in the city. In particular, the Team was focused on
implementing better, leaner systems to support
licencing and permitting processes, and improving
citizens’ experience conducting a range of transactions
with the city.
The Team reduced the time to issue commercial
building permits from more than four weeks to less
than eleven days; reduced average customer wait
times by over 70%; and reduced the number of special
event application types from 15 to 1, streamlining
what had been a complicated and onerous
bureaucratic process.
Impact
The Innovation Delivery Team has had impacts
including changing culture of government, engaging
citizens in decision making, creating costs savings
for government, and improving services for residents
and businesses. The table below shows the outputs
and outcomes measured in three of the New Orleans
Innovation Delivery Team’s initiatives.
Key Outputs
Simplified and
standardised
procedures for largescale building projects
Key Outcomes
Reduced average
wait time for permit
delivery by 62%
Key Impacts
Commercial building
projects are able to be
completed faster, and
citizens’ time is saved
Key Outputs
Updated the GIS
zoning layer to make it
a reliable dataset
Key Outcomes
Reduced the average
time spent reviewing
zoning requests by
the City Planning
Commission each
week by 92%, saving
approximately 150
hours of staff time per
week
Key Impacts
Citizens’ rezoning
requests are processed
faster, and the City
saves significant
staff time that can be
reallocated to other
tasks
Key Outputs
Targeted policing
and interventions in
neighbourhoods with
the highest historic
violent crime rate
Key Outcomes
37% fewer murder
victims and 33% fewer
shooting victims in
NOLA FOR LIFE
target neighbourhoods
compared to 2012
Key Impacts
Citizens are safer;
longstanding cultural
cycle of violence is
interrupted
Streamlining
permitting process
(part of the Customer
Service priority
detailed above)
GIS zoning layer
update (part of the
Customer Service
priority detailed
above)
NOLA FOR LIFE
target areas (part
of the Public Safety
priority detailed
above)
The Team puts in place metrics and targets for all
priorities and initiatives at their outset. The New
Orleans Team developed performance dashboards
to help systematically track progress and impact,
and they use routine “stocktakes” with Mayor Landrieu
and other senior leadership to monitor the data and
ensure everyone is held accountable for results.
New Orleans Innovation Delivery Team 59
Interesting features
Leadership
Mayor Landrieu developed the Innovation Delivery
Team to deliver on commitments early in his first term
in office and is continuously engaged in the work of the
Team. The engagement of the Mayor was key to the
New Orleans’ Innovation Delivery Team’s ability to
work rapidly across different priority areas; it signalled
the importance of the work, and enabled the Team to
leverage the Mayor’s influence when needed to help
overcome barriers.
Team
The Innovation Delivery Team is focused on problem
solving and providing the support and guidance for
agencies and departments to undertake innovation
and longer-term delivery. They have focused on hiring
staff with generalist knowledge so the Team is agile
and able to quickly shift to diverse policy areas as
new priorities are identified, with specific subject
knowledge leveraged from existing experts inside and
outside government. A mix of hires from both private
consultancy and government policy backgrounds
has brought a balance of diversity in experience and
perspective to think creatively, while understanding
how municipal governments work.
Methods
At the heart of the Innovation Delivery Team approach
is the four-step Innovation Delivery Model developed
by Bloomberg Philanthropies. This Model underpins
the New Orleans i-team’s ways of working, providing
a clear structure for innovation and helping make its
offer clear to the rest of government.
As well as providing a guiding structure for innovation,
the Model aims to be flexible to enable teams to apply
it in different ways to suit different situations and still
achieve results. As the director of the New Orleans
Innovation Delivery Team, Charles West 153, says,
“the Innovation Delivery Model provides a critical
framework for taking on big challenges and delivering
results. We’ve been able to take that framework, and
make it our own, fine tuning it to work in New Orleans.”
The Four Steps of the Innovation Delivery Model
1
Investigate
the problem
2
Generate
new ideas
3
Prepare
to deliver
4
Deliver
and adapt
Once substantial progress
is made, return to Step 1
for a new priority
60
New York
City Innovation
Zone (iZone)
“…working in schools,
working in external
markets, and driving
systemic reform”
Andrea Coleman,
former CEO, iZone160
Where they are based
New York City, USA
(population of NYC: 8.3 million)154
Location in government
City government
Mission statement
“In 2010, the New York City Department of Education
(NYCDOE) launched the Innovation Zone (iZone),
a dedicated Office of Innovation that would support
schools in personalizing learning to accelerate college
and career readiness among our students. Having
started with 81 schools, the iZone now includes 300
schools from across the city.”
What they do
Developing, funding and advising government
and schools on innovations in education
What defines them
User-centred design
Size of team
40
Annual spend
£9.1 million (with £6.4 million from government
and £2.7 million from other sources)155
Launched
2010
Example of impact
iZone’s iLearn programme is projected to save
£6.6m ($10.8m) by 2015156 Impact measurement Partnerships
Interesting Features
The Essential Allies
Challenge to increase
family engagement
Image courtesy of New
York City Innovation
Zone (iZone)
61
Background
The iZone was set up in 2010 by Mayor Bloomberg
and the then chancellor of the New York City Schools
system, Joel Klein.157 Education reform in the city had
started eight years earlier after NYC public schools
had experienced decades of poor performance.158
During the first wave of reforms, Children First, the
administration, sought to create more leadership,
autonomy, and accountability at school level.
As a result of Children First, graduation rates increased
by more than 40 per cent, bringing the city-wide
graduation rate to 67 per cent. City Hall recognised that
there was still some distance to go before all students
successfully graduated ready for college and careers.159
The response was an innovation strategy, emerging as
the Office of Innovation, and the establishment of the
iZone, the first dedicated innovation initiative of its
kind in the USA. Rather than replacing Children First,
iZone worked alongside it. Andrea Coleman, the former
CEO, noted that the iZone “attempted to create the space
and promote innovation, skills and methods that would
prompt and yield promising solutions that had the
potential to radically move the needle as it relates
to college and career readiness for our students”.
Since its establishment, the iZone has expanded its
focus from the design and testing of personalised
learning models to also address some of the system level
barriers that prevent diffusion of effective approaches.
The New York City Innovation Zone (iZone) is a community
of schools committed to personalising learning around the
needs, motivations and strengths of each child, with the aim
of accelerating college and career readiness. The iZone acts as
an incubation lab for the city’s education department, working
directly with over 300 schools, a range of companies and
others in the education market, and the wider city government
to influence policy reforms and to test and develop solutions
that improve educational attainment across New York City.
What it does
The iZone acts as an incubation lab for the Department
of Education in New York City.160 It works on three
levels, supporting innovation in schools, creating and
stimulating external markets, and fostering wider
systemic innovation, such as through policy reforms.
Currently working with 300 schools, the iZone plans
to continue expansion to include other schools across
New York City in 2014.
The iZone develops initiatives with schools to promote
‘personalised learning’, an approach that utilises ideas,
technologies and tools that work best for individual
schools and their students. A good example is School
of One, a programme that creates a customised
timetable for each student, tailored to their learning
needs, and best utilising teacher time (see text box
for more details).
Schools in the iZone are held to the same levels of
accountability on success metrics, such as attainment,
as all other schools in New York. This scrutiny
requires the iZone to support the schools to be creative
and innovative, and to help them manage the risks
involved with balancing innovation and sustaining high
performance.
62
Challenges are the central method for encouraging
iZone schools to innovate. Schools help set the
challenges, and are involved in developing, testing and
scaling solutions. An example is The Essential Allies
Challenge to increase family engagement in support
of student achievement. Schools are invited to design
and prototype solutions that improve the relationship
between schools and families. Following prototyping,
schools that meet the benchmarks are eligible to receive
up to $15,000 in funding for the continued design and
implementation of their innovations.161
Challenges, such as open calls and hackathons, are
also used to grow the external technology sector,
helping the iZone leverage expertise in developing
software solutions that meet learning needs. An
example is the Gap App Challenge, involving software
developers creating games or programmes that help
schools improve attainment in mathematics. The
twelve winning entrants of 2013 are now working
in a number of schools to pilot and test their products.163
School of One
School of One strives to solve the issue of all children
requiring different types of support in order to learn
effectively.
Drawing on a complex set of algorithms that analyse
each student’s understanding of materials from each
lesson, a customised schedule is created for the student
to follow the next day. This schedule determines the
learning modality, such as teacher-led instruction,
student collaboration, or virtual instruction, as well as
allocating the amount of teacher time to best leverage
their expertise.162
The third strand of the iZone’s work involves ‘systems
level’ change, whereby the iZone works to influence
policy to foster innovation in schools. One example
is the iZone’s collaboration with the city’s student
enrolment team in the School Choice Design Challenge
to help streamline the process for the 80,000 eighth
grade students applying to the city’s more than 700
high school programmes each year. From interviewing
the enrolment team, families, students and school staff,
the iZone team recognised that searching through
a 600 page guidance book on the comparative merits
of different schools was overly complicated. To develop
alternatives, the iZone set the challenge for technology
companies to compete in designing user-friendly tools
for students and their families to use when selecting
a high school. Six separate applications were developed
and refined and will be promoted to families during
the school enrolment season.164
New York City Innovation Zone (iZone) 63
Impact
iZone’s objective is to accelerate students to college
and career readiness. The iZone is committed to using
data to measure impact and to analyse outcomes at the
classroom, school, market, and policy levels. Evaluation
is tailored to each individual initiative, drawing on
a range of methods, proportional to the stage of the
innovation. Prototypes are quickly and cheaply tested,
while the later stage innovations receive more intensive
evaluation. The methods include:
• Educational return on investment (eROI) – a
framework to estimate the outcomes from an
investment compared to the likely outcomes in other
settings, using inputs of cost and student/teacher
outcomes. This helps iZone answer the following
questions: is it lowering the cost to innovate; is it faster
and cheaper; and do schools get what they need much
more quickly and effectively?
• Administrative data – enabling the iZone to compare
the performance of iZone schools to other NYC schools
by using standardised government data, such as on
assessment scores or graduation rates.
• Design-based evaluation – helping determine the ‘how
and why’ of an intervention, through determining
which inputs influence which outcomes.
• Formal trials, such as randomised controlled trials
(RCTs) – approaches that measure an intervention’s
impact by comparing outcomes of the intervention
group to a control group. These more in-depth methods
are reserved for the ‘big bet’ solutions, those later stage
innovations that have already demonstrated positive
impact in prior, lower cost testing.
iZone uses these data sources, and in particular eROI,
to determine which interventions should be scaled or
further evaluated. The table opposite shows the outputs,
outcomes and impacts for three iZone initiatives.
Key Outputs
160 qualified
applications to close
the learning gap in
middle school math
Key Outcomes
12 schools are
currently piloting
software tools
and working with
software developers to
improve the products
(pilot results will be
available summer
2014)
Key Impacts
Work has resulted
in the potential
for alternative
procurement processes
that enable smaller,
more innovative
companies to
contract with the
NYCDOE165, 166
Key Outputs
Over 20,000 middle
and high school
students engaged
in ‘personalised
learning models’
where curriculum,
assessment, staff,
learning time and
learning environment
were designed around
individual student
needs, strengths and
interests
Key Outcomes
iZone 360 students
showed growth from
autumn 2012 to spring
2013 as measured by
the Student Habits of
Mind survey, which
assesses growth in
academic motivation,
self-directed learning,
and online learning
readiness; and in Key
Cognitive Strategies,
which assesses college
and career readiness
skills
Both of these are
linked to increases in
longer term academic
achievement
Key Impacts
Over a two year period
from Fall 2011 to
Spring 2013, iZone360
students made positive
and significant
gains in problem
formulation, research,
interpretation and
communication.167
Key Outputs
iLearn NYC has
increased student
access to online and
blended learning from
7,400 students in
2010/11 to more than
22,000 students in
2013/14
Key Outcomes
iLearn schools
saved £3.9m ($6.5m)
annually in the cost
of software licenses as
compared to the same
scale implementation
if these schools were
to purchase licenses
at cost on their own.
FY2012
Key Impacts
Projected savings to
increase to £6.6m
($10.8m) by 2015, with
the full analysis due in
2014168
Gap App Challenge iZone 360 iLearn NYC
64
Advancing ICT in the
classroom
Image courtesy of New
York City Innovation
Zone (iZone)
Interesting features
Impact measurement
iZone is data driven, using evidence in the formulation
of programmes and testing their impacts through
rigorous evaluation design. To ensure continuous
improvement, the iZone has developed an Education
Return on Investment (eROI) measurement. eROI
is a tool to estimate the cost of a specific educational
outcome, and serves as a management tool to
complement formal evaluation. The calculation of
student outcomes is particularly important, and
is designed to estimate the outcomes from a new
programme, school design or intervention for the
specific target population which is served by comparing
what their outcomes would likely have been in other
settings. eROI is used to decide whether a programme
should be scaled and evaluated further.
Partnerships
iZone seeks to work closely with partners in government
and to stimulate innovation through partnerships,
creating what it terms a radical collaboration
community involving strategic collaborations with
the private sector, as well as the schools in the iZone.
Another key aspect of this network is to draw on the
innovation capabilities available inside government.
The iZone team works closely with their colleagues
across city hall, in particular with staff at less senior
levels. They identified this “middle layer” as where
the work gets done, making it a good place to identify
and understand problems, and to draw on expertise
for developing effective solutions.
New York City Innovation Zone (iZone) 65
Leadership
“...the original theory
of change with CEO
is to try pilots that
then drive more
systemic changes”
Kristin Morse, former Executive
Director, NYC Center for
Economic Opportunity169
Where they are based
New York City, USA
(population of New York: 8.3 million170)
Location in government
City government
Mission statement
“CEO is the anti-poverty innovation unit of New York
City Government. Working in support of City agencies,
CEO develops, oversees, and evaluates programs and
policy innovations”
What they do
Design and fund experimental programmes
What defines them
Rigorous use of data and evidence
Size of team
18
Annual spend
£60.7 million171 ($100m per annum, 60 per cent
public funds, 40 per cent private funds)
Launched
2006
Example of impact
CEO has run almost 70 programmes in collaboration
with 40 different agencies, directly serving 540,000
individuals across New York City, securing more than
37,000 job placements, and 12,000 paid internships,
and enrolling 18,000 individuals in college or
occupational training172 Impact measurement
Interesting Features
NYC Center
for Economic
Opportunity
An employability
programme aimed
at those previously
involved with the
criminal justice
system
Image courtesy of NYC
Center for Economic
Opportunity
Methods
66
The New York City Center for Economic Opportunity (CEO)
develops and finances innovations to tackle poverty across the
city. With evidence of impact central to its approach, CEO runs
programmes in collaboration with agencies across the City
government, robustly testing their effectiveness to scale and
spread the most promising, whilst stopping those that don’t
meet their desired outcomes.
What it does
CEO is a team based in New York City Hall
that supports innovations to promote education,
employment, asset development, and health, targeting
the working poor, young adults aged 16-24, and families
with young children, to address economic inequalities
in the city. CEO provides the financial and technical
assistance to test whether these solutions work, with
delivery and implementation tasked to the relevant
city agency.
Former Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs describes CEO
as a laboratory with the mission to pilot and innovate,
which is reflected in a structured approach to
experimentation, commitment to evidence of impact
and scaling of successful innovations.
CEO uses New York City Government funds to
leverage philanthropic, foundation and federal funding
to create an annual £60.7 million public-private
partnership fund.173 As well as increasing the flexible
funds for innovation, this external funding helps create
legitimacy for CEO’s work. Many of these philanthropic
foundations are attracted by the early stage new ideas,
with some seeing themselves as “a kind of venture
capital in social programmes”. As well as funding,
foundations also bring their own experience and
expertise to bear.
To date CEO has run 67 programmes; sometimes
CEO develops the original idea, whilst in other
instances the city agency approaches CEO with the
problem and potential solutions. In all programmes
CEO works closely with the partner agency to design
and implement the intervention, but delivery is
always undertaken by the partner agency.
Background
The catalyst for CEO came in 2006 when Mayor
Bloomberg and Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs created
the Commission for Economic Opportunity. At the time,
economic prosperity was at a peak, but 1.5 million New
Yorkers were living in poverty. The Commission was
charged with seeking out the most effective approaches
to poverty reduction from across the USA and around
the world. Learning and adapting the best of these led
to the design of CEO, an innovation team and fund that
works with government agencies to develop high impact
solutions.
CEO survived a change of mayoral leadership in 2014
when Mayor Bill de Blasio took office. As part of his
effort to reduce inequality in the city, CEO was moved
into the Mayor’s Office of Operations, with the intention
of applying the insights and evidence developed through
its work at a city-wide scale.
NYC Center for Economic Opportunity 67
The CEO Innovation Process ’Replicating NYC Innovation‘
(Source: NYC Center for Economic Opportunity 2011)174
CEO programmes
CEO designs and tests
new anti-poverty initiatives in
collaboration with City agencies
Results
CEO pursues a rigorous
monitoring and evaluation
agenda, working with real
time performance data and
independent evaluators
New York City
Replication
CEO seeks to expand
and replicate successful
programmes
National Replication
CEO shares its findings with
stakeholders nationwide to
inform policy and practice
CEO’s focus on evaluation was a deliberate strategy.
CEO was created to be a lean organisation, positioning
itself as providing technical programme support to the
government agencies that are delivering the services.
With a strong focus on evaluating interventions,
CEO is one of the few innovation teams that ensure
on-going support for successful programmes, whilst
actively and strategically ending failing programmes.
Of the programmes launched to date, 12 (18%) have
proved successful and ‘graduated’, securing follow-on
funding; 18 (27%) are still being monitored to see
how they develop; 18 (27%) are in the early stages of
implementation, and 19 (28%) were not successful
and have since been decommissioned.175, 176
One successful project is the City University of New
York Accelerated Study In Associate Program (CUNY
ASAP), which aimed to help remove the barriers that
prevent 80 per cent of students from completing
their degrees and graduating. CEO sought to increase
graduation rates from 14 per cent to 50 per cent of
students within three years. CEO worked with the
Chancellor of the City University System177 to develop
a programme that helps motivate college students
to earn their degrees as quickly as possible. The results
show 55 per cent of students now graduating, which
is double the rate of students not in the programme.178
This improvement creates significant financial returns
for both the taxpayer and the student.179
Another CEO programme is Community Partners,
an outreach programme to connect people from high
poverty areas with employment opportunities. Mobile
Community Partner teams were established in all five
boroughs of New York City, coordinating referrals to
the public workforce system for job placement services.
In 2013, 23,000 referrals have been made, resulting
in 3,600 people securing job placements.181
Just as it is committed to growing what is working,
CEO is equally committed to stopping or
decommissioning ineffective programmes. For instance,
the Family Rewards programme, an experimental,
privately-funded, conditional cash transfer intervention
to help families break the cycle of poverty,182 was
stopped at the end of the pilot phase. Despite positive
engagement, researchers found there had been little
impact on longer term outcomes such as academic
achievement.183
Other programmes have been stopped because of
external circumstances. One example is the Nurses
Career Ladder programme, designed to train lowincome New Yorkers to secure higher salaried positions
as nurses, which was stopped when there ceased to be
a demand for nursing staff.184 Other programmes are
stopped because of lack of positive impact. One example
is the Learning Independence for Empowerment (LIFE)
Transitions programme which focused on life skill
development for youth in secure detention. The
programme was stopped because an evaluation
was unable to determine if there was any impact.
When CEO programmes are discontinued, the funds
are kept by CEO and invested in new initiatives.
A recent example is a large scale randomised controlled
trial (RCT) to test Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)
in New York City, an experiment to test whether
the highly successful programme that is generously
targeted to adults with child custody will be as
successful if offered to childless adults. This programme
involves providing a supplement to earnings for low
income workers, with the goal of increasing
employment and earnings and reducing poverty.185
68
Impact
The NYC Center for Economic Opportunity has
had a number of impacts:
• Solving city government challenges by developing
a number of programmes that have been sustained
by agencies across New York City, and supported
by other cities in the USA.
• Influencing national government policy through
a number of programmes being adopted in federal
funding, such as through the federal Social
Investment Fund, and through the poverty measure
CEO developed being adopted by the federal
government (see the text box for details on the
poverty measure).
• Creating cost savings in government, such as through
programmes like CUNY ASAP discussed earlier,
which was demonstrated through analysing costs
per outcome relative to existing approaches.
• Improving services for businesses and residents
by improving the percentage of people achieving
intended outcomes and through altering or
discontinuing underperforming programmes and
practices.191
All CEO programmes are designed and implemented
with clear outcomes in mind and with programmespecific evaluations developed, often designed in
partnership with city agencies and in collaboration
with a selection of independent evaluation firms.192
Evaluations draw upon a mix of qualitative and
quantitative methods, including surveys, participant
observations, interviews, randomised controlled trials
(RCTs), and cost benefit and cost effectiveness analysis.
Going forward, CEO is continuing to conduct
high quality evaluation, while also engaging more
extensively in additional methodologies that enable
real-time assessment and iteration, including the use
of administrative data.
CEO does not just grow and spread innovations;
it also adopts and adapts models from elsewhere.
One example is Jobs-Plus. Originally developed by
the research organisation MDRC, the Rockefeller
Foundation and the US Department of Housing
and Urban Development, the Jobs-Plus programme
improves the employment and economic outlook of
low-income workers and job seekers living in public
housing, and has a significant impact on the long-term
earnings of participants.186 The Jobs-Plus model has
three elements: on-site access to employment related
services, rent-based work incentives to help residents
keep more of their earnings, and activities to promote
neighbour-to-neighbour support networks.187
Compelled by the success of Jobs-Plus elsewhere
in the US, CEO collaborated with agencies in New
York City to adapt the programme for use in the city,
starting with a pilot in East Harlem.188 The early
implementation in New York was a success, and in
2010 the program was expanded to two additional
sites with funding from a federal stream dedicated to
growing evidence for community-based anti-poverty
strategies. The programme has since expanded to
seven new sites in New York City through CEO’s
Young Men’s Initiative.189
Social Innovation Fund
CEO and the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City,
in collaboration with MDRC, were selected as a Social
Innovation Fund (SIF) intermediary by the US Federal
Government. The SIF is a public-private investment
programme to help identify and expand solutions
to address social challenges. With a budget of £52
million ($85 million), CEO is working with partners to
replicate five of CEO’s innovative anti-poverty pilots
across seven partner cities across the USA.180
Young Adult
Internship Program
at Southern Queens
Park Association
Image courtesy of NYC
Center for Economic
Opportunity
NYC Center for Economic Opportunity 69
Interesting features
Impact measurement
Rigorous data collection and measurement is the core
of CEO’s model, with clear definitions for success and
failure. It is one of the few innovation agencies to
regularly run randomised assignment evaluations,
as well as drawing on a range of other mixed method
approaches.
As CEO has developed, it has grown in confidence
about how much can be achieved, raising the standard
of evidence collected, and expanding the outcomes to
be met. CEO has overcome criticism from those who
question spending money on evaluation when it could
be better spent “serving people”, to a point where
impact measurement is seen integral to its model
and a crucial investment decision.
Leadership
CEO’s relentless focus on experimentation and evidence
has been enabled by strong leadership. Until 2013 the
initiative was overseen by Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs,
a public servant with over 20 years of government
experience who worked with Mayor Bloomberg to create
the space and political cover for the CEO to operate.
In press interviews when CEO launched, Mayor
Bloomberg made clear that some of CEO’s projects
would fail. Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs reiterated
this commitment to experimentation, “the mayor
was insistent from the get-go that he’s totally open
to trying new things, to unconventional approaches,
and to shaking things up a little bit”, but crucially,
he is “focused on demanding accountability to whether
or not those things worked”. This means that there
is a strong focus on evidence of impact throughout its
work. As Kristin Morse, the former Executive Director
of CEO, notes, their basic monitoring information
is their “first line of defence”.195
Methods
CEO is structured to provide funding for
experimentation, supported by a political commitment
to grow what works and stop what doesn’t. CEO is one
of the few innovation agencies around the world with
processes in place to sustain successful programmes,
and to actively decommission programmes that either
don’t achieve impact or fail to do so at lower cost than
existing interventions.
When a programme is declared successful, it ‘graduates’
and is funded through mainstream departmental
budgets. There are three success criteria to be met:
• The programme must demonstrate successful
performance;
• The partner agency must be committed to integrating
the programme into its other activities
• The agency must ensure long term sustainability for
the programme by securing dedicated and additional
government or private funding.193
As well as sustaining success, CEO is committed to
stopping programmes that fail to produce the desired
impact, with 19 programmes discontinued so far,
some because they were intended to be one-time
investments; others because they failed to produce
the desired outcomes, had a poor model or were badly
implemented.194 Equally, if the programme is not
innovative enough, CEO may stop funding it.
National policy impact: the development
of a new poverty measure
In 2008 CEO developed an alternative poverty
measure that is having national impact. Based upon
earlier work by the National Academy of Sciences,
CEO revised the official measure of poverty, expanding
the model so that it more accurately accounted for
the role of benefits and tax credits, such as housing
subsidy and food stamps on levels of poverty.
Their work inspired the Obama Administration to
create the Supplemental Poverty Measure, based on
the method developed by CEO. This new approach is
now being used by the US Census Bureau.190
70
Open
Mexico
“A new governance
model to transform
the relationship
between government
and society
to strengthen
democracy”
Open Government Partnership196
Where they are based
Mexico City, Mexico
(population of Mexico: 117 million197)
Location in government
National government
Mission statement
“We explore how digital tools can enable the design
of an open, fair, competitive, and inclusive Mexico.
A Mexico where the government can become a platform
for innovation and boost the creation of new enterprises
and organisations that address key public challenges.”
What they do
Support the implementation of the digital strategy
What defines them
Engaging citizens and external experts
Size of team
15
Annual spend
Not known for Open Mexico (however the unit they
are based within, Coordinación de Estrategia Digital
Nacional, receives £1.2m from government (2014/15)198)
Launched
2013
Example of impact
Open Mexico is developing the Open Dashboard,
a platform to solicit discussion amongst citizens
and to communicate government’s progress
implementing the strategy. Methods
Interesting Features
Academic institutions
are consulted on
datos.gob.mx
Image courtesy of
Coordination of National
Digital Strategy
71
Background
When Enrique Peña Nieto was elected Mexican
President in 2012 he set out to drive innovation in
government and civil society by accelerating the use
of digital technology. In 2013, the five-year Estrategia
Digital Nacional (National Digital Strategy) was
launched, identifying five areas where digitisation
could have an impact, covering open government,
efficiency, health, education and security.
To co-ordinate and implement the strategy across
government, a team of 70 was created within the
President’s office called the Coordinación de Estrategia
Digital Nacional. This team is responsible for ensuring
the vision is effectively implemented and supports
individual departments who fund and deliver the
work across the wider government. Open Mexico
is a dedicated unit within the strategy team, with 15
staff members focusing exclusively on civic engagement
and the development of the open data strategy.
The Mexican Government has embarked on a strategy to
advance the use of digital technology. The aim is for new
technologies to open up information for government and
citizens, helping to create better public services, promote
economic growth, foster social inclusion and combat corruption.
Open Mexico is the unit responsible for civic engagement.
It helps to ensure that the government’s open data agenda
tackles the issues and challenges that matter to citizens.
What it does
Open Mexico and the wider strategy team are driven
by a belief that new digital technologies will help create
a government that is more transparent, accountable,
and collaborative, to generate the solutions the country
requires.
Few members of the Open Mexico team worked
in national government previously. It employed
a deliberate recruitment strategy to hire from local
government and civil society, recognising that past
digital policies had struggled to decentralise and foster
links to local government and citizens.
Open Mexico is creating the Open Dashboard to
engage with citizens and help increase government
accountability.199 The Open Dashboard will be publically
available and will continually monitor and track
progress across government and then communicate
impacts directly to citizens online. Citizens are invited
to post comments about the work of the government
with an advisory board, which includes entrepreneurs,
academics, and civil sector organisations, that views and
considers their comments. Chosen ideas will be debated
at public consultations across Mexico during 2014.
72
A major part of Open Mexico’s work is opening up
government data with dedicated ‘Data Squads’, created
to provide help and support. Government agencies
apply to Open Mexico for help from the Data Squads,
which are comprised of external experts skilled in
legal and technical support, and are partnered with an
expert on a six-week basis to open up specific data sets,
help overcome obstacles, and identify projects where
the data can be put to use.
One current project is Reconstruccion MX,200 a
platform that links up national and state government
to address areas affected by natural disasters, with real
time information about the incident and the support
being provided to citizens, aiming to help increase the
transparency of disaster relief funds.
To generate new ideas and champion innovation across
government, Open Mexico has created the ‘Agentes
de Innovación Nacional’ programme. These are five
individuals recruited from across government as those
well-known for trying to solve problems in the past.
These recruits recognised as change makers with
an ability to cut through bureaucracy and political
obstacles. They are allowed to spend 25 per cent of their
time developing the digital prototype over a nine-month
period, and are supported by a full-time team
of four government staff, alongside being partnered
with relevant experts from outside government. The
Agents and their team collaborate with citizens and
other public servants, involving stakeholders in the
design, implementation and evaluation of the solution.
The department responsible for the implementation
covers the cost of the project.
Open Data Squads
Image courtesy of
Coordination of National
Digital Strategy
Open Mexico 73
Impact
Open Mexico’s work is still at an early stage with
no impact results yet available from their evaluation.
To support impact measurement, Open Mexico
has partnered with two independent research
institutions, CIDE and Reboot, which provide help
in experimenting and developing its evaluation
strategy. International funders are supporting these
evaluations, with this non-governmental support
seen as crucial to ensuring reliable results.
The table below shows the outputs and outcomes
measured in three of the Open Mexico’s projects,
with impacts still being tracked.
Interesting features
Methods
Open Mexico has established a number of interesting
methods to help foster collaboration and engagement
between government and external experts, citizens
and entrepreneurs, such as through the Data Squads
providing the necessary external expertise on specific
projects. The Open Dashboard will engage with citizens,
enabling the public to follow government’s progress
in real time, with the hope that the prospect of public
scrutiny and pressure will imbue some “healthy
competition” across government.
Securing rapid results and ensuring departments
implement the strategy is ensured through setting
specific timescales, with Innovation Agents required
to have developed a workable solution for their
department in nine months, and the Data Squads
supporting data to be opened and used for a specific
purpose in six weeks.
Key Outputs
Real time information
about the path and
help given to affected
areas and natural
disasters
Key Outcomes
Increased
transparency and
increased usage of the
disaster relief fund and
charitable goods
Key Outputs
Increased information
about Mexico’s
Open Data initiative
and developed the
‘datatron’ – a public
poll to measure
demand of data
Key Outcomes
Public comments
and direct editing
to the draft policy
documents on the
platform
Key Outputs
26 commitments
agreed by the
government and civil
society organisations
through participatory
process
Key Outcomes
Increased participation
and collaboration
of citizens in public
affairs
Reconstruccion MX201 Datos.gob.mx – a
citizen participation
platform202
Open Government
Partnership (OGP)
- a multilateral
initiative, where the
governments of 63
member countries
work together with
civil society203
Launch of the Open
Government Action Plan
Image courtesy of
Coordination of National
Digital Strategy
74
Leadership
Performance
Management
& Delivery
Unit (PEMANDU)
“Because we are part of
the Prime Minister’s Office
and not aligned
to any particular ministry
or agency, our greatest
advantage is that
we are able to cross
boundaries.”204
Chris Tan, Director, PEMANDU
Where they are based
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
(Population of Malaysia: 28.3 million205)
Location in government
National government
Mission statement
“To translate the government’s vision into
detailed action plans and to monitor the
implementation of these plans to ensure
outcomes/objectives are met.”
What they do
Providing staff training, designing new service
prototypes and overseeing implementation
What defines them
Big Fast Results (method inspired
by how businesses are turned around
in the private sector)
Size of team
135
Annual spend
£7.3 million (2011)206
Launched
2009
Example of impact
One of PEMANDU’s projects supported
Malaysian law enforcement and reduced
reported street crime by 35% in one year
Partnerships
Interesting Features
PEMANDU is based in
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Petronas Towers by J P is
licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
Methods
75
Background
The Performance Management & Delivery Unit
(PEMANDU) was set up in 2009 as an in-house
consultancy to support the implementation of
Malaysia’s National Transformation Programme,
which aims to turn Malaysia in to a high-income
economy by 2020. PEMANDU is also the Malaysian
word for ‘drive’, which reflects the mission of the
team to drive the transformation programme.
The programme targets transformation in both
government and the private sector through the
Government Transformation Programme (GTP)
focusing on modernising how the Malaysian
Government operates, and the Economic
Transformation Programme (ETP), which focuses
on attracting private investment both foreign and
domestic into Malaysia.207
The Prime Minister wanted to take a personal leadership
role in this work, including supporting and coordinating
efforts across ministries and closely monitoring progress.
PEMANDU was established to provide a dedicated
capacity and the Prime Minister appointed Idris Jala,
a successful corporate leader, as Chief Executive. Jala
had earned recognition for the rapid turnaround of
Malaysian Airlines from making substantial losses
to being a profitable business in the late 2000s.
What it does
PEMANDU’s work is shaped by the belief that methods
and approaches used to drive efficiency and innovation
in the private sector can be applied successfully to the
public sector. The core methodology used is Big Fast
Results, which Jala had previously successfully used in
the turnaround of Malaysian Airlines. He said, “One of the
reasons I took this job was to see whether the techniques
and tools that were used in transforming a company can
be used in a country. I think all of it works.”208 Further
details on Big Fast Results are in the text box.
Based in the Prime Minister’s Department, the Performance
Management & Delivery Unit (PEMANDU) is charged with
transforming Malaysia into a high-income economy by 2020,
through transforming public services and attracting foreign
investment into the private sector. It does this by acting as
an in-house government consultancy, supporting ministries
in developing and implementing new solutions to transform
Malaysian public services.
1 Strategic direction
Define the scope of the work, by defining a set
of strategic areas to focus on, through surveys,
consultation and quantitative analysis of media.
2 Labs
Bring civil servants responsible for each area together
in lab sessions facilitated by PEMANDU, to set
ambitions for impact and develop the solutions that
will help achieve this.
3 Open days
Test the results from the Labs in open days, where
outcomes from the sessions are opened up to feedback
from the public.
4 Roadmap
Publish publicly available roadmaps to hold ministries
and PEMANDU accountable.
5 KPI targets
Enable monitoring of progress in implementing
solutions by co-developing KPIs for each project.
6 Implementation
Charge each ministry with implementation of agreed
upon reforms. Progress is monitored by PEMANDU
and reviewed on a weekly basis by the CEO who
can elevate issues to the responsible minister and
ultimately the Prime Minister.
7 International panel review and audit
Engage an external consultancy to verify progress
results reported by the ministries and to convene
an international panel of experts from the public
and private sectors to review and comment on
progress and ambitions.
8 Annual Report
Publish all results from the Economic Transformation
Programme (ETP) and GTP in annual reports.
Eight-step Big Fast
Results Methodology
76
1
Addressing the
rising cost of
living (led by
Deputy Prime
Minister)
2
Reducing crime
(led by Minister
of Home Affairs)
3
Fighting
corruption (led
by Minister in the
Prime Minister’s
Department, in
charge of Law)
4
Improving
student outcomes
(led by Minister
of Education)
5
Raising living
standards of
low-income
households (led
by Minister of
Women, Family
and Community
Development)
6
Improving
rural basic
infrastructure
(led by Minister
of Rural and
Regional
Development)
7
Improving urban
public transport
(led by Minister
of Transport)210
Seven national key results areas (NKRA) for the
Government Transformation Programme (GTP)
Jala has explained how one of the key features of the
labs is that they don’t recognise existing hierarchies
within ministries and agencies. “I always believe that
people actually know the solutions. The good ideas are
already there, and people know these ideas, but the
reason we don’t move from ideas to results is because
there are technical, political, administrative, process,
and system hurdles.”212
One of the labs has sought to develop solutions to
reduce crime in Kuala Lumpur. The lab team knew
that there were 2,892 police working across 501
geographical sectors in Kuala Lumpur. The team
mapped every incidence of crime that took place in
Kuala Lumpur over the previous two years and found
that most of the crimes were committed in 11 hot spots.
Their proposed solution was to redeploy 2,892 police
to focus on those hot spots. This initial pilot proved
a success and resulted in the redeployment of 20,000
policemen to primarily focus on 55 hot spots in just
12 months — the most significant redeployment of
police in Malaysia’s history, which resulted in a 35 per
cent drop in reported street crime within one year.213
PEMANDU has been given a mandate by the
Prime Minister to initiate change in the Malaysian
Government, and works closely with the ministries
in charge of the areas covered by the GTP to make
this happen. It helps teams across government
with designing and implementing projects. While
PEMANDU will review and report on progress,
the successful delivery of GTP programmes are the
responsibililty of the departments and teams that
work with PEMANDU.
PEMANDU identified which parts of the public
sector to target by conducting a series of extensive
consultations, including a number of public surveys,
as well as analysing Malaysian media209 to identify
the most recurrent topics and issues related to public
services. This led to the development of seven national
key results areas (NKRA) for the GTP (see text box).
Having defined these key areas, the next step was
to define how to achieve success and impact within
each one.211 To start this process, PEMANDU organised
a series of ‘labs’. Over 250 of the best civil servants from
Malaysian Government, including policemen, teachers,
transport staff, and senior managers, spent around
seven weeks working across each target area.
The ultimate aim of the labs was to develop new
programmes and services that could help the minister
achieve NKRA results, along with detailed plans for
implementation. In the past, good ideas and initiatives
struggled with making it up through the ranks. Prime
Minister Idris Jala made clear that the lab approach
started from the fundamental belief that, given the
right context and support, civil servants would have
the skills and capacity to develop innovative solutions.
Performance Management & Delivery Unit (PEMANDU) 77
Other programmes focused on building the skills of civil
servants to deliver better public services. In education,
one idea was the restructuring of teacher training to
close educational gaps, which has led to 300 teachers
being trained to improve their work with children who
have learning difficulties, and 3,494 private pre-school
teachers trained on improving their delivery of preschool education.214
Based on the lab findings, feedback from surveys and
open days where the unit shared its ambitions with
the Malaysian public, PEMANDU was able to publish
the GTP Roadmap report, which outlines the
implementation plan and ambitions for the GTP.
Chris Tan, Director, of PEMANDU explains how a key
success factor is the unit’s ability to constantly monitor
progress. He said, “the real secret is in the followthrough, in the systems used to monitor progress
and senior buy-in to the process”.215
The ability to connect very specific targets and
indicators to the ideas and implementation plans that
have been agreed in the lab sessions, and the Prime
Minister’s support for the GTP, also helps alleviate most
of the challenge that the PEMANDU team encounter
when pushing civil servants on implementation.
PEMANDU developed
programmes with the
Ministry of Education to
close educational gaps.
Image courtesy of
PEMANDU
PEMANDU manages a dashboard that holds data
on each ministry’s progress. Progress is monitored
and scorecards are updated on a weekly basis. This
allows the team to rigorously monitor performance.
Every week, Idris Jala chairs a meeting with his
PEMANDU Directors and the delivery teams from
the respective ministries, with the sole purpose
of discussing any emerging problems with
implementation and progress in the ministries.
If ministries are falling behind, Idris Jala has
the opportunity to elevate the conversation to the
responsible minister. Every six months, the dashboards
are shared among all cabinet ministers. This helps
to drive internal competition; no one wants to be
seen as falling behind.
PEMANDU also convenes an international panel
of experts from the World Bank, IMF, Transparency
International, and other governments from around
the world to review progress on an annual basis.
To test the NKRA impact captured internally, they
have commissioned the consultancy Price Waterhouse
Coopers to undertake an external review of progress.216
78
To achieve Big
Fast Results
Transformation
Engine
It operates differently
Doing (action)
It becomes a totally
different organization
Being (character)
PEMANDU’s path to transformation
Impact
PEMANDU operates with a single measure of
success – to what extent projects contribute to Malaysia
becoming a high-income economy, as classified by the
World Bank. Using these World Bank measures, the
PEMANDU team has set the goal of achieving £9,111
gross national income (GNI) per capita by 2020. The
economic progress is currently ahead of schedule with
the current income just below £6,074.217
On a micro level, PEMANDU measures its impact
through levels of adoption of interventions by
government and external audiences, changes in culture
and level of innovation skills and capacity within
government, and cost savings and improvement of
outcomes against the NKRA.
To track these impacts, PEMANDU uses administrative
data, user feedback surveys, and questionnaires. Each
year, PEMANDU publishes an annual report outlining
achievements under each NKRA, such as the number
of teachers trained and kilometres of road built.218
Highlights of the impact of PEMANDU’s work on
the GTP219 include:
• Supporting law enforcement to achieve a 35 per cent
drop in reported street crime within one year220
• A survey conducted by Transparency International’s
Global Corruption Barometer 2010 showed that 48
per cent of Malaysians felt that the government’s
efforts in fighting corruption were effective — a
significant increase from 28 per cent in 2009221
• In rural areas, approximately two million people
benefited from projects that provided potable drinking
water, extended electrical service, built roads, and
restored housing222
Interesting features
Leadership
Established by the Prime Minister and based within
his department, one of the key features of PEMANDU
is the strong buy-in its work has from senior political
leadership. This makes it easy for PEMANDU to
elevate implementation issues with involved ministries
to the Prime Minister, and to easily coordinate efforts
across government. To further strengthen its links
to the political leadership, PEMANDU is governed by
a board of politicians, chaired by the minister in charge
of National Unity and Performance Management.
Partnerships
PEMANDU builds strong partnerships with the
ministries across the Malaysian Government
responsible for delivering the NKRAs. Each ministry
has dedicated staff – many of whom attended the
original lab sessions – to work closely with PEMANDU
on implementing the initiatives. The PEMANDU team
will often work in the respective ministries, as Tan
notes, this ensures “that people do what they say they
were going to do, and they deliver on what they say
they are going to deliver, at the target budget, within
the target timeframe”.223
Methods
PEMANDU grounds its work on the Big Fast Results
method, an approach that was originally developed in
the private sector. The method helps monitor progress
of large scale interventions. PEMANDU often receives
visits from other governments interested in Big Fast
Results, and the team is working closely with Tanzania
and India on their efforts to implement the approach.
Performance Management & Delivery Unit (PEMANDU) 79
PS21
Office
“Staff suggestions were
floated up to the senior
management of each
agency for consideration.
When the senior
management started to see
good ideas coming up from
the ground they started
paying attention.”
Tay Choon Hong, Director, PS21 Office224
Where they are based
Singapore (population of Singapore: 5.4 million)225
Location in government
Central government
Mission statement
“PS21 is the Change Movement of the Singapore
Public Service. It encourages every public officer
to be open to change, and to find better ways,
ideas and possibilities to bring about improvement
and innovation in their individual work or the
work of the public service.”
What they do
Manage staff idea schemes, awards and
prizes across government
What defines them
Staff-led innovation
Size of team
43
Annual spend
Not provided
Launched
1995
Example of impact
An evaluation of PS21 estimated that over
a year it generated 520,000 suggestions
from staff, of which approximately 60 per
cent were implemented, leading to savings
of around £55 million.226 Leadership
Interesting Features
Khoo Teck Puat
Hospital won the
2013 Ps21 Gold
ExCEL award for
their Ageing in
Place project.
Image courtesy of
PS21 Office
Methods
80
PS21 Office (PS21) is a team within the Public Service Division
of the Singapore Prime Minister’s Office responsible for driving
change and innovation in the Singaporean Public Service.
Launched in 1995, PS21 started from the government’s desire
to develop more employee-centered public management with
the overarching aim of “preparing public services for the
21st century“. PS21 has implemented a range of government
programmes focusing on improving policy and service delivery,
encouraging cross-agency collaboration and recognising public
service innovation.
History
In 1995 the former Head of the Singaporean Civil
Service, Lim Siong Guan, felt that the country’s public
service needed to have an agenda in place to help the
country address emerging challenges to Singapore,
such as economic competition, geopolitical shifts and
demographic changes. Lim argued that, “the public
service must go from being a mere service provider
and regulator to being a catalyst for change.”227 PS21
was created in response to a mandate to drive change
across the entire public sector.
When first launched, PS21 applied a top-down approach
to change, with clear requirements for participation
and compliance imposed on every government agency.
However, PS21 faced resistance and critique from public
agencies, that the initiatives were too prescriptive.
Taking on board this feedback, PS21 has given agencies
more flexibility in executing initiatives.
The most significant shift happened in 2008 when
PS21 decentralised its approach and made individual
ministries responsible for articulating and implementing
the requirements for staff participation.228 While
acknowledging the limitations of the initial top-down
driven approach, Tay Choon Hong, Director at PS21,
maintains that making participation mandatory at the
beginning was a necessary ‘shock to the system’, which
brought staff-driven innovation on the agenda and
kick-started the development of a new mindset amongst
public officers.229
What it does
PS21 has been described as the most comprehensive
administrative reform to be introduced in Singapore,
working on a wide range of initiatives to improve the
quality and efficiency of public services and to boost
innovation.230 At the heart of the PS21 movement is
the ambition to improve the capacity of public officers
to develop ideas and solutions that ‘future-proof’ the
Singaporean public services.
The PS21 team consists of 43 people and is funded
directly through the Public Service Division in the
Prime Minister’s Office where the team is based.
One of the teams’ primary tasks is to develop and
implement programmes directly aimed at involving
and recognising public officers in increasing levels
of innovation in public services.
One of the most prominent initiatives introduced under
PS21 is the Staff Suggestion Scheme (SSS) (see text box)
- a method for public officers to suggest ideas for public
service improvement. In a single year SSS was estimated
to have generated 520,000 suggestions for public service
improvement.231 Other initiatives from PS21 include
working with all ministries on getting staff to set up
mandatory Work Improvement Team (WIT) projects –
teams of public officers who are working together
to collaboratively develop innovation projects.232
One example involved a fighter jet engineer in the
Singaporean Army who came up with a more effective
way of scanning fighter jets for ‘leaks’ after having
seen how his son’s optician used UV lights to scan for
scratches to the cornea. His idea was to use the same
technology to scan aircrafts, a method now widely
used by the army.
PS21 Office (PS21) 81
In another example, Chinese language teachers at
Guangyang Primary School developed the Teaching
Mandarin Through Kinesthetic Intelligence project.
The teachers created a new teaching method using
simple hand and body movements to represent the
different strokes of the Chinese characters and pupils
were taught to ‘act out’ the strokes and form Chinese
words in teams, which helped students increase their
learning. The project was rolled out in the school
through the entire lower primary level in 2012.
In addition to directly implementing programmes
and processes that make it easier for public officers to
nominate and develop their ideas, PS21 also runs the
annual PS21 Excellence in Continuous Enterprise and
Learning (ExCEL) Awards and Convention, which aims
to promote and disseminate insights on innovation
activities taking place across the public sector. It does
this by awarding annual gold, silver and bronze awards
to projects and individuals that ‘exemplify the spirit
of innovation’. For PS21, ExCEL is seen as the visible
symbol of innovation in the public service.
Every year PS21 facilitates a process where all ministries
can submit proposals that represent the work they have
been doing on innovation. Before deciding which project
to nominate, each ministry runs its own mini ExCEL
fair or convention to identify the best projects to put
forward. These projects then compete at a public
service-wide level.
Projects are assessed based on three main criteria:
level of innovativeness, impact and alignment with
the thrust of public sector transformation. The selection
process is managed by a committee consisting of a
mix of heads of services and mid-level project managers
and is currently chaired by the Permanent Secretary
for the Ministry of Law. (See box text for one of the
2013 winning projects – Ageing in Place).
PS21 also publishes a bi-monthly magazine, Challenge,
which promotes change and innovation initiatives that
are taking place across the public service. The magazine
is circulated to about 23,000 public officers while the
online version233 has around 67,000 unique visitors.234
An email featuring highlights from every new issue
is also sent to all 139,000 public officers.
In addition to its focus on enabling more staff-driven
innovation, PS21 also supports initiatives aimed at
improving the efficiency of public services. It develops
service standards and guidelines to support agencies
in delivering quality public services. It is also building
up a network of service practitioners across agencies
through regular sharing sessions, newsletters and an
online community. The office also works closely with
partners in the Civil Service College to run training
programmes for public officers on communicating
effectively with customers and coordinating with fellow
officers to deliver integrated services.
PS21 does not provide any funding for projects, as
these are typically sponsored by the departments and
ministries in which they are based. Where projects
need funding outside what the ‘host’ ministry can offer,
PS21 will assist project teams in requesting additional
funding from the Ministry of Finance.
Staff Suggestion Scheme
The Staff Suggestion Scheme (SSS) creates an
opportunity for any public officer to directly submit
ideas to improve public services. Once submitted,
ideas for improvement are sent to a Central Steering
Committee which is chaired by a Permanent
Secretary, where they are vetted and considered
for implementation.
Before the SSS, one of the big barriers to idea
generation had been the hierarchy in each agency,
where a senior manager’s approval could make
or break an idea. Alongside its primary focus of
increasing the flow of ideas to improve public services,
PS21 sees the scheme as a commitment to public
officers, that every idea is welcomed and that every
idea counts.
The next iteration of the scheme is a mobile app titled
Post ‘n’ Poll that allows public officers to nominate
ideas, which can then be voted on by all 139,000 public
sector employees via the government’s intranet.
The Post ‘N’ Poll app
lets any civil servant
report an issue or
suggest an idea.
Image courtesy of Nesta
82
Interesting features
Leadership
PS21 was initiated and driven by the Head of the
Singaporean Civil Service, Lim Siong Guan. Reflecting
on the development of the PS21 and the wider PS21
movement, Tay Choon describes how he sees the
ownership and drive from Lim Siong Guan, the Head
of the Civil Service, as one of the most important factors
behind the success of PS21, “He took it upon himself
as Head of the Civil Service to embody change. Year
after year, through many platforms, Mr Lim reminded
officers of the need to change and not just change for
change sake, it’s change for the purpose of making the
public service much better”.239 Building on this, much
of the success of the PS21 movement today can be found
in the ability to connect ideas from frontline staff with
heads of services, thereby getting senior public officers
to champion new ideas for improvement.
Methods
Whilst many of the leading examples of public service
innovation models we look at in this report focus on
involving citizens in developing new ideas and insights
to redesign or develop new public service models,
PS21 provides an interesting example of the potential
in creating systemic interventions that tap into the
knowledge and creative potential in public officers.
The staff suggestion and WIT schemes provide two
examples of creating functions within government
that enable more creation and better flow of ideas from
public officers while the ExCel award and Challenge
magazine seek to reward and incentivise participation
in these and other public innovation schemes.
PS21 ExCEL Gold Award Winner 2013 -
Ageing in Place
The Ageing in Place project was awarded an ExCEL
gold award in 2013 for its development of a high
potential health innovation. Initiated under the
Ministry of Health, the project provides holistic posthospital discharge support for patients and carers
in their homes. The rationale for Ageing in Place
came within a year of the opening of Khoo Teck Puat
Hospital in July 2010, as the hospital faced more
demand for subsidised beds than it could meet.
Faced with the reality that Singapore is one of
the fastest ageing societies in Asia, a team started
hot-spotting high consumers of bed days to identify
opportunities for intervention. A group of about 400
patients with three or more admissions in a six-month
period, consuming about 9,000 bed days (equivalent
to 1.5 wards) was identified.
The team conducted home visits to identify needs and
unarticulated problems that caused these patients to
become high consumers. Initial findings showed a big
discrepancy in care provision between hospital and
home, and studies showed that 70 per cent of health
determinants such as medical, social, environmental
and behavioural were modifiable.
The team went on to set up the programme, which
focused on deployment of community nurses to
provide post-discharge care in the patients’ homes,
personalised care plans, and nursing posts located in
community centres to provide basic nursing support
for early intervention. Results of the first 400 patients
completing a six month period of care showed the
average admission rate dropped from 3.6 times to
1.2 times per patient after the intervention.
Impact
The three main indicators PS21 looks at when trying
to understand the impact of its initiatives are the
extent to which it has achieved a culture change in
public services, impact on consumer satisfaction from
PS21 initiatives and number of attendees in PS21
events, such as the ExCEL awards. These are
tracked via internal surveys and research.
Studies of the PS21 movement in its early years
provide an estimate of its financial impact. A study
examining the period from April to December 1999
revealed WITs developing 14,228 projects, which were
estimated to have generated savings of approximately
£40 million.235 Alongside this, public officers used the
SSS to contribute more than 520,000 ideas, of which
approximately 60 per cent were implemented, leading
to savings of around £55 million.236 The total cost
savings from the WITs by 2002 was estimated
to be £78 million.237, 238
Khoo Teck Puat
Hospital won the
2013 Ps21 Gold
ExCEL award for
their Ageing in
Place project.
Image courtesy of
PS21 Office
PS21 Office (PS21) 83
Creating
the world’s
first Social
Innovation City
Methods
Seoul
Innovation
Bureau
(서울혁신기획관)
Where they are based
Seoul, South Korea
(population of Seoul: 10.4 million240)
Location in government
City government
Mission statement
“Using social innovation to improve
citizens’ lives”
What they do
Engaging citizens online and offline to
understand problems and generate solutions
for governments to develop and adopt
What defines them
Citizen-led innovation
Size of team
58
Annual spend
£5 million241
Launched
2013
Key Achievement
Applying the social media tools used
in the mayor’s political field campaign
to day-to-day government, rapidly
increasing citizen engagement
Interesting Features
An ear outside of City
Hall to symbolize
Mayor Park’s promise
to listen to citizens
Photo courtesy of
Kyungsub Shin©.
84
Seoul City Hall is undergoing rapid change. Led by a mayor on
a mission to revolutionise the policy-making process, the city
government is embarking on extensive civic engagement to
help identify and solve challenges.
Background
South Korea is renowned for its rapid innovation
and economic development over the past 30 years,
yet government innovation is a nascent field, seen
as counter-cultural and radical by many, which
means it is often blocked or avoided.
Despite these challenges, Seoul Mayor Park Won-Soon
is progressing with plans to turn Seoul into
an innovation-led Sharing City, engaging citizens
in the radical redesign of public services. To achieve
this vision, Mayor Park created the Seoul Innovation
Bureau. It is said to be the first city-level government
structure of its kind anywhere in Asia.242
What it does
Reporting directly to the Mayor, the Seoul Innovation
Bureau is a cross-departmental innovation unit with
58 staff members and an annual budget of £5 million.
The overriding principle of the Bureau is that citizens
are the main catalysts and sources of innovation,
whether that be in identifying problems, clarifying
issues or generating solutions. The Bureau team
captures and orchestrates this knowledge and insight.
Establishing Seoul as the world’s first Sharing City
was a key priority for the Mayor.243 The advancements
in online technologies and mobile phones have made
it easier for the city to engage with citizens and
companies, and to create the platforms for resources
to be shared.244 To advance the Sharing City agenda,
the Seoul Innovation Bureau oversees a range of
projects to tap into dormant assets across the city,
ranging from housing to hammers. Projects include:
• Tool Kit Centres that offer communities a shared
space stocked with infrequently used items such
as tools and suitcases for residents to borrow so that
they don’t have to individually buy and store them.
Subsidies are available to encourage residents to
create and manage one in their neighbourhood.
• The Generation Sharing Household service matches
elderly people who have spare residential space with
students in need of a place to live. In exchange for
housing, students help out their elderly housemates
with day-to-day tasks, such as shopping and cleaning.
• The Sharing Bookshelves project creates small
libraries in apartment blocks to enable neighbours
to share books.
• Open Closet was established to provide job seekers
with appropriate clothes for an interview. Open
Closet enables people to loan suits to job hunters,
with the additional option to provide advice and
guidance to candidates.245
From radical outsider to Seoul Mayor
Mayor Park Won-Soon had no experience in politics
before taking office, having never been a politician
or member of any of South Korean’s political parties.
Instead, he had a career as a public prosecutor and
human rights lawyer, as well as the founder of a
community foundation, a social enterprise and a think
tank. His election slogan was to become a mayor who
“truly changes the life of citizens”, striving to be the
world’s first Social Innovation Mayor.
Seoul Innovation Bureau (서울혁신기획관) 85
Citizens don’t just contribute resources; they are also
seen as the main driver of government innovation.
Seoul Innovation Bureau involves residents in many
aspects of decision making, for example, in budget
decisions, where 250 residents were randomly selected
to decide how £16.3m of the city’s £607.4m budget
should be spent.246 Citizens are also seen as a source
of innovative ideas. The Seoul Innovation Bureau
created an online portal established to solicit these
ideas, with citizens able to vote on entries, prompting
City Hall to explore those receiving the most votes
every three months.
Offline, the Seoul Innovation Bureau works with
departments across City Hall to support them to host
listening workshops with citizens and policy makers
to discuss particular topics. More than 6,000 of these
have been held — allowing the government to hear
from more than 600,000 citizens. There is also a newly
established speaker’s corner in City Hall for residents
to record a video on any topic, which is then uploaded
onto the Seoul City website. The Innovation Bureau
also works with departments to create a temporary
City Hall offsite, such as in a specific community or
area of the city, enabling government staff to become
immersed helping them to better understand the
issues affecting residents.
The Seoul Innovation Bureau’s remit is to solicit ideas
and to then work closely with agencies across City Hall
to put them into practice. Ideas from citizens that have
been implemented include an automatically updating
travel card for public transport. Another was
a ‘Pregnant Ladies First’ badge, suggested in response
to pregnant women being denied seats on public
transport, leading to City Hall distributing these for
women to wear when travelling throughout the city.247
Sharing bookshelves
in residential
apartment complexes
Photos courtesy
of Seoul Innovation Bureau
Impacts
The Seoul Innovation Bureau attempts to achieve
impact in two areas:
• Engaging citizens: soliciting ideas and suggestions
for improving public services
• Changing the culture of government: increasing the
adoption of suggested changes and improvements by
the relevant agencies and departments across City Hall
The Bureau does not currently have an evaluation
strategy in place for recording impacts of its individual
programmes, but it does record levels of activities and
outputs. For instance, with Sharing City Seoul, it
is measuring the increase in the number of ‘sharing’
companies and initiatives, as well as recording the
number of residents attending events and workshops
and suggesting ideas both online and offline. With its
second objective of changing government culture,
it views this as a longer term process, anticipating
that it will take many years to see a marked shift
in the workings of government.
Interesting features
Methods
The move toward a social innovation-led government
is a departure from the cultural and bureaucratic norms
of South Korean Government. One of the Bureau’s
key tools is social media. Mayor Park is applying the
social media tools used in his political field campaign
to day-to-day politics to help rapidly increase citizen
engagement. Mayor Park himself is also active online,
with over one million followers on Twitter and
Facebook, and often directly answering enquiries
from citizens.248
Alongside engaging citizens through social media,
the Seoul Innovation Bureau hosts policy workshops
before decisions are made, invites ideas through its
new portals, and promotes transparency by publishing
all mayoral conversations and other decisions and
discussions online.
86
Resources
Sitra
“…a change agent
in society which is
taking risk on behalf
of the public and
private sectors.”
Mikko Kosonen,
President, Sitra255
Where they are based
Helsinki, Finland
(population of Finland: 5.4 million249)
Location in government
National government
Mission statement
“Sitra is building a successful Finland
for tomorrow’s world.”
What they do
Influencing government policy,
designing prototypes and backing
new ventures
What defines them
A combination of impact investment,
research and practical programmes
Size of team
110
Annual spend
£22.1 million (2012)250
Launched
1967
Example of impact
Sitra estimates that its work
on sustainable energy has led
to around £1 billion in savings
for the Finnish government
Methods
Interesting Features
The Health Kiosk
programme aims to
increase access to
healthcare in Finland
Photo courtesy of Patrick
Rastenberg © Sitra
Leadership
87
Mikko Kosonen, Sitra’s president, describes how it
funds work in areas that other public and private sector
funders often steer clear of, saying “the public sector
tends to avoid risks and companies tend to invest in
short-term initiatives. Sitra aims to serve as the risk
taker for the public and private sectors to show that
change can happen and it can be very positive”.255
Sitra roughly splits its resources and activities between
two types of projects, with half spent on innovation
programmes that incorporate research and practical
experiments such as Taltioni (see text box) and the
other half invested in early stage companies.
With their innovation programmes, there are
three main phases:
1 The first phase uses different research techniques,
from desk research to action based research such
as ethnography to understand trends, opportunities
and challenges within a given area, such as
healthcare or community development.
2 Insights from the research are used to develop
scenarios or prototypes that illustrate how challenges
and regulatory hurdles might be overcome. In the
second phase, Sitra works with the stakeholders
of the new service, such as local communities,
institutions, and industry bodies, to turn prototypes
into practice.
3 In the final phase Sitra collects the key findings
and results, presents them to relevant stakeholders
and audiences, finds an exit-partner to continue the
‘concept-proven’ activities and spreads the new ways
of thinking and operating further in the society.
One example is From NIMBY (“not in my back yard”)
to YIMBY (“yes in my back yard”),256 a project that
explored how to increase community participation in
shared decision-making, resulting in the development
of Brickstarter, a crowdsourcing platform for citizen
participation.257
Sitra is Finland’s innovation agency, and is endowed with
public funding to enable experimentation and innovation
in a range of sectors, from healthcare to sustainable energy.
Their endowment has enabled them to work flexibly, helping
transform government policy to successfully impact the
Finnish economy and society.
Background
Sitra is one of the oldest publically funded innovation
organisations in the world. It was founded in 1967 as
an organisation of the Bank of Finland to honour the
50th anniversary of Finland’s independence. In 1991,
it transformed into an independent fund that reports
directly to the Finnish Parliament.
Since it was set up in 1967, Sitra’s mission has evolved.
Until the early 1980s, Sitra focused on financing
technological research and development. With the
emergence of public funding agencies serving this
purpose, Sitra shifted its focus to supporting venture
capital activities in Finland (which did not exist at the
time). In the mid-2000s, the venture capital market
in Finland had developed to such an extent that Sitra
once again decided to shift its focus toward its current
mission, namely social innovation and systemic change.
What it does
Sitra’s mission is to “build a successful Finland for
tomorrow’s world”,251 with a particular focus on
pioneering sustainable well-being, through achieving
three strategic objectives:
• Creating incentives for meaningful care and for
advancing new operating models and business
operations for well-being
• Creating the conditions for a resource-wise, carbonneutral society and for business operations advancing
towards this goal
• Advancing sustainable well-being and employment
based on new funding and operating models
Sitra employs 110 people,252 with primary funding from
its endowment, which totaled £535 million in 2012.253
The endowment provides nearly £24 million a year,
with all project funding and investment expenditure
approved by Sitra’s board.254
88
Building on the insights from experiments and
research, Sitra organises training and development
sessions for leaders from across Finland. The
overarching aim is to explore the structural and
cultural changes required in Finland to foster longerterm sustainable development into the practices
and management of economic policy.
The second area of Sitra’s work is investments. In 2012,
Sitra’s investment portfolio included 32 companies
across a range of sectors, from sustainable energy to
biotechnology, all aiming to achieve substantial social
impact along with a financial return on the investment.
Examples from their investment portfolio include
renewable energy companies AW Energy258 which is
developing wave energy solutions; Savosolar,259 which
works on solar energy; and biotech companies, such
as FIT Biotech,260 which develops new vaccines.
Impact
Sitra’s overarching goal is to positively improve Finnish
economy and society. Some of the strongest evidence
of impact is the uptake of its research in government
policy and in public service delivery.261 One example
is the Ministry of Employment and the Economy
using Sitra’s research to address barriers in the
uptake of solar energy and other renewable resources
amongst citizens and enterprises. Another example
is Sitra’s programmes that explore the development
of biodynamic and local food businesses; lessons from
which have informed the Finnish government’s local
food development programme.262
Taltioni - a practical programme experimenting
with new approaches to healthcare
Funded, created and promoted by Sitra, Taltioni is
an online service platform and database containing
information about the health and well-being of Finns.
Taltioni was created to help shift the focus in healthcare
from treating diseases to promoting better health and
well-being. The platform enables patients to store and
share any information related to their health, including
vaccination data, laboratory test results, blood pressure
measurements and even personal wellbeing information
such as a jogging and diet diary.
Patients can share these data with their healthcare
providers, caregivers and family members to provide a
whole picture of their health with ample background
data. Patients can use the site tools to monitor their
own health and well-being independently and to create
personal health programmes that are easily accessible
and monitored by both the patient and healthcare
provider.
Health Kiosks are
located in shopping
centres and other
public spaces.
Photo courtesy of Patrick
Rastenberg © Sitra
In addition to influencing policy, Sitra has achieved
impact through scaling new services and practical
programmes. For instance, its Health Service
Voucher has been adopted by more than 100 Finnish
municipalities. Another example is their work in
sustainable energy and energy efficiency. Collectively,
Sitra’s energy programmes are estimated to have saved
Finland £1 billion.
Sitra’s key indicators are determined individually
for each project, and may include the level of adoption
of interventions by government and external
audiences, changes to policy and legislation and the
extent to which projects have delivered cost savings
in government and achieved public or consumer
satisfaction, and the number of new businesses and
pilots generated. Due to its focus on energy and the
environment, Sitra also puts a strong emphasis
on tracking indicators in this area, such as reduction
in CO2
emissions and energy consumption.
Sitra’s progress is tracked using a customised “steering
panel”, in which each project has an explicitly stated
outcome and impact goals. These goals are analysed
on a quarterly basis, at project completion, and three
years after project completion to understand what
lasting impacts have been created. The methods used
are a mix of administrative data, user feedback surveys,
focus groups, qualitative interviews, questionnaires
or surveys, progress against a logic model or theory
of change, and external expert reviews.
Sitra 89
Interesting features
Methods
As mentioned above, Sitra’s mission is to ‘build a
successful Finland for tomorrow’s world’. The organisation
has evolved over the 47 years since it was established,
successfully reinventing itself to adapt to changes in
society and economy to ensure that it remains relevant.
There have been three main periods of reinvention.
After originally focusing on financing technological
research and development, in the 1980s Sitra recognised
that public bodies were emerging to serve this need so
it shifted its focus towards supporting venture capital
activities, which at the time did not exist in Finland.
In the mid-2000s, as the venture capital market matured,
Sitra once again shifted its focus, this time to its current
focus on social innovation and systemic change.
Sitra’s ability to reinvent its purpose and focus onto
emerging needs is often referred to as one of its key
characteristics. An evaluation in 2012 concluded that
“throughout Sitra’s existence, its role has been to make
new initiatives and to launch reform support processes
by acting as a pioneer in social innovation. At the same
time, it has become essential to abandon old operating
models and content, as other actors have entered the
fields opened up by Sitra”.263
Resources
With an endowment of £535 million, of which it spends
between £20- and £30 million each year, Sitra has the
financial capacity to take on large and complex projects,
such as its work on healthcare reform or renewable
energy solutions. This capacity was emphasised in
an analysis of Sitra programmes, which highlighted
that Sitra can ‘take initiatives and act as a forerunner
for new institutional or organisational innovations’,
which puts it in a unique position within the Finnish
innovation ecosystem.264
Leadership
Mikko Kosonen, President of Sitra, emphasises that
the governance structure of Sitra is one of the most
interesting features. Sitra’s main board is made up
of senior civil servants, including permanent
secretaries, and leading academics. Alongside this,
Sitra has a supervisory board made up of Members
of Parliament from the Supervisory Council of the
Bank of Finland, which monitors Sitra’s operations
and financial performance.
This creates a governance structure which is both
closely aligned and overseen by government officials,
enabling Sitra to stay relevant to political priorities,
but with the freedom to deliver new experimental
activities without budgetary delays.265
The Health Kiosk
programme aims to
lower the threshold
for healthcare in
Finland
Photo courtesy of Patrick
Rastenberg © Sitra
90
Team Partnerships Methods
“Our role is to take
organisations in
Australia on a journey
towards becoming
high-impact social
innovators.”
Carolyn Curtis, CEO, TACSI266
Where they are based
Adelaide, Australia
(population of Australia: 23.2 million)267
Location in government
Regional government
Mission statement
“To build the innovation capacity
of Australia’s social change sector
and help tackle our toughest problems.”
What they do
Practical programmes, challenge
prizes and training
What defines them
Co-production
Size of team
27
Annual spend
£2.2 million268 (£1.5m from government,
£0.7m from other sources)
Launched
2009
Example of impact
An evaluation of TACSI’s Family by Family
programme found it had a 90 per cent
success rate in improving family life.
Interesting Features
The Australian
Centre for
Social Innovation
(TACSI)
Family by Family is
TACSI’s most successful
programme to date
Image courtesy of The
Australian Centre for Social
Innovation (TACSI)
91
The Australian Centre for Social Innovation (TACSI) is a social
innovation lab with a mission to tackle some of Australia’s
most pressing economic, social, environmental and cultural
challenges. It attempts to do this by “cracking open the current
systems at crisis points”,269 through designing new services
and solutions in partnership with citizens and service users.
What it does
TACSI focuses its activities on two main areas. The
first is on ‘doing’ — working on practical projects that
solve problems for three segments of citizens: families,
older people and indigenous Australians. The second
focus is on taking the learning from practical projects
and using it to build the capacity of organisations inside
and outside of government involved in delivering public
services to work on social innovation.274
All of TACSI’s work is guided by a belief that coproduction, where citizens and professionals work
together to co-design and co-deliver projects, holds
the key to solving social challenges.275 The seed-funding
from the South Australian Government enabled TACSI
to test out its methods and approaches in projects such
as Family by Family (see box text) and use these to
convince the public sector of the value in, and potential
of, investing in social innovation projects.
In the design and implementation of projects, TACSI
relies on a number of methods and tools from business
and management, design thinking and social sciences
(see diagram opposite).
While each project is tailored to the specific context
and social challenge that the project is trying to
address, all projects begin with extensive research,
using ethnographic methods to observe and understand
service users and their lived experiences. Insights from
this research are used by TACSI as the building blocks
to redesign an existing service or create a new one.
To understand the feasibility of the new service,
the team develops prototypes of new solutions and
tests them out a on a small scale with service users
and public service partners. In its projects, TACSI
spends significant resources on identifying what
needs to change in order for the new prototype service
to be implemented.
Background
TACSI was established in 2009 as an independent notfor-profit organisation with £3.3 million270 grant seedfunding from the South Australian Government.271
The original idea came from the South Australian
Premier Mike Rann, and his creation of the Adelaide
Thinkers in Residence, a project providing a means
of generating new ideas for the state. Geoff Mulgan,
current CEO of Nesta, was the thinker in residence
between 2007 and 2008, and used his residency to
focus on ways of making practical social change by
transforming innovative ideas into lasting action.
He recommended that “a new institution to act as a
catalyst for innovation in South Australia and beyond”272
was created, prompting the launch of TACSI.
Brenton Caffin, founder and former CEO of TACSI,
described how the process of setting up TACSI
involved six years of engaging stakeholders and
finding inspiration from organisations like MindLab
in Denmark, Kennisland in the Netherlands and
Participle, the Design Council and the Young
Foundation in the UK.
The seed-funding for TACSI expired in 2013 and
the organisation has since then evolved into a selfsustaining not-for-profit organisation, funded through
grants and contracts with partners in the social,
private and public sectors.273
92
Design Business Social Science
Rapid Ethnography
Guided Interviews
Experience Prototyping
Paper Prototyping
Visual Methods
Business Model Canvas
Lean Start-up
Theory of the Business
Job-to-be-done
Strategic Choice Framework
Program Logic
Realist Evaluation
TACSI’s innovation tools
This involves working closely with the stakeholders
that ‘own’ the public services that TACSI is designing
new prototypes for, such as social care providers,
identifying what it would take for them to take the
project from prototype to mainstream service. This
includes identifying if and how old services could
be decommissioned to enable the commissioning
of the new service.
This process of implementation was originally called
Radical Redesign, however, Carolyn Curtis, CEO,
TACSI, says that it have since abandoned this name as
‘radical’ dissuaded public service partners collaborating
on the project.
Family by Family was the first solution designed
and delivered by TACSI. The project is a new model
of family support designed with families to address
the growing demand on crisis services and the
increasing number that are unable to manage
chronic stress and isolation.
TACSI worked with more than 100 families to tackle
the problem of stress causing family breakdowns.
This enabled TACSI to identify causes of crisis
and isolation and potential solutions. These led to
prototyping and later scaling the Family by Family
network, where families that have experienced
and overcome hardships and grievances are trained
and paired with other families currently in stress
but eager to make improvements.
One of the insights from its work with stakeholders in
charge of delivering main stream services was the need
for TACSI to provide clear evidence of the impact of its
work. In 2009, Australia had experienced a 51 per cent
increase in the number of children removed from their
families and placed in out-of-home care since 2005,
providing the financial and moral drive for the Family
by Family project.276 TACSI worked with external
evaluators who have estimated that for every £1
invested in Family by Family, it generates £7 of savings
by keeping children out of state care.277 This was one
of the primary reasons behind the South Australian
Government funding TACSI with £1.53 million278 in
2013 to grow and expand the service over the next
three years.279
In 2010 TACSI ran the Bold Ideas Better Lives
Challenge, which set out to identify some of Australia’s
most successful social innovations, by asking the
question “what do you think the big problems are
facing our society and how do you think we can solve
them?”280 TACSI received 258 proposals and ultimately
eight winners shared £547,000 of funding along with
mentoring support from TACSI.281 There were two goals
for TACSI’s challenge prize: first, to identify the most
promising social innovations and support these to grow
and second, to provide a quick way for TACSI to map
the Social Innovation Community to “get a sense of what
was out there”, without being restricted to a particular
sector, domain or issue.
In addition to its work on designing services, TACSI
uses its research to inform policy development. TACSI
is currently working with a number of Commonwealth
agencies to identify opportunities to improve transitions
from care and custody into adulthood. To understand
what can be done, TACSI is working with 18 to 21 year
olds who have exited care or custody and live in the
greater Adelaide area, to understand their hopes and
goals for the future and to see how services can help
or hinder their progress.
The Australian Centre for Social Innovation (TACSI) 93
Interesting features
Team
When setting up the organisation in 2009, one of the
early challenges was a lack of service design and coproduction skills in Australia. To address this TACSI
recruited staff internationally, bringing in service
designers from the UK to help get the first projects
off the ground and build the service design and coproduction skills within the newly formed TACSI team.
Partnerships
Although it operates as an independent not-for-profit
organisation, a key feature of TACSI is its strong
partnership with government. TACSI’s initial seed
funding from government and the political support
from the South Australian Government was crucial
in getting the organisation off the ground and helped
it develop proof of concept for its methods. An additional
£1.5 million investment from the South Australian
Government has helped further grow TACSI’s flagship
programme, Family by Family.
Methods
At the core of TACSI’s methods and approaches is a
belief “that social policy and programs can’t be tested
in laboratory conditions the way a vacuum cleaner
or a new drug can”.287 To address this challenge, TACSI,
with inspiration from social sciences as well as design
and business thinking, developed a co-production
methodology to develop solutions directly with service
users and those responsible for delivering them.
Impact
The Family by Family initiative provides the most
tangible example of TACSI’s impact in achieving its
goal of redesigning services. To calculate the impacts
of Family by Family, TACSI worked with Community
Matters, an evaluation company, and found a 90 per
cent success rate in improving family life for those in
the programme, generating significant cost savings,
estimated at saving £7 to government for every £1
invested in it.282 The data from the evaluation of Family
by Family helped TACSI receive an additional £1.5
million283 funding in 2013 from the South Australian
Government to help grow the programme.284, 285
Beyond individual programme evaluations exploring
service redesign, TACSI have found it challenging
to measure their impact on wider culture change
in public services, and the extent to which TACSI
is influencing the spread of co-production across
government. Carolyn Curtis notes, “It’s relatively
easy to build and measure short term satisfaction
through participation in workshops. It’s much harder
to change and measure long term behaviour of people
and the systems. When we work out how, we’ll be
clearer on what are the interim indicators of success”.286
Family by Family is
TACSI’s most successful
programme
Image courtesy of The
Australian Centre for
Social Innovation (TACSI)
94
VINNOVA
“We are supporting
companies and
organisations that
would like to test out
new ideas of how
they can become
more innovative”
Charlotte Brogen,
CEO, VINNOVA288
Where they are based
Stockholm, Sweden
(Population of Sweden: 9.7 million289)
Location in government
National government
Mission statement
“VINNOVA aims to strengthen Sweden’s
innovativeness, aiding sustainable growth
and benefiting society.”
What they do
Influencing government policy through research,
funding R&D, and backing new ventures
What defines them
Cross-sector collaboration
Size of team
200
Annual spend
£450 million (2013)290 (£225m from government,
and £225m from other public and private sources291)
Launched
2001
Example of impact
In 2013, VINNOVA supported more than
2,400 projects to promote collaboration between
companies, universities, research institutions
and the public sector across 11 strategic areas292
Resources Partnerships
Interesting Features
VINNOVA is based in
Stockholm, Sweden
‘Gamla stan’ by Björn
Sahlberg is licensed under
CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
95
Background
VINNOVA was established in 2001 by the Swedish
Government, as a government agency working
under the Ministry of Enterprise, Energy and
Communications. It was created as a merger of
a number of existing public agencies and funds
responsible for R&D funding, which the government
decided to bring into one organisation. In recent
years, VINNOVA has increased its focus on providing
funding for initiatives that increase the public sector’s
innovation capacity.
What it does
VINNOVA’s overarching mission is ‘the promotion of
Sweden’s innovation capacity for sustainable growth’.
It aims to promote collaboration between companies,
universities, research institutes and the public sector.
It has 200 employees and an annual budget of £225
million293 that was used in 2013 to support 2,400
projects across 11 strategic areas.294
The majority of VINNOVA’s activities are concentrated
on providing R&D funding across 11 strategic areas,
which are defined by the Swedish Government. These
strategic areas include finding new solutions to meet
the challenges of a rapidly growing elderly population
and exploring leadership and organisational processes
than can support and develop innovation capacity.
Some of the programmes involve funding research.
Others involve organisations applying for funds for
their development projects.
VINNOVA is Sweden’s innovation agency, funding
a large portfolio of R&D collaborations between companies,
universities, research institutes and the public, helping
boost the innovation capabilities of the Swedish public
and private sectors.
Based within government, a large proportion of
VINNOVA’s projects are delivered in partnership
with public sector organisations. Projects include
Attract295 which supports the building of sustainable
attractive housing in cold climates; another project, in
collaboration with Gothenburg Hospital, explores ways
to reduce blindness in infants.296 Across the portfolio,
58 per cent of funding is spent on collaborations with
universities and research organisations, and 28 per
cent on funding companies. The remainder of funding
is spent on funding projects with public and third sector
partners.297
In addition to funding from the Swedish Government,
a large proportion of VINNOVA’s funding comes from
the European Commission. VINNOVA has set up
a department in Brussels which helps broker relations
between European funding and potential partners
in Sweden, including academics and entrepreneurs.
What is particularly interesting about VINNOVA
is how, as a traditional R&D funding agency, it has
increased funding for initiatives that build the public
sector’s innovation capacity. This includes a commission
from the Swedish Government to create a strategic
work programme on using procurement as a driver for
more public innovation, exploring how government can
aide innovation and growth as a buyer and consumer,
and taking an active role in creating new markets and
enabling new business ideas. Innovative Procurement
X is one of the initiatives supported as part of this
project to demonstrate how public sector demand can
actively drive the development of innovative products
and services.
96
Led by Inköp Gävleborg, a Swedish company owned
by the Gävleborg county government, Innovative
Procurement X is funded by VINNOVA to explore
new ways of procuring meals for the elderly. Inköp
Gävleborg and its local government partners are
using participatory research with the elderly to
understand how meals could be improved, with the
aim of creating new models for procurement. By 2015,
lessons from Innovative Procurement X and similar
projects supported by VINNOVA will be developed
into more generic tools to support governments using
procurement as a driver for innovation.
Another area of VINNOVA’s work is helping to promote
the commercialisation and spread of ideas in the health
system. Through funding their Innovation Centres
and Test Beds programme, VINNOVA is supporting
health professionals to develop and test out ideas
within county councils and municipalities.
VINNOVA has a wide range of programmes
underway in a number of policy areas. This prompted
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD) to comment in 2012 that
VINNOVA is a “bold and risk taking actor” in the
Swedish innovation system. Yet the OECD also said
the broad portfolio is a potential weakness, with a risk
of spreading its resources across too many areas.
OECD compares VINNOVA to TEKES, the Finnish
Funding Agency for Innovation in Finland and The
Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) in
Austria. These organisations have similar remits,
but significantly higher budgets per capita.298
Impact
Previous studies show how VINNOVA’s long term
work on innovation policy is helping define new fields
of research, while also supporting and helping expand
programmes developed through collaborations between
companies and universities.299, 300 VINNOVA tries to
measure the impacts of projects it funds, but emphasises
that this is often very challenging, particularly as many
projects may show impact many years after the funding
from VINNOVA has ended. Going forward, VINNOVA is
seeking to develop a framework for more systematically
measuring project impacts.
Interesting Features
Resources
With a yearly budget of £225 million from the Swedish
Government, VINNOVA has a large financial capacity
to initiate projects and drive change at scale. All
VINNOVA-funded projects must be co-financed by
at least the same amount.
Partnerships
Building on its experience of funding R&D projects
delivered by universities and private businesses,
VINNOVA is now building strong partnerships inside
government to help develop new solutions. These
partnerships are developing as part of VINNOVA’s
work to test and scale innovative ideas in health,
and then their work to explore how government
procurement can drive innovation.
VINNOVA’s model of supporting
innovation in procurement
Innovation Centres
•Capture ideas from
individuals and companies
•Promote creativity
•User-driven innovation
•Creating projects
Testbeds
•Does it work?
•Does it provide value?
•Validate and demonstrates
•Create generic implementation
models
Innovation Procurement
•Identify innovation needs
•Challenge the industry
•Respond to the needs
of your organization
•Create new markets
VINNOVA 97
What we
have learnt
about the
i-teams
98 99
When setting up an i-team, a government must decide how large
it should be, where it should be “positioned” within government,
what resources it needs, what approaches and methods it should
adopt, who it should partner and collaborate with, and how it
should measure its impacts. Looking across the 20 i-teams we
studied, there are interesting patterns and trends that can help
to guide these decisions.
Methods
All i-teams use a range of methods. Some i-teams build
their identity and philosophy around the application
of a particular method, such as MindLab’s use of
human-centred design, La 27e Région’s “Friendly
Hacker” method, Performance Management and
Delivery Unit (PEMANDU)’s “Big Fast Results”,
or the New Orleans Innovation Delivery Team’s
application of the four-step Innovation Delivery
model to a range of city challenges.
What distinguishes i-teams is that they generally
adopt approaches that are unique within government.
For instance, The Australian Centre for Social
Innovation (TACSI) and Centro de Innovación
Social (Centre for Social Innovation) predominantly
draw on user-centred design methods, such as artbased tools or ethnographic methods. Open innovation
methods are also commonly used, with challenge prizes
being a key feature of the work of New York City
Innovation Zone (i-Zone) and Nesta Innovation Lab,
whereby solution providers outside of government win
awards, recognitions or contracts for their intervention.
Awards are also used by the Centre for Public Service
Innovation and PS21 Office (PS21) to recognise and
celebrate innovation efforts by civil servants, helping
to share innovative ideas across government.
Citizen engagement is both a mission and a method
for stimulating innovation across a number of i-teams,
most strongly seen in the Seoul Innovation Bureau
and the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics
(MONUM). In both instances, social media is a key
engagement tool. A commitment to open innovation and
transparency is common, such as with Open Mexico
publishing all dashboards publically online to enable
citizens to hold government departments accountable.
Interestingly, only MindLab and the Centre for
Public Service Innovation describe their office space
as being important to their work. Both believe that
neutral space, which is literally and metaphorically
apart from the day-to-day of government, helps to
engage civil servants to promote more creative ways
of thinking, whilst the other i-teams do not identify
their working space as part of their innovation toolkits.
The methods used by the i-teams are vital to
making their offer clear. Their work by definition is
experimental, novel and often contrasting to the ways
in which wider government operates. A striking number
of the i-teams have tried to clearly communicate how
they work, and the processes and issues they engage
in, helping to engage partners, make their offer clear –
and crucially, help demystify the innovation process.
100
What they do
i-teams use a range of tools, and undertake a mix of
activities, such as training, grant giving or evaluation.
They typically draw on a more diverse and unique set
of tools than those in wider government. The diagram
below shows the mix of activities that each i-team
undertakes.
Barcelona Urban Lab
Behavioural Insights Team
Centre for Public Service Innovation
Centro de Innovación Social
Investing in Innovation Fund (i3)
Fonds d’expérimentation pour la jeunesse
La 27e Région
Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics
MindLab
Nesta Innovation Lab
New Orleans Innovation Delivery Team
New York City Innovation Zone
NYC Center for Economic Opportunity
Open Mexico
PEMANDU
PS21
Seoul Innovation Bureau
Sitra
TACSI
VINNOVA
Citizen Engagement
Consulting
Evaluation
Grant Giving
Idea Developement
Idea Generation
Investing for Returns
Policy Change
Training
Other
Data not provided
Number of activities
undertaken by the i-teams
What we have learnt about the i-teams 101
What i-teams create and produce
As well as using a range of methods, the i-teams
also vary greatly in the different types of outputs
they generate. Written documents continue to be
one of the primary currencies of government, but
none of the i-teams rely exclusively on simply writing
recommendations. Instead, all try to influence change
more directly and are associated with bringing new
ideas to life. Their outputs can be grouped into the
following six categories, with many producing
more than one:
• Designing prototypes
A large proportion of the i-teams, including the
Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, the
NYC Center for Economic Opportunity (CEO),
Nesta Innovation Lab and TACSI, design and test
new prototypes. Their aim is to test models that
can be adopted by government.
• Backing new ventures
Some of the i-teams invest for a financial return
by creating new enterprises. Sitra has a dedicated
venture arm that creates and backs a portfolio of
health and clean-tech companies, while the Centre
for Public Service Innovation has a dedicated
incubation space for growing businesses.
• Evaluating programmes
The primary aim of funds like Investing in
Innovation (i3) and the Fonds d’expérimentation
pour la jeunesse (Experimental Fund for Youth),
as well as units like iZone and the Center for
Economic Opportunity, is to understand the
impact of innovative programmes. All of these use
rigorous evaluation to identify which innovations
should be scaled up.
• Policy influence through research
All of the i-teams do research of some form, from the
Seoul Innovation Bureau’s workshops to understand
consumer insights and help reframe issues and
challenges, to VINNOVA’s horizon scanning
to understand emerging fields and the Behavioural
Insights Team’s use of randomised controlled trials
(RCTs) to test ideas. As well as using this research
to develop and inform their own work, i-teams also
use it to produce broader recommendations and
guidance to government.
• Skills-building and changing government culture
Many i-teams strive to create a culture more
conducive to innovation in government by running
workshops, conducting training sessions, and helping
other civil servants to design pilots. La 27e Région’s
work on the La Transfo (The Transformation),
whereby they work with staff to build innovation labs
within regional government, is a leading example.
• Communications and marketing
Some of the i-teams systematise and spread
innovations by documenting the development of
specific solutions, promoting these to a wide audience,
and crediting the government officials responsible.
For instance, the Centre for Public Service
Innovation publishes the Innovations that Work
journal, detailing innovation practice and efforts
in specific areas of government, and PS21 has
a bi-monthly magazine circulated to 23,000 civil
servants to showcase and highlight work underway.
102
New York City
Innovation Zone (iZone)
40
Size and skills of the i-teams
The size of the i-team is linked to the scope and breadth
of its mandate. There is great variation in the team size,
ranging from five team members in the Mayor’s Office
of New Urban Mechanics up to 200 team members in
VINNOVA.
A team with experience in both the private and public
sector is an important feature of the i-teams. Most, if
not all, of the i-teams leaders have experience both in
government and outside. This mix of insider and outsider
knowledge extends to the core team, with staff actively
recruited with private or not-for-profit experience, as well
as prior knowledge of government. For both leaders and
their teams, this diverse experience helps contribute fresh
ways of thinking, with sufficient inside experience to know
how to navigate government and engage elected leaders.
There are a number of key skills that many i-teams
rely on. Some of these skills are relatively new and also
unique compared to typical public sector skillsets. La
27e Région’s multidisciplinary team combines social
research and design; the Mayor’s Office of New Urban
Mechanics includes experts in technology development
and coding; Sitra has staff with venture experience;
and MindLab’s team includes anthropologists. Some
i-teams, including the Nesta Innovation Lab, New
Orleans Innovation Delivery Team, Centre for
Social Innovation, and PEMANDU, deliberately
recruited a mix of staff with backgrounds in the public,
private and not-for-profit sectors to help bring different
perspectives to government. There are also more
traditional skills that are core to the i-teams, including
strong project management, data analytics, and
communications.
The degree of freedom i-teams have to recruit
talented individuals depends on their relationship
with government, and the HR systems in place. Some
are based within government and are confined to
hiring from the existing civil service pool, which can
be limiting. However, some, like the New Orleans
Innovation Delivery Team, have been enabled to
navigate around these internal processes and hire
talented people from outside government. The i-teams
that operate at arms-length or independently from
government, such as Sitra and Nesta, have much
greater freedom in recruiting.
Another recruitment challenge has been finding the
required skills locally. TACSI and PEMANDU, for
example, had to recruit internationally to secure people
with the necessary skills. Other i-teams invested time
and resources in building skills internally, helping
to create a cohort of new professionals.
Size of Team
(Number of People) Barcelona Urban Lab Behavioural Insights Team Centre for Public Service Innovation Centro de Innovación Social Fonds d’expérimentation pour la jeunesse
Investing in Innovation
Fund (i3)
La 27e Région
Mayor’s Office of
New Urban Mechanics
MindLab
Nesta Innovation Lab
New Orleans Innovation
Delivery Team
Open Mexico
PEMANDU
PS21
Seoul Innovation Bureau
Sitra
TACSI
VINNOVA
5 8
10 12
16
32 27
58
135
200
110
7
43
12
20 15
65
3
NYC Center for
Economic Opportunity
18
What we have learnt about the i-teams 103
Barcelona Urban Lab
Behavioural Insights Team
Centre for Public Service
Innovation
Centro de Innovación Social
Fonds d’expérimentation
pour la jeunesse
Investing in Innovation
Fund (i3)
La 27e Région
Mayor’s Office of
New Urban Mechanics
MindLab
Nesta Innovation Lab
New Orleans Innovation
Delivery Team
New York City Innovation
Zone (iZone)
NYC Center for
Economic Opportunity
Open Mexico
Performance Management
and Delivery Unit (PEMANDU)
PS21
Seoul Innovation Bureau
Sitra
TACSI
VINNOVA
Budget from Government
(per year)
Budget from other sources
(per year)
* Figures rounded to one
decimal place
1 BIT anticipate receiving additional
consultancy revenue from the
private and social sectors, and
other governments around the
world
2 Expected private sector match of
£9.7m ($16m) to be secured by
July 2014
3 Additional city funds are used
to implement the Innovation
Delivery Team’s recommendations,
but these are not regarded as part
of the Team’s budget.
Funding per year* (£)
4 This refers to the budget for
Coordinación de Estrategia Digital
Nacional, the strategy team which
hosts Open Mexico. Open Mexico’s
budget is not known.
5 In addition to its core budget
VINNOVA leverages external
funding of around 100% matched
funds from public or private
partners in most projects.
£9.1m (2013)
£0.2m (2013)
£1m1 (2014)
£1.3m (2013)
£2.3m (2013)
£37.8m (2013)
£91.7m2 (2013)
£0.6m (2013)
£0.7m3 (2014)
£0.5m (2013)
£1m (2012)
£15.4m (2014)
£1.2m4 (2014)
Will not disclose
£7.3m (2011)
£5m (2014)
£22.1m (2012)
£2.2m (2014)
£450m5 (2013)
£60.7m (2014)
104
Funding from government and
other sources
Government is the primary source of funds for the
i-teams, and the levels of funding vary greatly. For
example, Barcelona Urban Lab spends £0.2 million
a year, while VINNOVA has an annual budget of
£187 million. The level of funding is not indicative
of whether the team works at a national or regional
level, but it does influence how it works, a point we
return to later. Funding mechanisms fall into four
overlapping categories:
• Direct government funding
Many i-teams, including Barcelona Urban Lab,
NYC Center for Economic Opportunity, the
Centre for Social Innovation, the Mayor’s Office
of New Urban Mechanics, MindLab, PEMANDU,
and Seoul Innovation Bureau are funded like any
other government team or agency, with funding for
staff costs covered by their host departments. In
most instances, the team members are employed
directly as civil servants.
• Contract funding from government
Other i-teams, such as TACSI, receive grants from
government sponsors, while La 27e Région has
service contracts with individual French regional
governments.
• Endowment
Sitra and Nesta Innovation Lab are examples of
organisations whose primary funding comes through
publically funded endowments. The organisations
use a proportion of their endowments each year
to fund their work.
• Fundraising outside government
At least half of the i-teams leverage funding from
external sources, such as philanthropic foundations,
corporate partners, or matched funding as an explicit
requirement when awarding funding to external
organisations.
The total financing for most i-teams is often a hybrid.
As an example, 23 per cent of the funds supporting
the Experimental Fund for Youth came from private
contributions. The iZone and Centre for Social
Innovation have dedicated funding vehicles that help
government to leverage funding from external sources.
Other i-teams have an explicit strategy for matching
funds, such as the Nesta Innovation Lab, which seeks
to match expenditure from the endowment.
The i-teams use money in various ways. One group,
including Seoul Innovation Bureau, MindLab,
New Orleans Innovation Delivery Team, and the
Behavioural Insights Team, spend their allocated
funding on staff costs, with their support to government
as intellectual input and human capital. Another group
of i-teams, including the Nesta Innovation Lab, NYC
Center for Economic Opportunity, and Mayor’s
Office of New Urban Mechanics, provide funding
directly to support innovators, both inside and outside
government. The package of support typically mixes
finance with technical assistance in areas such as
business planning or evaluation design.
Focus and role in the innovation process
While all the i-teams promote and enable innovation
in government, they focus their efforts on different
stages of the innovation process.
The majority of teams focus on the early stages
of the innovation process exploring opportunities
and challenges, generating ideas and developing and
testing these. Typically, i-teams that are responsible
for more stages of the innovation process receive higher
levels of funding. For instance, the smaller i-teams
like Barcelona Urban Lab, La 27e Région, and the
Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics focus on
exploring and developing new ideas, but don’t have
responsibility for implementing pilots. Some – including
the New Orleans Innovation Delivery Team and
the NYC Center for Economic Opportunity – take
responsibility for growing, scaling and spreading new
approaches. Larger i-teams with more resource and
which are independent from government, like Sitra and
Nesta Innovation Lab, work to scale these innovations
and influence the wider systems.
Other i-teams, like the Experimental Fund for Youth,
and, to a certain extent, the Investing in Innovation
fund (i3), focus on what could be perceived as a market
failure. They specifically support the evaluation
of innovations in order to help build a case for the
implementation, growing and scaling of new types
of effective practice in government.
What we have learnt about the i-teams 105
Location in government and proximity
to executive power
An i-team’s proximity to government and executive
leadership is a question of mission and mandate. Some
of the i-teams are physically based in the mayor’s or
president’s office, with their agenda directly set by their
executive leader. These include the Mayor’s Office
of New Urban Mechanics and NYC Center for
Economic Opportunity. Although their mission
is not one of radicalism, the work they do is radical
compared to what else is happening in government,
with their closeness to government providing cover
and legitimacy for experimentation.
In direct contrast are those like Nesta Innovation
Lab which are at the other end of the spectrum, with
their independence from government, enabling greater
freedom to set their agenda to enable more radical
innovation in their work.
Others, such as Centre for Social Innovation and
the iZone, are based in a government department or
agency to actively support their wider mission, while
others, like MindLab and VINNOVA, are co-owned by
more than one department. La 27e Région and Centre
of Public Service Innovation are based outside of
government, but have their agenda set by or are
wholly funded by government.
i-teams create a safe space for governments who want
to do things differently. The spectrum of proximity to
government has different pros and cons in affecting
their ability to do this. Being close to government
leadership provides greater opportunity to stay abreast
of political priorities and a greater chance of affecting
them. Proximity to leadership also gives i-teams
authority and legitimacy to galvanise engagement
across the government, as well as providing protection
to try new things and take risk. Yet ‘closeness’ may
also constrain an i-team’s ability to experiment and
think radically, particularly true if the team is tied
to a risk adverse government.
Being too closely associated with the political sponsor
also creates challenges when power shifts. To some
extent every i-team has to renew its mandate, though
over time this becomes easier. Sitra has been in
existence for more than 45 years, MindLab has also
survived changes in national political leadership, while
the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics and
NYC Center for Economic Opportunity were both
closely tied to their past political sponsors and survived
when this leadership changed. It will be interesting to
see whether those, like Seoul Innovation Bureau and
PEMANDU, which are inextricably linked with their
current respective mayor and president who established
them, stay in existence when their sponsors leave office.
Proximity to executive power
Based in and agenda
set by President or
Mayor’s Office
Mayor’s Office of New
Urban Mechanics
New Orleans Innovation
Delivery Team
NYC Center for Economic
Opportunity
Open Mexico
PEMANDU
PS21
Seoul Innovation Bureau
Based within
the government
department or agency
which manages them
Barcelona Urban Lab
Centro de Innovación
Social
Fonds d’expérimentation
pour la jeunesse
Investing in Innovation
Fund (i3)
New York City Innovation
Zone (iZone)
Co-owned, with more
than one department
setting the agenda
Behavioural Insights
Team
MindLab
VINNOVA
Independent entity
but agenda set by
and wholly funded
by government
Center of Public Service
Innovation
La 27e Région
Independent
organisation with
government funding,
but autonomy to set
own agenda
Nesta Innovation Lab
Sitra
TACSI
Closest to executive power
106
There can also be movement in an i-teams proximity
to government. For instance, both Nesta Innovation
Lab and the Behavioural Insights Team started
out as government entities. Today, Nesta is entirely
independent as a charitable foundation and the
Behavioural Insights Team is an independent
venture, with the UK government as a shareholder.
In contrast, the Centre for Public Service
Innovation moved the other way. It was originally
established as a not-for-profit, but it has since moved
back to being an arms-length agency of the central
South African Government.
Partners and collaborators
None of the i-teams are responsible for public service
delivery; instead each team works closely with agencies
across government, and with external partners, to fund
or support new solutions, with implementation tasked
to the relevant government partner.
Partnerships inside government are often crucial. The
Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics explicitly
seeks out innovators across Boston, Seoul Innovation
Bureau and New Orleans Innovation Delivery
Team involve civil servants early in projects to ensure
that they are prepared to take on new ideas, and
Open Mexico takes this a stage further and recruits
innovators from across government to deliver digital
projects.
Those operating independently of the public sector,
like Nesta Innovation Lab, La 27e Région and
TACSI, also seek to build strong, collaborative
relationships with government.
Relationship management turns out to be a crucial skill.
It’s not enough for ideas to be good; they must have
champions and supporters in order to achieve impact.
Appetite for risk and failure
The process of innovation inevitably brings both success
and failure. It’s not always easy to acknowledge when
projects aren’t working. Attitudes towards taking risk
and acknowledging failure appear to be influenced by
culture and geography. U.S. teams are most at ease
in recognising failure; in Europe, this is less accepted;
and in Asia and Latin America, risk is explicitly said to
not be accepted. The boldest acceptance of failure is in
New York City. When Mayor Bloomberg launched NYC
Center for Economic Opportunity, he acknowledged
that a number of the team’s projects would fail,
providing explicit political cover for risk taking.
What we have learnt about the i-teams 107
Administrative data
Assessing progress against a logic
model or theory of change
Cost benefit analysis
Cost effectiveness analysis
Experimental methods, such as
randomised controlled trials (RCTs)
Focus groups
Participant observations
Qualitative interviews
Questionnaires or surveys
User feedback surveys
Other
None. We do not measure impact
Data not provided
Approaches to measuring impact
Barcelona Urban Lab
Behavioural Insights Team
Centre for Public Service Innovation
Centro de Innovación Social
Investing in Innovation Fund (i3)
Fonds d’expérimentation pour la jeunesse
La 27e Région
Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics
MindLab
Nesta Innovation Lab
New Orleans Innovation Delivery Team
New York City Innovation Zone
NYC Center for Economic Opportunity
Open Mexico
PEMANDU
PS21
Seoul Innovation Bureau
Sitra
TACSI
VINNOVA
108
Approaches to measuring impact
There is a growing recognition that impact
measurement is a vital part of government, with
robust data needed to ensure outcomes are being met
and money is being spent well. Yet it was an interesting
finding that impact measurement has not always
been a core feature of many i-teams.
All of the i-teams use a range of qualitative and
quantitative methods to develop and scope their work,
with some of these also using these methods to measure
impacts.
Although all the i-teams use research methods, only
half of the i-teams currently measure the impacts of
individual projects in terms of outcomes and savings.
Throughout the report, we have highlighted teams
that have robust impact measurement as a central
part of these i-teams. For instance, iZone, the
Investing in Innovation fund (i3), and the NYC
Center for Economic Opportunity, regularly
undertake large, complex trials to test different
interventions, Nesta Innovation Lab uses a Standards
of Evidence framework, whilst the New Orleans
Innovation Delivery Team and Open Mexico
use dashboards to track and communicate progress.
Yet for many, impact measurement remains a
challenging activity. Some i-teams reported lacking
the skills internally or the resources to fund evaluation.
For other i-teams, their funders and partners resist
measuring impact, not viewing it as a core part of
the i-team’s work, or not thinking it is useful or needed.
For those that do impact measurement well, it is seen
as a core and essential part of the innovation process,
helping demonstrate progress, highlight success, and
prove their value to others. There is much that can be
learnt from those leading the field, by drawing on the
methods they are developing and using.
There are also broader lessons for both i-teams, and
government sponsors to help encourage more and better
impact measurement. These recommendations
include the need to create standard definitions for results
and outcomes to enable easier comparison of results, for
data management systems to reduce the burden of data
entry and increase the facilitation of real time flow, and
the development and spread of innovative methodologies
that enable real-time data capture.
What we have learnt about the i-teams 109
How
to create
an i-team
110 Page Title 111
The type of i-team you create should be driven by
your ultimate goal – whether it’s to generate specific
solutions, engage citizens, grow innovation capacity
in the public sector, or encourage system level change
We found four rather different priorities for i-teams. Some i-teams aim
to solve specific problems linked to the leader’s priorities. A second group
prioritises involving citizens and businesses in open innovation, which
means that how the team works is as important as the results it achieves.
A third group aims to build the innovative capabilities of the civil service,
which points to a longer term approach, more below the radar, and more
tied into official processes rather than political ones. Finally, a fourth
option is to seek to change whole systems, linking changes in policy,
business models, technology and behaviour. i-teams can pursue multiple
aims, but you are much more likely to succeed if you’re clear from the
start which is your priority.
Here we summarise some
of the main lessons from
our study and provide some
pointers to anyone wanting
to set up a new i-team.
Forge strong links to executive power inside
government, leveraging internal and external
partnerships, resources and insights, to achieve goals
i-teams thrive best with close ties to their authorising powers – Prime
Ministers, ministers, Mayors, or in some cases senior officials. These
ties lend visible authority to the team’s work and enhance credibility
and influence. They make it easier to overcome barriers. But i-teams
also need to use influence as well as power, building partnerships and
persuading people why they should collaborate and engage. Crucially
they need plenty of guile to navigate the complexities of power.
Example
Nesta Innovation Lab is now an
independent charity but continues to
work closely with government, with over
half it’s work designed and co-funded
with government.
Example
PEMANDU is based within the Prime
Minister’s department and reports directly
to the Malaysian President.
112
Example
The Australian Centre for Social
Innovation (TACSI) recruited service
designers internationally due to a lack
of available talent in Australia.
Example
Centro de Innovación Social (Centre for
Social Innovation) deliberately hired a
mix of staff with experience in the private
and NGO sectors.
Example
Centro de Innovación Social (Centre for
Social Innovation) is part of the Colombian
Alliance of Funding Pioneers to leverage
corporate funding, helping side step complex
government procurement to more easily
develop programmes.
Example
Barcelona Urban Lab has developed
a low cost model, with all costs to run pilots
covered by the companies involved.
Build a team with a diverse mix of skills and a
combination of insiders and outsiders to government
The people in the i-team obviously make all the difference. Too many
consummate insiders and you risk low ambitions and incrementalism.
Too many brilliant outsiders and it may be hard to shift the system.
So the key is to combine insiders and outsiders, merging sufficient
charisma to generate energy and excitement, with strong management
skills to push ideas into implementation. The leaders of i-teams need to
understand the rhythms of government; they can always bring in design
and other skills to support them. As well as recruiting from business,
non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and academia, and from other
countries, i-teams can also use networks of associates to be drawn on for
particular projects, including specialists in fields like ethnography, data,
social psychology or citizen experience. But often there isn’t a ready supply
of innovation experts out there - be ready to train people on the job.
Develop a lean funding model for the team itself, and
attract secure funds from partners for implementation.
Money matters. i-teams can have their own budgets, but often work
better if they have to unlock departmental or agency budgets to fund
projects. Some successfully leverage corporate or philanthropic funding –
which gives them added clout, and a handful have secured endowments,
which allows them to act much longer term. The key is to mobilise funds
elsewhere in the system rather than trying to accumulate large budgets –
which risks giving the rests of the system an excuse for disengaging.
How to create an i-team 113
Continually demonstrate and communicate the
i-team’s unique value
i-teams are most likely to be seen as valuable if they bring unique expertise
and knowledge that isn’t available elsewhere in the system, as well an
ability to unlock money and mobilise political capital. They need to bring
distinct insights, for example into public attitudes and aspirations, and
create a culture that is visibly different to the surrounding bureaucracy –
experimental, risk taking, data driven, entrepreneurial, and open. The value
i-teams bring needs to be communicated to help survive changes in political
leadership there’ll be plenty of vested interests keen to see them fail.
Employ explicit methods, drawing on cutting edge
innovation skills and tools, alongside strong project
management to get work done
i- teams are more likely to survive if they use methods that are clearly
distinct from the normal practices of the bureaucracy. An explicit way of
working helps make the team’s offer clear and demystifies the process of
innovation. There are plenty of methods to choose from, including design
and data, stage-gated funding and open innovation. Be pragmatic about
which ones are most useful, and be sceptical of the evangelists, since often
the most successful methods are hybrids of different approaches. Despite
their diversity many of the i-teams share some common approaches, such
as moving fast from ideas to demonstrable small scale prototypes, plenty
of measurement and data, and using platforms or challenges to help draw
ideas in. All i-teams need to continually develop their methods, setting
aside time to reflect to keep them fresh, relevant, and effective.
Example
New Orleans Innovation Delivery Team
has a structured four-step model to
apply to all solution development and
implementation.
Example
MindLab uses its office space as a way
to engage government officials to innovate
outside of their day-to-day work.
Example
Open Mexico is developing an Open
Dashboard to communicate government’s
progress to the public, inviting scrutiny
and debate.
Example
Sitra has reinvented the organisation
and its purpose three times throughout
the fund’s lifespan to stay relevant to
current challenges to Finland.
Example
The Behavioural Insights Team has applied
low cost randomised controlled trials (RCT)
to a range of policy areas.
114
Example
The Mayor’s Office of New Urban
Mechanics (MONUM) has a rapid
prototyping methodology, developing
solutions in a matter of weeks.
Be clear on handovers early on, tasking
implementation and delivery to government
Once problems are identified and new solutions developed, there need
to be clear off ramps to ensure they are incorporated into mainstream
delivery. Identify your relevant partners in government early on, and plan
for budgets, and legal changes, ideally with named staff responsible for
delivery. Track handovers, and continue to monitor delivery to make sure
project impacts are sustained as the innovation grows.
Example
Barcelona Urban Lab have dedicated
civil servants across government as their
partners to develop pilots with businesses
in the city.
Example
Seoul Innovation Bureau solicits ideas
from citizens and works with the relevant
agencies across city hall to put them into
practice.
Example
VINNOVA supports local government
partners to develop new ways of buying
innovative services.
Example
La 27e Région uses a three month rapid
creation process, pairing civil servants
with researchers and service designers
to generate pilots to solve a government
challenge.
Example
Fonds d’experimentation pour la jeunesse
funds the evaluation of projects, helping
government select the most successful
to adopt and scale.
Have a bias towards action and aim for rapid
experimentation, combining early wins with longer
term impacts
All i-teams should have a bias towards action. New i-teams should move
fast to achieve early wins, choosing issues where the chances of rapid
progress are high, and avoiding unnecessary controversy. This will build
confidence and legitimacy in the team’s work and ability, and avoid setting
the i-team up to fail.
When starting out i-teams may need to be incubated in an existing
organisation to provide a base and back office functions, rather than
being set up entirely from scratch. Some of the i-teams have lasted a long
time, but most have a limited lifespan. The chemistry that makes them
work is hard to sustain. The most common unnecessary mistake is to set
unrealistically demanding timescales. But it’s not necessary to set up
i-teams as permanent capacities. Setting an initial timescale of three
to five years can helpfully focus attention on proving their worth.
How to create an i-team 115
Relentlessly measure impacts, quantify successes
and be sure to stop what isn’t working
i-teams thrive best if they are clear about what they’re trying to achieve
with a detailed logic model or theory of change. Measurable results can
be crucial to winning over sceptics – especially if savings can be quantified.
Earlier stage innovations need different proof points than more developed
ideas, and the work is bound to be a mix of sprints and marathons, with
small triumphs communicated confidently to provide a narrative while
bigger impacts inevitably take much longer to achieve. Admit when a
project is not working and end it. This is just as important as scaling
projects that work: it will build credibility and focus scarce resources
on what’s effective.
Celebrate success and share credit
There’s a famous saying that “it’s amazing what you can achieve if you
don’t care who gets the credit”. i-teams need to celebrate their impact,
and create credit for their main sponsors. Tying in leading officials into the
team’s success helps to make them champions, and allows them to share
some of the glory. But i-teams are likely to succeed best if they create credit
for lots of their other stakeholders too, including other officials, partner
organisations, people on the frontline and the public. Shared credit is the
single best guarantee that projects and programmes will be sustained,
and ultimately delivers more rewards to the sponsors too.
Example
The Investing in Innovation Fund (i3)
uses standards of evidence to help include
promising interventions alongside those
with stronger evidence, and allocates
funding accordingly.
Example
The NYC Center for Economic Opportunity
(CEO) actively decommissions ineffective or
redundant programmes to free up resources
to be used elsewhere.
Example
The New York City Innovation Zone (iZone)
uses mixed evaluation methods that are
proportionate to the stages of innovation.
Example
Performance Management & Delivery Unit
(PEMANDU) holds annual music festivals,
promoting its work and celebrating success
stories between the acts.
Example
Centre for Public Service Innovation
runs award programmes to celebrate and
promote innovative ideas across the South
African government.
Example
PS21 organises the annual ExCel awards
for the best staff-driven innovation project
in the Signaporean public service.
116
Endnotes
117
Barcelona Urban Lab
1 Nesta interview with Josep Pique, CEO, Office
of Economic Growth, Barcelona City Council, 6
September 2013
2 Population of Barcelona, January 2013 as
cited in Adjuntament de Barcelona, Estadistica. Available online: http://www.bcn.cat/
estadistica/angles/dades/tpob/ine/a2013/index.
htm#inicio [Last accessed 9 May 2014]
3 Confirmed in email correspondence with Nesta, February 2014, converted from €225,000,
conversion: €0.822143 to £1, as exchange rate
on 21/01/2013, taken from: http://www.xe.com/
currencyconverter/full/
4 Adjuntament de Barcelona (2010) 22@ Barcelona:
10 years of economic growth. Available online:
http://www.22barcelona.com/content/view/887/90/
lang,en/ [Last accessed 26 March 2014]
5 Nesta interview with Marc Fàbregas, CEO,
Zolertia, 6 September 2013
6 Urbiotica Barcelona22@ Innovation District.
Available online: http://www.urbiotica.com/
experience/waste-collection/ [Last accessed 26
March 2014]
7 Further details about Bitcarrier are available
online: http://www.bitcarrier.com/barcelona1
[Last accessed 9 May 2014]
8 Confirmed in email correspondence with Nesta,
February 2014, conversion: (Euro) 0.822143 to
£1, as exchange rate on 21/01/2013, taken from:
http://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/full/
Behavioural Insights Team
9 Nesta interview with David Halpern, Director,
Behavioural Insights Team, May 2014
10 Population of UK (2012), Office of National
Statistics. Available online: http://www.ons.
gov.uk/ons/taxonomy/index.html?nscl=Population [Last accessed 15 May 2014]
11 Confirmed in email with Owain Service, Managing Director, Behavioural Insights Team to
Nesta, 14 May 2014
12 Confirmed in email with Owain Service, Managing Director, Behavioural Insights Team to
Nesta, 14 May 2014
13 Civil Service World (2013) ‘Transparency chief
Paul Maltby on his new innovation role.’ Available online: http://www.civilserviceworld.com/
transparency-chief-paul-maltby-on-his-newinnovation-role [Last accessed 16 April 2014]
14 Dolan, P., Hallsworth, M., Halpern, D., King,
D. & Vlaev, I. (2010) ‘MINDSPACE: Influencing behaviour through public policy’, Institute
for Government. Available online: http://www.
instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publications/
mindspace#sthash.81xTklsf.dpufhttp://www.
instituteforgovernm ent.org.uk/publications/
mindspace [Last accessed 16 April 2014]
15 Cabinet Office (2012) ‘Government’s nudge
unit goes global.’ Available online: https://www.
gov.uk/government/news/governments-nudgeunit-goes-global [Last accessed 16 April 2014]
16 The Behavioural Insights Team (2014) ‘EAST:
Four simple ways to apply behavioural
insights.’ Available online: http://behaviouralinsights.co.uk/sites/default/files/BIT%20
Publication%20EAST_FA_WEB.pdf [Last
accessed 16 April 2014]
17 Nesta interview with David Halpern, Director,
Behavioural Insights Team, April 2014
18 Hallsworth, M., List, J.A., Metcalfe, R.D. &
Vlaev, I. (2014) ‘The Behavioralist As Tax
Collector: Using Natural Field Experiments
to Enhance Tax Compliance’, NBER Working
Paper No. 20007, Issued in March 2014, NBER
Programs. Available online: http://www.nber.
org/papers/w20007 [Last accessed 15 May
2014]
19 For further details on the tax letter programme
see https://www.gov.uk/government/news/
behavioural-insights-could-save-millions-ofpounds [Last accessed 16 April 2014]
20 Nesta interview with Owain Service, Managing Director, Behavioural Insights Team, April
2014
21 Haynes, L., Green, D.P., Gallagher, R., John,
P. & Torgerson, D.J. (2013) ‘Collection of
Delinquent Fines: An Adaptive Randomised
Trial to Assess the Effectiveness of Alternative
Text Messages’, May 20, 2013. Available
online: http://e-gap.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/
EGAP9_Haynes_et_al.pdf [Last accessed 20
May 2013]
22 Behavioural Insights Team (2012) ‘Applying
Behavioural Insights to Reduce Fraud, Error
and Debt.’ Available online: https://www.gov.
uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/60539/BIT_FraudErrorDebt_accessible.p df [Last accessed 16 April 2014]
23 Behavioural Insights Team (2013) ‘Organ
donor registrations: trialling different
approaches.’ Available online; https://www.
gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/
attachment_data/file/267100/Applying_Behavioural_Insights_ to_Organ_Donation.pdf [Last
accessed 16 April 2014]
24 Details of the pilot are available online - http://
blogs.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/behavioural-insights
[Last accessed 16 April 2014]-with a full report
of the UK-wide trial forthcoming
25 Nesta interview with Owain Service, Managing Director, Behavioural Insights Team, April
2014
Centre for Public Service Innovation
26 Population of South Africa in 2011, as cited on
Statistics South Africa. Available online: http://
beta2.statssa.gov.za/ [Last accessed 8 May
2014]
27 Nesta interview with Pierre Schoonraad,
Centre for Public Service Innovation, converted from ZAR22,500,000, conversion using
ZAR0.0560357 to £1, as of 21/01/2013, taken
from http://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/full/
28 For further details on the Police Nerve Crime
Cluster: South African Police Service (2013)
‘Leveraging innovation as a catalyst for enhanced public service productivity.’ Available
online: http://www.cpsi.co.za/conferences/2013/
Reddy.pdf. [Last accessed 17 April 2014] [1]
Mail&Guardian (2013) ‘Technology helps
find innovative solutions.’ Available online:
http://mg.co.za/article/2013-11-22-00-technology-helps-public-service-find-innovative-solutions [Last accessed 17 April 2014]
29 Mail&Guardian (2013) ‘Technology helps
find innovative solutions.’ Available online:
http://mg.co.za/article/2013-11-22-00-technology-helps-public-service-find-innovative-solutions [Last accessed 17 April, 2014]
30 Mail&Guardian (2013) ‘Technology helps
find innovative solutions.’ Available online:
http://mg.co.za/article/2013-11-22-00-technology-helps-public-service-find-innovative-solutions [Last accessed 17 April, 2014]
31 Mail&Guardian (2013) ‘Technology helps
find innovative solutions.’ Available online:
http://mg.co.za/article/2013-11-22-00-technology-helps-public-service-find-innovative-solutions [Last accessed 17 April, 2014]
32 CPSI generate and manage content for the
Public Sector Innovation Journal ‘Ideas that
Work.’ This journal recognises the importance
of knowledge management in innovation
33 Discussed in email correspondence with Nesta,
13 January 2014
34 Discussed in email correspondence with Nesta,
13 January 2014
35 Discussed in email correspondence with Nesta,
13 January 2014
36 Details on CPSI’s awards are available online:
www.cpsi.co.za/awards.php [Last accessed 15
April 2014]
37 For further details on the Innovation Exchange
see Open Innovation Exchange, (2014).
Available at: http://openix.theinnovationhub.
com//. [Last accessed 15 April 2014]
Centro de Innovación Social
38 Nesta interview with Natalia Currea Dereser,
Centro de Innovación Social, September 2013
39 Population of Colombia (2013) as cited on
World Population Statistics. Available online
http://www.worldpopulationstatistics.com/
colombia-population-2013/ [Last accessed 14
May 2014]
40 Budget confirmed via email with Natalia
Currea Dereser, Centro de Innovación Social, 9
May 2014. Total budget of £2,283,037 in 2013,
comprised of £1,425,459 government funding,
and £857,578 leveraged externally, converted
from US$2,346,790.27 and US$1,411,864.19
respectively, converted using $(US)0.607408
to £1, as exchange rate on 21/01/2013, taken
from: http://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/
full/
41 Budget confirmed via email with Natalia
Currea Dereser, Centro de Innovación Social, 9
May 2014
42 Nesta interview with Natalia Currea Dereser,
Centro de Innovación Social, Colombian Government, September 2013
43 Nesta interview with Nazly Frias, National
Planning Department, Colombian Government, December 2013
44 Nesta interview with Nazly Frias, National
Planning Department, Colombian Government, December 2013
45 Values confirmed via email with Natalia
Currea Dereser, Centro de Innovación Social,
9 May 2014. Converted using $(US)0.607408
to £1, as exchange rate on 21/01/2013, taken
from: http://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/
full/
46 Nesta interview with Natalia Leal Puentes,
Centro de Innovación Social, September 2013
118
47 Nesta interview with Natalia Leal Puentes,
Centro de Innovación Social, September 2013
48 For details on Hilando see http://hilando.gov.co/
[Last accessed 9 May 2014]
49 Nesta interview with Nazly Frias, National
Planning Department, Colombian Government, December 2013
50 Budget confirmed via email from Natalia
Currea Dereser, Centro de Innovación Social, 9
May 2014
51 Nesta interview with Nazly Frias, National
Planning Department, Colombian Government, December 2013
52 Nesta interview with Nazly Frias, National
Planning Department, Colombian Government, December 2013
Fonds d’expérimentation pour la jeunesse
53 Presentation by Mathieu Valdenaire, former
Head of Evaluation and Results Dissemination
Unit, Experimental Fund for Youth Direction
de la Jeunesse, de l’Education Populaire et de
la Vie Associative-Fonds d’expérimentation
pour la jeunesse) at the International
Workshop “Evidence-based Innovation: the
Role of Evaluation and Social Experiments”
Barcelona, 26 September 2013
54 Population of France (2013), as cited on World
Population Statistics. Available online: http://
www.worldpopulationstatistics.com/france-population-2013/ [Last accessed 14 May 2014]
55 Confirmed in email correspondence with
Nesta, May 2014, conversion: (€) 0.822143
to £1, as exchange rate on 21/01/2013, taken
from: http://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/
full/. The total budget is EUR 230 million euros
(£189.1m) across 5 years; we have taken an
average for each year
56 Based on presentation by Mathieu Valdenaire
(DJEPVA-FEJ) at the International Workshop.
Evidence-based Innovation: the Role of Evaluation and Social Experiments. Barcelona, 26
September 2013.
57 Gurgand, M. (2008) Experimental Fund for the
Youth. Available online: http://www.povertyactionlab.org/sites/default/files/documents/2%20
Presentation%20Marc%20Gurgand%20FEJ.
pdf [Last accessed 31 March 2014]
58 B. Crépon Crest, J-Pal Europe and The Abdul
Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. Available
online: https://www.povertyactionlab.org/sites/
default/files/Session%202%20-%20Youth%20
and%20Social%20Cohesion.pdf [Last accessed
1 April 2014]
59 Presentation by Mathieu Valdenaire, former
Head of Evaluation and Results Dissemination
Unit, Experimental Fund for Youth Direction
de la Jeunesse, de l’Education Populaire et de
la Vie Associative-Fonds d’expérimentation
pour la jeunesse) at the International
Workshop “Evidence-based Innovation: the
Role of Evaluation and Social Experiments”
Barcelona, 26 September 2013
60 Presentation by Mathieu Valdenaire, former
Head of Evaluation and Results Dissemination
Unit, Experimental Fund for Youth Direction
de la Jeunesse, de l’Education Populaire et de
la Vie Associative-Fonds d’expérimentation
pour la jeunesse) at the International
Workshop “Evidence-based Innovation: the
Role of Evaluation and Social Experiments”
Barcelona, 26 September 2013
61 Puttick, R. (2011) Ten Steps to Transform the
Use of Evidence, Nesta UK. Available online:
http://www.nesta.org.uk/library/documents/
TenStepsBlog.pdf [Last accessed 1 April 2014]
62 Confirmed in email correspondence with Nesta, May 2014, conversion: (€) 0.822143 to £1,
as exchange rate on 21/01/2013, taken from:
http://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/full/.
The total budget is EUR 230 million (£189.1m)
across five years; we have taken an average for
each year.
63 Confirmed in email correspondence with Nesta, May 2014, conversion: (€) 0.822143 to £1,
as exchange rate on 21/01/2013, taken from:
http://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/full/
Investing in Innovation Fund (i3)
64 Nesta interview with Jim Shelton, Deputy Secretary at the U.S. Department of Education,
September 2013
65 Population of USA in 2013, as cited in http://
www.worldpopulationstatistics.com/population-of-new-york-city-2013/ [Last accessed 8
May 2014 ]
66 Provided in email correspondence to Nesta,
May 2014; conversion: (US)0.607408 to £1,
as exchange rate on 21/01/2013, taken from:
http://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/full/
67 Haskings, R. & Baron, J. (2011) ‘Building the
connection between policy and evidence: the
Obama evidence based initiatives’, in Puttick,
R. (ed.) Using Evidence to Improve Social
Policy and Practice, Nesta UK. Available
online: http://www.nesta.org.uk/publications/
using-evidence-improve-social-policy-and-practice [Last accessed 9 May 2014]
68 Interview with Jim Shelton, Deputy Secretary,
U.S. Department of Education, September
2013
69 Interview with Jim Shelton, Deputy Secretary,
U.S. Department of Education, September
2013
70 Nesta interview with Jim Shelton, Deputy
Secretary, U.S. Department of Education,
September 2013
71 Nesta interview with Jim Shelton, Deputy
Secretary, U.S. Department of Education,
September 2013
72 Office of Innovation and Improvement (2013)
’Video Series Reveals How i3 Science Project
is Unfolding’. Available online: http://www.
ed.gov/edblogs/oii/2013/12/video-series-revealshow-i3-science-project-is-unfolding/. [Last
accessed 15 April 2014]
73 Colorado Legacy Foundation (2013) ’Program
to close achievement gap celebrates record
gains’. Available online: http://colegacy.
org/2013/11/program-to-close-achievementgap-celebrates-record-gains/. [Last accessed 15
April 2014]
74 Exchange rate on 21/01/2013, taken from:
http://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/full/
75 U.S. Department of Education (2013)
‘U.S. Department of Education Announces
Highest-Rated Applications for Investing
in Innovation 2013 Competition’. Available
online: http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/
us-department-education-announces-highest-rated-applications-investing-innovatio.
[Last accessed 15 April 2014]
76 Discussed in email correspondence with Nesta,
5 February 2014
77 Peterson, J & K. Smith (2011) ‘Supporting and
Scaling Change: Lessons from the first round
of the investing in innovation (i3) program.’
Available online: http://www.edweek.org/
media/belwetherreport-37i3.pdf [Last accessed
15 April 2014]
78 Nesta interview with Nadya Chinoy Dabby,
the Department of Education’s Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement,
U.S. Department of Education, September
2013
79 Haskings, R. & Baron, J. (2011) ‘Building the
connection between policy and evidence: the
Obama evidence based initiatives’, in Puttick,
R. (ed.) Using Evidence to Improve Social
Policy and Practice. Nesta UK, p42
80 Interview with Jim Shelton, Deputy Secretary,
U.S. Department of Education, September
2013
La 27e Région
81 Nesta interview with Stephane Vincent, Director, La 27e Région, 29 August 2013
82 Population of France (2013), as cited on World
Population Statistics. Available online: http://
www.worldpopulationstatistics.com/france-population-2013/ [Last accessed 14 May 2014]
83 Confirmed in email correspondence with Nesta, November 2013, conversion: (€) 0.822143
to £1, as exchange rate on 21/01/2013, taken
from: http://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/
full/
84 Nesta interview with Stephane Vincent, Director, La 27e Région, 29 August 2013
85 Jégou, F., Vincent, S., Thevenet, R. & Lochard,
A. (2013) ‘Friendly hacking into the public sector: co-creating public policies within regional
governments.’ Available online: http://www.
slideshare.net/27eregion/friendly-hacking-into-public-sector [Last accessed 16 April 2014]
86 This relationship is formalised in a contract
signed between La 27e Région and its regional
government partners before any project which
specifies the process, political backing of the
project and the necessity of open source documentation. La 27e Région see the contract as a
powerful tool in maintaining the right project
synergies throughout the project
87 Nesta interview with Stephane Vincent, Director, La 27e Région, 29 August 2013
88 Confirmed in email correspondence with Nesta, November 2013, conversion: (€) 0.822143
to £1, as exchange rate on 21/01/2013, taken
from: http://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/
full/
Endnotes 119
Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics
89 Nesta interview with Nigel Jacob, Co-chair,
Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, 9
October 2013
90 Population of Boston (2013), as cited in
U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Department of
Commerce. Available online: http://quickfacts.
census.gov/qfd/states/25/2507000.html [Last
accessed 14 May 2014]
91 Total budget over two years: $1,800,000
($1,000,000 from government, and $800,000
from external sources), average taken for
one year. MONUM’s budget is a mixture of
foundation, city and other public funding. In
addition to staff salaries, the office has drawn
on foundation and public grants totalling over
$800,000 over the last two years, which have
gone to either the city or to partners. In addition, the office has used just under $1 million
in capital funding over that time period for
work on specific projects. Budget confirmed via
email with Chris Osgood, Co-chair, MONUM,
19 May 2014
92 Mayor Menino was the longest serving mayor
in Boston’s history
93 Nesta interview with Nigel Jacob & Chris Osgood, Co-chairs, Mayor’s Office of New Urban
Mechanics, 9 October 2014
94 Government Innovators Network, Harvard
University Kennedy School of Government
(2014). Available online: http://www.innovations.harvard.edu//showcase.html?id=2849471
[Last accessed 15 April 2014]
95 Nesta interview with Chris Osgood, Co-chair,
Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, 9
October 2014
96 MONUM Overview (2013) Civic Design for
Civic Technology. Available online: http://www.
slideshare.net/nsjacob/monum-overview-new
[Last accessed 15 April 2014]
97 Nesta interview with Nigel Jacob & Chris Osgood, Co-chairs, Mayor’s Office of New Urban
Mechanics, 9 October 2014
98 As quoted by Chris Osgood at CityLab, October
2013
99 Baldwin-Phillipi, J. et al. (2014). Design
Action Research within Government: A Guide.
(DARG, Engagement Lab, MONUM, MacArthur Foundation). Available online: http://
engagementgamelab.org/pdfs/darg.pdf. [Last
accessed 15 April 2014]
100 Autiknow was developed by a team from Technology for Autism Now, a non-profit focused
on using technology to improve the lives of
people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD)
and those around them. Further details about
Autiknow is available online: http://autiknow.
com/ [Last accessed 14 May 2014]
101 Nesta interview with Chris Osgood, Co-chair,
Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, 9
October 2014
102 Nesta interview with Nigel Jacobs, Co-chair,
Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, 9
October 2014
103 Information provided in Nesta’s i-team Impact
Survey, 12 May 2014
104 Information provided in Nesta’s i-team Impact
Survey, 12 May 2014
105 This symbiotic relationship, whereby City
Hall receives dedicated research support,
and academics are given access to real life
challenges, is quite novel, and a different
government-academia relationship to that seen
in other i-teams in Europe and elsewhere
106 Nigel Jacobs quoted in Georges, G., GlynnBurke, T. & McGrath A. (2013). ‘Improving the
Local Landscape for Innovation Part 2: Framework for an Innovative Jurisdiction.’ Available
online: http://www.innovations.harvard.edu/
cache/documents/28496/2849663.pdf. p. 18.
[Last accessed 15 April 2014]
107 Nesta interview with Nigel Jacob, Co-chair,
Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, 9
October 2014
MindLab
108 Nesta interview with Christian Bason, Director, MindLab, July 2013
109 Population of Denmark in 2012, as cited in The
Official Website of Denmark, http://denmark.
dk/en/quick-facts/facts/ [Last accessed 9 May
2014]
110 Confirmed by MindLab in email to Nesta,
May 2014. Conversion 0.822143E to £1 as of
21/01/2013, taken from http://www.xe.com/
currencyconverter/full/
111 Vibeke Cartensen, H, & Bason, C. (2012)
Powering Collaborative Policy Innovation:
Can Innovation Labs Help? ‘The Innovation
Journal: The Public Sector Innovation Journal.’
Vol. 17, No. 1, Article 4, p.7
112 MindLab (2014) ‘The History of MindLab.’
Available online: http://www.mind-lab.dk/en/
about_mindlab/the_history_of_-mindlab [Last
accessed 15 April 2014]
113 Nesta interview with Runa Sabroe, Project
Manager, MindLab, August 2013
114 MindLab (2014) About MindLab. Available online: http://www.mind-lab.dk/en/about_mindlab
[Last accessed 15 April 2014]
115 Further details about MindLab’s strategy and
values are available online: http://www.mindlab.dk/en/about_mindlab/strategy_and_values
[Last accessed 9 May 2014]
116 MindLab (2014) The History of MindLab.
Available online: http://www.mind-lab.dk/en/
about_mindlab/the_history_of_-mindlab [Last
accessed 15 April 2014]
117 MindLab (2012). ‘MindLab Result Report 2011-
12: From insight to change.’ Available online:
http://www.mind-lab.dk/assets/856/_RSRAPPORT_ENG_013.pdf [Last accessed 15 April
2014]
118 MindLab has method cards available for download, see MindLab (2014). Methods. Available
online: http://www.mind-lab.dk/en/methods.
[Last accessed 15 April 2014]
119 MindLab (2013) ‘When little things make a
big difference’. Available online: http://www.
mind-lab.dk/en/cases/when-little-things-makea-big-difference [Last accessed 17 April 2014]
120 For further details about MindLab’s work with
young people and their personal finance, see
http://www.mind-lab.dk/en/cases/unges-oekonomiske-forstaaelse [Last accessed 17 April
2014]
121 MindLab (2013) ‘Dialog promotes growth
team’s recommendations to the government’.
Available online: http://mind-lab.dk/en/cases/
dialog-promotes-growth-teams-recommendations-to-the-government [Last accessed 15
April 2014]
122 MindLab (2013) ‘New industry code website
reaps rewards for the authorities and businesses’. Accessed online: http://www.mind-lab.dk/
en/cases/nyt-branchekodesite-hoester-gevinster-baade-hos-myndigheder-og-virksomheder
[Last accessed 17 April 2014]
123 MindLab (2013) ‘New industry code website
reaps rewards for the authorities and businesses’. Accessed online: http://www.mind-lab.dk/
en/cases/nyt-branchekodesite-hoester-gevinster-baade-hos-myndigheder-og-virksomheder
[Last accessed 17 April 2014]
124 Review of project by Helsinki Design Lab.
Available online: http://www.helsinkidesignlab.
org/peoplepods/themes/hdl/downloads/Legible_Practises.pdf [Last accessed 9 May 2014]
125 MindLab interview with project manager, details available on the MindLab website: http://
mind-lab.dk/en/cases/nyt-branchekodesite-hoester-gevinster-baade-hos-myndigheder-og-virksomheder [Last accessed 9 May 2014]
126 For more details, see Bason, C. (2010).’Leading
Public Sector Innovation: Co-creating for a
better society’. 1st ed. The Policy Press, UK
127 Case study in forthcoming Bason (ed., 2014)
Design for Policy
128 Review of project by Helsinki Design Lab
http://www.helsinkidesignlab.org/peoplepods/
themes/hdl/downloads/Legible_Practises.pdf
[Last accessed 9 May 2014]
129 MindLab interview with project manager, details available on the MindLab website: http://
mind-lab.dk/en/cases/nyt-branchekodesite-hoester-gevinster-baade-hos-myndigheder-og-virksomheder [Last accessed 9 May 2014]
130 Nesta interview with Christian Bason, Director, MindLab, July 2013
131 Nesta interview with Jesper Christiansen,
Research Manager, MindLab, July 2013
132 Nesta interview with Christian Bason, Director, MindLab, July 2013
133 Nesta interview with Christian Bason, Director, MindLab, July 2013
Nesta Innovation Lab
134 Interview with Helen Goulden, Executive
Director, Nesta Innovation Lab, April 2014
135 Population of UK (2012), Office of National
Statistics. Available online: http://www.ons.
gov.uk/ons/taxonomy/index.html?nscl=Population [Last accessed 15 May 2014]
136 Further details about the Nesta Innovation
Lab available online: www.nesta.org.uk [Last
accessed 15 May 2014]
120
137 Further details about Digital Makers available
online: http://www.nesta.org.uk/project/digital-makers [Last accessed 15 May 2014]
138 Further details about the Centre for Social
Action Innovation Fund available online: http://
www.nesta.org.uk/project/centre-social-action-innovation-fund [Last accessed 15 May
2014]
139 Nesta (2010) ‘Big Green Challenge Final
Evaluation Report’. Available online: http://
www.nesta.org.uk/publications/big-green-challenge-final-evaluation-report [Last accessed 15
May 2014]
140 Further details about the Centre for Challenge
prizes available online: http://www.nesta.org.
uk/sites/default/files/the_business_case_for_
people_powered_health.pdf [Last accessed 15
May 2014]
141 Nesta (2013) ‘Business Case for People
Powered Health’. Available online: http://www.
nesta.org.uk/sites/default/files/the_business_
case_for_people_powered_health.pdf [Last
accessed 15 May 2014]
142 Puttick, R. & Ludlow, J. (2013) ‘Standards of
Evidence: an approach to balance innovation
with the need for evidence’, Nesta UK, http://
www.nesta.org.uk/publications/nesta-standards-evidence [Last accessed 16 May 2014]
143 Interview with Helen Goulden, Executive
Director, Nesta Innovation Lab, April 2014
New Orleans Innovation Delivery Team
144 Interview with Mitch Landrieu, Mayor, City of
New Orleans
145 Population of New Orleans in 2012, as cited
in United States Census Bureau. Available
online: http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/
states/22/2255000.html [Last accessed 9 June
2014]
146 This funding includes grant funding from
Bloomberg Philanthropies along with matching
funds to support the team. Additional city
funds are used to implement the Innovation
Delivery Team’s recommendations, but these
are not regarded as part of the Team’s budget
147 NYU Wagner Innovation Labs (2012) ‘Getting
to Innovation: How Cities are Rethinking
Municipal Governance’, p.1; Available online:
http://wagner.nyu.edu/files/labs/NYUWagner-BloombergIdeation1.pdf [Last accessed 16
April 2014]
148 Mike Bloomberg (2011) ‘Bloomberg Philanthropies to Fund Innovation Delivery
Teams in 5 Cities.’ Available online: http://
www.mikebloomberg.com/index.cfm?objectid=28464D06-C29C-7CA2-FB0C8CA243578BE3 [Last accessed 16 April 2014]
149 Mike Bloomberg (2011) ‘Bloomberg Philanthropies to Fund Innovation Delivery
Teams in 5 Cities.’ Available online: http://
www.mikebloomberg.com/index.cfm?objectid=28464D06-C29C-7CA2-FB0C8CA243578BE3 [Last accessed 16 April 2014]
150 Katie Appel Duda, Government Innovation
Team at Bloomberg Philanthropies speaking at
CityLab 2013
151 For details on how to structure these engagement techniques see p. 33 – 39 of Bloomberg
Philanthropies (2014) Transform Your City
Through Innovation: the Innovation Delivery
Model for making it happen. p. 33 – 39;
Available online: http://www.bloomberg.org/
db/bloomberg_dragonfly/da90277ec06184fabba72df8c75d8a4c/IDT%20Playbook%20full.pdf
[Last accessed 16 April 2014]
152 The Times-Picayune (2014) ‘New Orleans murders fall again in 2013.’ Available online: http://
www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2014/01/2013_
new_orleans_murder_rate_d.html [Last
accessed 9 June 2014]
153 Interview with Charles West, Innovation
Delivery Team Director, City of New Orleans
New York City Innovation Zone (iZone)
154 Population of New York in 2013, as cited in
http://www.worldpopulationstatistics.com/population-of-new-york-city-2013/ [Last accessed 8
May 2014]
155 Confirmed in email correspondence with iZone,
May 2014. Converted from $15,0000 ($10,5000
government funding and $4,500 other sources)
Currency converted using $ 0.607408 To £1 as
on * as of 21/01/2013, taken from http://www.
xe.com/currencyconverter/full/
156 Data provided in Nesta Impact Survey, February 2014. Currency converted using $ 0.607408
To £1 as on * as of 21/01/2013, taken from
http://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/full/
157 Historically, the school system was governed
by a Board of Education, and when Mike
Bloomberg was elected Mayor the city transitioned governance under the Mayor, a trend
also seen across the USA. This meant that the
Mayor was able to appoint the Chancellor, who
acts as the day-to-day manager of the system
158 Interview with Andrea Coleman, former CEO,
Office of Innovation, NYC Department of
Education, July 2013
159 Interview with Andrea Coleman, former CEO,
Office of Innovation, NYC Department of
Education, July 2013
160 Interview with Andrea Coleman, former CEO,
Office of Innovation, NYC Department of
Education, July 2013
161 For more information about the Essential
Allies Challenge see: http://www.izone360.org/
essential-allies.html [Last accessed 14 January
2014]
162 New Schools Venture Fund (2007) Available
online: http://www.newschools.org/venture/
school-of-one [Last accessed 15 April, 2014]
163 For more information on the NYC School Gap
App Challenge see : http://vimeo.com/72068230
[Last accessed 15 April 2014]
164 For more details on the Schools Choice Design
Challenge see: http://izonenyc.org/?project=innovate-nyc-schools [Last accessed 15 April
2014]
165 Waters, M. (2013) ‘Grading the Innovate NYC
Experience How NYC teachers helped this
Boston-based startup refine its product.’ Available online: https://www.edsurge.com/n/2013-
12-03-grading-the-innovatenyc-experience
[Last accessed 15 April 2014]
166 Medlock, L. (2013) ‘Innovate NYC Schools
Aims to Connect Educators & Entrepreneurs
Second phase of Gap App Challenge focuses
on ‘how’ things get done.’ Available online:
https://www.edsurge.com/n/2013-10-17-innovatenyc-aims-to-connect-educators-entrepreneurs [Last accessed 15 April 2014]
167 Data provided in Nesta Impact Survey, February 2014
168 Data provided in Nesta Impact Survey, February 2014. Currency converted using $ 0.607408
To £1 as on * as of 21/01/2013, taken from
http://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/full/
NYC Center for Economic Opportunity
169 Nesta interview with Kristin Morse, former
Executive Director, NYC Center for Economic
Opportunity, July 2013
170 Population of New York in 2013, as cited in
http://www.worldpopulationstatistics.com/population-of-new-york-city-2013/ [Last accessed 8
May 2014]
171 Confirmed in email correspondence with Nesta, May 2014, conversion: ($)0.607408 to £1,
as exchange rate on 21/01/2013, taken from:
http://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/full/
172 Confirmed in email correspondence with
Nesta, 14 May 2014
173 NYC Center for Economic Opportunity (2011)
‘Local and National Impact’. Available online:
http://www.nyc.gov/html/ceo/downloads/pdf/
annual_report_2012.pdf [Last accessed 15
April 2014]
174 Confirmed in email correspondence with Nesta, May 2014, conversion: (US)0.607408 to £1,
as exchange rate on 21/01/2013, taken from:
http://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/full/
175 Quoted by Linda Gibbs, Deputy Mayor for
Health and Human Services, New York,
CityLab, 2013
176 Of those that have been decommissioned, six
were one-time investments, four were pilots
that ended, two had their content changed and
seven were deemed to be weak programme
models or poorly executed. Based on a slide
from Linda Gibb’s CityLab 2013 presentation
177 For more details about CUNY ASAP see: http://
www.cuny.edu/academics/programs/notable/
asap/about.html [Last accessed 15 April 2014]
178 The City University of New York (2014) ‘Accelerated Study In Associate Programs’. Available
online: http://www.cuny.edu/academics/
programs/notable/asap/about/evaluation.html.
[Last accessed 15 April 2014]
179 The City University of New York (2014) ‘Accelerated Study In Associate Programs’. Available
online: http://www.cuny.edu/academics/
programs/notable/asap/about/evaluation.html.
[Last accessed 15 April 2014]
180 For further details on CEO’s involvement in
the Social Innovation Fund see: http://www.
nyc.gov/html/ceo/html/sif/sif.shtml [Last
accessed 8 May 2014]
Endnotes 121
181 NYC Center for Economic Opportunity (2014)
‘Community Partners (CBO Outreach)’.
Available online: http://www.nyc.gov/html/ceo/
downloads/pdf/appendixb_cbooutreach.pdf.
[Last accessed 15 April 2014]; CEO (2007).
‘Community Based Organization Outreach.’
Available online: http://www.nyc.gov/html/ceo/
downloads/pdf/appendixb_cbooutreach.pdf.
[Last accessed 15 April 2014]
182 Riccio, J.A., Dechausay, N., Greenberg,
D.M., Miller, C., Rucks, Z. & Verma, N.
(2010) ‘Toward Reduced Poverty Across
Generations:Early Findings from New York
City’s Conditional Cash Transfer Program’,
MDRC, U.S. Available online: http://www.
mdrc.org/publication/toward-reduced-poverty-across-generations [Last accessed 8 May
2014]
183 Friedman, J. (2013) ‘Learning from cross-disciplinary impact evaluation: the Family Rewards
CCT program in New York City’, World
Bank Blogs. Available online: https://blogs.
worldbank.org/impactevaluations/learningfrom-cross-disciplinary-impact-evaluation-thefamily-rewards-cct-program-in-new-york-city
[Last accessed 17 April 2014]
184 NYC Center for Economic Opportunity (2012)
‘CEO Strategy Update: Nursing Career
Ladder’, August 2012. Available online: http://
www.nyc.gov/html/ceo/downloads/pdf/nursing_
evaluation_120925.pdf [Last accessed 15 April
2014]
185 City of New York (2013) ‘Mayor Bloomberg
and Deputy Mayor Gibbs Announce Pilot
Expansion Of Earned Income Tax Credit As
New Antipoverty Initiative’. Press Release,
9 May 2013. Available online: http://www1.
nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/157-13/
mayor-bloomberg-deputy-mayor-gibbs-pilotexpansion-earned-income-tax-credit-new [Last
accessed 6 May 2014]
186 Riccio, J.A, Dechausay, N., Greenberg, D.M.,
Miller, C., Rucks, Z. & Verma, N. (2010)
‘Toward Reduced Poverty Across Generations:
Early Findings from New York City’s Conditional Cash Transfer Program’. Available
online: http://www.mdrc.org/publication/
toward-reduced-poverty-across-generations
[Last accessed 7 May 2014]
187 NYC Center for Economic Opportunity (2009)
‘Learning Independence for Empowerment
(LIFE) Transitions Program Community Component: Final Program Assessment Report’.
Available online: http://www.nyc.gov/html/ceo/
downloads/pdf/ltp_final_report_20100310.pdf
[Last accessed 17 April 2014]
188 Friedman, J. (2013) ‘Learning from cross-disciplinary impact evaluation: the Family Rewards
CCT program in New York City’, World
Bank Blogs. Available online: https://blogs.
worldbank.org/impactevaluations/learningfrom-cross-disciplinary-impact-evaluation-thefamily-rewards-cct-program-in-new-york-city
[Last accessed 17 April 2014]
189 NYC Center for Economic Opportunity
(2007).’Community Based Organization
Outreach’. Available online: http://www.
nyc.gov/html/ceo/downloads/pdf/appendixb_
cbooutreach.pdf. [Last accessed 15 April 2014]
190 Further details on the poverty measure can be
found here: http://www.nyc.gov/html/ceo/html/
poverty_research/poverty_research.shtml [Last
accessed 15 April 2014]
191 For NYC Center for Economic Opportunity’s
impact evaluations see: nyc.gov/CEO [Last
accessed 7 May 2014]
192 Quoted by Linda Gibbs, Deputy Mayor for
Health and Human Services, New York,
CityLab, 2013
193 As detailed in Metis Associates (2011) ‘Innovation and Success: Qualitative Assessment of
the NYC Center for Economic Opportunity’s
Transition of Proven Programs to City
Agencies’. Available online: http://www.nyc.
gov/html/ceo/downloads/pdf/successful_programs_report.pdf [Last accessed 15 April 2014]
194 Quoted by Linda Gibbs, Deputy Mayor for
Health and Human Services, New York,
CityLab, 2013
195 Nesta interview with Kristin Morse, former
Executive Director, CEO, July 2013
Open Mexico
196 Open Government Partnership Action Plan
2013 – 2015 Mexico: a renewed partnership.
Available online: http://pa2015.mx/en/ [Last
accessed 9 May 2014]
197 Population of Mexico in 2013 as cited in World
Population Statistics. Available online: http://
www.worldpopulationstatistics.com/mexico-population-2013/ [Last accessed 9 May 2014]
198 Coordination of National Digital Strategy
is an area of recent creation, with budget
allocation from this year. There is no specific
allocation for team Open Mexico. According
to the Expenditure Budget of the Federation
2014, National Digital Strategy Coordination
is assigned a total expenditure of 25,849,136
pesos. Of which 12,925,238 pesos are “personal
service”, 12,900,891 pesos for “operating
expenses” and to 23,007 pesos in “other current”. Confirmed via email with Nesta, 1 May
2014. Available online: http://www.apartados.
hacienda.gob.mx/presupuesto/temas/pef/2014/
temas/tomos/02/r02_reurgfpp.pdf. [Last
accessed 9 June 2014] We have converted this
as $0.0456568* as of 21/01/2013, taken from
http://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/full/
199 The Open Dashboard will be available online
during 2014: http://datos.gob.mx/
200 For further details on Reconstruccion MX see
http://www.presidencia.gob.mx/fonden/
201 México, Presidencia de la República (2014).
Available online: www.presidencia.gob.mx/
FONDEN [Last accessed 15 April 2014]
202 Un Gobierno Abierto (2014). Available online:
www.datos.gob.mx [Last accessed 15 April
2014]
203 Alianza para el Gobierno Abierto (2013) Alianza para el Gobierno Abierto Plan de Acción
2013 — 2015 México. Available online: Pa2015.
mx [Last accessed 15 April 2014]
Performance Management & Delivery Unit
(PEMANDU)
204 Nesta interview with Chris Tan, Director,
PEMANDU, 29 October 2013
205 Population of Malaysia, 2010, as cited in
Department of Statistics, Malaysia. Available
online: http://www.statistics.gov.my/portal/
index.php?option=com_content&id=1215 [Last
accessed 9 May 2014]
206 The Sun Daily, 1 November 2010, Idris Jala
clarifies use of PEMANDU operating budget.
Available online: http://www.thesundaily.my/
node/136751 [Last accessed 9 May 2014] Conversion: (MYR) 0.182723 to £1, as exchange
rate on 21/01/2013, taken from: http://www.
xe.com/currencyconverter/full/
207 The Economic Transformation Programme
(ETP) was launched in September 2010. Its
goal is to attract US$444 billion in investments
and create 3.3 million new jobs. The GTP was
launched in September 2009 with the primary
objective to transform the delivery and efficiency of public services in Malaysia
208 Daly, E, Singham, S, (2011) ‘Jump-Starting
Malaysia’s Economy: An Interview with Idris
Jala’ McKinsey Quarterly (October available
online at http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/
public_sector/jump-starting_malaysias_
growth_an_interview_with_idris_jala [Last
accessed at 3 April 2014]
209 One exercise involved consultants quantifying
column space dedicated to individual news
items
210 Government Transformative Programme.
‘Annual Report 2012’. Available online: http://
www.PEMANDU.gov.my/gtp/annualreport2012/ [Last accessed 3 April 2014]
211 Daly, E., Singham, S., (2011) ‘Jump-Starting
Malaysia’s Economy: An Interview with Idris
Jala McKinsey Quarterly’ (October 2011).
Available online: http://www.mckinsey.com/
insights/public_sector/jump-starting_malaysias_growth_an_interview_with_idris_jala
[Last accessed 3 April 2014]
212 Daly, E., Singham, S., (2011) ‘Jump-Starting
Malaysia’s Economy: An Interview with Idris
Jala McKinsey Quarterly’ (October 2011).
Available online: http://www.mckinsey.com/
insights/public_sector/jump-starting_malaysias_growth_an_interview_with_idris_jala
[Last accessed 3 April 2014]
213 Daly, E., Singham, S., (2011) ‘Jump-Starting
Malaysia’s Economy: An Interview with Idris
Jala McKinsey Quarterly’ (October 2011).
Available online: http://www.mckinsey.com/
insights/public_sector/jump-starting_malaysias_growth_an_interview_with_idris_jala
[Last accessed 3 April 2014]
214 Supporting evidence for this can be found in
PEMANDU’s Government Transformative
Programme ‘Annual Report’ 2012. Available
online: http://www.PEMANDU.gov.my/gtp/
annualreport2012/ [Last accessed 3 April 2014]
and Preliminary Report: Malaysia Education
Blueprint 2013 – 2025 (2012). Available online:
http://www.moe.gov.my/userfiles/file/PPP/
Preliminary-Blueprint-Eng.pdf [Last accessed
16 April 2014]
215 Nesta interview with Chris Tan, Director,
PEMANDU, 29 October 2013
122
216 This review, while identifying some exceptions on the figures, shows progress in the
samples they selected, validated findings
on overall progress on achieving the NKRA.
Supporting evidence for this can be found in
PEMANDU’s Government Transformative
Programme ‘Annual Report 2012’. Available
online: http://www.PEMANDU.gov.my/gtp/
annualreport2012/ [Last accessed 3 April 2014]
and Preliminary Report: Malaysia Education
Blueprint 2013 – 2025 (2012). Available online:
http://www.moe.gov.my/userfiles/file/PPP/
Preliminary-Blueprint-Eng.pdf [Last accessed
16 April 2014]
217 GNI targets converted from USD to GBP
using (US)0.607408 to £1, as exchange rate on
21/01/2013, taken from: http://www.xe.com/
currencyconverter/full/
218 Jabatan Perdana Menter Government Transformative Programme. Annual Report 2012.
Available online: http://www.PEMANDU.
gov.my/gtp/annualreport2012/upload/Eng_
GTP2012_AR_Full.pdf [Last accessed 23 April
2014]
219 This is excluding impact on the ETP
220 Iyer, D. (2011) ‘Tying Performance Management to Service Delivery: Public Sector Reform
in Malaysia, 2009-11’ p.11 Available online:
http://www.princeton.edu/successfulsocieties/
content/data/policy_note/PN_id160/Policy_
Note_ID160.pdf [Last accessed 14 May 2014]
221 Government Transformative Programme,
‘Annual Report 2012’. Available online: http://
www.PEMANDU.gov.my/gtp/annualreport2012/ [Last accessed 3 April 2014]
222 Government Transformative Programme.
‘Annual Report 2012’. Available online: http://
www.PEMANDU.gov.my/gtp/annualreport2012/ [Last accessed 3 April 2014]
223 Nesta interview with Chris Tan, Director,
PEMANDU, 29 October 2013
PS21 Office
224 Nesta interview with Tay Choon Hong, Director (Services), PS21 Office, 13 September 2013
225 Population of Singapore (2013), Department of
Statistics, Singapore. Available online: http://
www.singstat.gov.sg/statistics/latest_data.
html#14 [Last accessed 13 May 2014]
226 Quah, J.S.T. (2010), Chapter 8 Implementing
PS21 in the Singapore Civil Service, in Quah,
J.S.T. (ed.) ‘Public Administration Singapore-style’ (Research in Public Policy Analysis
and Management, Volume 19), Emerald Group
Publishing Limited, pp.147-170
227 Quah, J.S.T. (2010), Chapter 8 Implementing
PS21 in the Singapore Civil Service, in Quah,
J.S.T. (ed.) Public Administration Singapore-style (Research in Public Policy Analysis
and Management, Volume 19), Emerald Group
Publishing Limited, pp.147-170
228 Quah, J.S.T. (2010), Chapter 8 Implementing
PS21 in the Singapore Civil Service, in Quah,
J.S.T. (ed.) Public Administration Singapore-style (Research in Public Policy Analysis
and Management, Volume 19), Emerald Group
Publishing Limited, pp.147-170
229 Nesta interview with Tay Choon Hong, Director (Services), PS21 Office, 13 September 2013.
230 Quah, J.S.T. (2010), Chapter 8 Implementing
PS21 in the Singapore Civil Service, in Quah,
J.S.T. (ed.) Public Administration Singapore-style (Research in Public Policy Analysis
and Management, Volume 19), Emerald Group
Publishing Limited, pp.147-170
231 Quah, J.S.T. (2010), Chapter 8 Implementing
PS21 in the Singapore Civil Service, in Quah,
J.S.T. (ed.) Public Administration Singapore-style (Research in Public Policy Analysis
and Management, Volume 19), Emerald Group
Publishing Limited, pp.147-170
232 While SSS and WITS are still adopted by some
public agencies, they are no longer mandatory.
233 For further details about the Challenge see:
http://www.challenge.gov.sg [Last accessed 16
May 2014]
234 Based on 2013 figures, provided by PS21, 7
May 2014.
235 Converted from S$84 Million using exchange
rate 0.475176 (as of 21/01/2013, taken from
http://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/full/)
236 Converted from S$115 Million using exchange
rate 0.475176 (as of 21/01/2013, taken from
http://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/full/)
237 Converted from $165 Million using exchange
rate 0.475176-(as of 21/01/2013, taken from
http://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/full/)
238 Quah, J.S.T. (2010), Chapter 8 Implementing
PS21 in the Singapore Civil Service, in Quah,
J.S.T. (ed.) Public Administration Singapore-style (Research in Public Policy Analysis
and Management, Volume 19), Emerald Group
Publishing Limited, pp.147-170
239 Nesta interview with Tay Choon Hong Director
(Services), PS21 Office, 13 September 2013
Seoul Innovation Bureau
240 Population of Seoul City as cited in World
Population Statistics. Available online: http://
www.worldpopulationstatistics.com/seoul-population-2013/ [Last accessed 9 May 2014]
241 Confirmed in email to Nesta, 5 May 2014.
Converted from 8,725,000,000 KRW, * as of
21/01/2013, taken from http://www.xe.com/
currencyconverter/full/
242 Kim, J et al.(2013) ‘A Seoul City’s social
innovation strategy: A model of multi-channel
communication to strengthen governance and
citizen engagement’. Paper written for Social
Frontiers Research Conference, 2013
243 Johnson, C. (2013) ‘Is Seoul the next great
sharing city?’ Available online: http://ourworld.
unu.edu/en/is-seoul-the-next-great-sharingcity/ [Last accessed 15 April 2015]
244 Johnson, C. (2013) ‘Is Seoul the next great
sharing city?’ Available online: http://www.
shareable.net/blog/is-seoul-the-next-great-sharing-city [Last accessed 15 April 2015]
245 Global Giving (2013) ‘Open Closet: Sharing
Suits and wills makes more valuable society’.
Available online: http://www.globalgiving.org/
donate/14097/open-closet/info/ [Last accessed
15 April 2014]
246 Data confirmed by Seoul City Hall in email
correspondence, 2 May 2014. Figures converted
from $51 million and $1 billion using $(US)
0.607408 to £1 as of 21/01/2013, taken from
http://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/full/
247 Korea4Expats.com (2012) ‘Pregnant ladies first
badge’. Available online: http://www.korea4expats.com/article-pregnant-women-badge.html.
[Last accessed 15 April 2014]
248 A Social Media Centre has been established to
help deal with the enquiries, and to use social
media as a means to get urgent information
to residents, for instance about weather or
transport.
Sitra
249 Population of Finland, 2011, cited on Statistics
Finland. Available online: http://www.stat.fi/
ajk/tiedotteet/2012/tiedote_012_2012-12-11_
en.html [Last accessed 12 May 2014]
250 Nesta email correspondence with Janne Peljo,
Analyst, Sitra, 30 April 2014. Exchange rate
on 21/01/2013, taken from: http://www.xe.com/
currencyconverter/full/
251 Sitra http://www.sitra.fi/en/about-sitra [Last
accessed 3 April 2014]
252 Ramboll Management (2012), ‘Actions and
visions for social change: Sitra’s evaluation
2002 – 2011’, p.31
253 Sitra’s values its endowment in Euros. In 2012
the Euro value of Sitra’s endowment was €651
million, converted to pounds using exchange
rate 0.822143 (0.822143 * 651 = £535.22)
254 Cited http://www.sitra.fi/julkaisut/Toimintakertomus/2012/Sitra_Boardreport2012.pdf
[Last accessed 3 April 2014], £s converted at
xe.com on 19/11/2012, exchange rate = 1 Euro
= £0.835855
255 Nesta interview with Mikko Kosonen, President, Sitra, 9 August 2013
256 Sitra ‘From NIMBY to YIMBY: New cultures
of local decision making’. Available online:
http://www.sitra.fi/en/projects/nimby-yimbynew-cultures-local-decision-making [Last
accessed 3 April 2014]
257 For further details on Brickstarter, see http://
brickstarter.org/ [Last accessed 4 April 2014]
258 For further details on WaveRoller, see http://
www.aw-energy.com/ [Last accessed 4 April
2014]
259 For further details on Savosolar, see http://
www.savosolar.fi/ [Last accessed 4 April 2014]
260 FIT Biotech http://www.fitbiotech.com/ [Last
accessed 4 April 2014]
261 An example of Sitra’s influence is the fact that
many of the central ideas in Finland’s new
broad-based innovation strategy originated
from Sitra’s innovation programme during
2004-2006. Taloustieto Oy (on behalf of the
Ministry of Education and the Ministry
of Employment and the Economy) (2009)
‘Evaluation of the Finnish National Innovation
System-Full Report’, Helsinki University Print
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=qXod4zKP7v8C&pg=PA25&dq=sitra&hl=en&sa=X-
&ei=b2pAUvegEq3Y0QXox4GgDw&r
edir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=sitra&f=false [Last
accessed 4 April 2014]
Endnotes 123
262 Ramboll Management (2012) ‘Actions and
visions for social change: Sitra’s evaluation
2002 – 2011’.
263 Ramboll Management (2012) ‘Actions and
visions for social change: Sitra’s evaluation
2002 – 2011’, p.8
264 Taloustieto Oy (on behalf of the Ministry of
Education and the Ministry of Employment
and the Economy). (2009) Evaluation of the
Finnish National Innovation System-Full
Report. Helsinki University Print.
265 Taloustieto Oy (on behalf of the Ministry of
Education and the Ministry of Employment
and the Economy) (2009) ‘Evaluation of the
Finnish National Innovation System-Full
Report’, Helsinki University Print
The Australian Centre for Social
Innovation (TACSI)
266 Nesta interview with Carolyn Curtis, CEO,
TACSI, 28 February 2014
267 Population of Australia 2013, Australian
Bureau of Statistics. Available online: http://
www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/3101.0
[Last accessed 13 May 2014]
268 Confirmed in email correspondence with
Nesta, May 2014, conversion: (AUD) 0.534812
to £1, as exchange rate on 21/01/2013, taken
from: http://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/
full/
269 Nesta interview with Brenton Caffin, former
Chief Executive, TACSI, August 2013
270 Conversion: $(AUS) 0.534812 to £1, as exchange rate on 21/01/2013, taken from: http://
www.xe.com/currencyconverter/full/
271 Nesta interview with Brenton Caffin, former
Chief Executive, TACSI, August 2013
272 Mulgan, G. and Adelaide Thinker in Residence
(2008) ‘Innovation in 360 Degrees: Promoting
Social Innovation in South Australia’. Available online: http://thinkers.sa.gov.au/lib/pdf/
Mulgan_Final_Report.pdf [Last accessed 4
April 2014]
273 Nesta interview with Carolyn Curtis, CEO,
TACSI, 13 March 2014
274 Nesta interview with Carolyn Curtis, CEO,
TACSI, 13 March 2014
275 The Australian Centre for Social Innovation
(TACSI) (2010) ‘Bold Ideas, Better Lives Challenge’, p3. Available online: http://www.tacsi.
org.au/assets/Projects/Challenge/TACSI-Challenge-Paper-01.pdf (Last accessed 4 April 2014]
276 The Australian Centre for Social Innovation
(TACSI). Family by Family. Available online:
http://www.tacsi.org.au/solutions/family-by-family/ [Last accessed 14 May 2014]
277 Community Matters Pty Ltd (2012) ‘Family
by Family Evaluation Report 2011-12’. Available online: http://www.tacsi.org.au/assets/
Documents/Publications/Family-Project/
TACSI-FbyF-Evaluation-Report-2012.pdf [Last
accessed 4 April 2014]
278 Converted from $(AUS) 0.534812 to £1, as exchange rate on 21/01/2013, taken from: http://
www.xe.com/currencyconverter/full/
279 The Australian Centre for Social Innovation
(TACSI) (2013) $2.8 Million Announced to Help
SA Families Thrive. Available online: http://
www.tacsi.org.au/assets/2.8m-announced-tohelp-families-thrive.pdf [Last accessed 4 April
2014]
280 TACSI shortlisted eight projects from the 258
applications-Aged care digital life styles: a
project improving the quality of life in aged
care facilities by engaging elderly people with
technology; Around you: a project using events,
activities, online services and mobile devises to
connect people with their local neighbourhood
in order to build a community; Employment
pathways for deaf students: creating access to
employment for the hearing impaired through
the development of workplace tools, technology
and training; Hello Sunday morning: a project
addressing Australia’s binge drinking culture
and encouraging individuals to take responsibility and change their drinking behaviour;
Renew Australia: placing creative, social and
cultural initiatives in empty or disused buildings to re-engage people with underutilized
urban areas.
281 TACSI (2010). Bold Ideas, Better Lives Challenge. Available online:http://www.tacsi.org.
au/assets/Projects/Challenge/TACSI-Challenge-Paper-01.pdf. [Last Accessed 14 May
2014]
282 Community Matters Pty Ltd (2012) ‘Family
by Family Evaluation Report 2011-12’. Available online: http://www.tacsi.org.au/assets/
Documents/Publications/Family-Project/
TACSI-FbyF-Evaluation-Report-2012.pdf [Last
accessed 4 April 2014]
283 Converted from $(AUS) 2.8 million, using
$(AUS) 0.534812 to £1, as on 21 January 2013,
taken from http://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/full/ cited in http://www.tacsi.org.au/
publications/blog/family-by-family-growing/
[Last accessed 9 June 2014]
284 Community Matters Pty Ltd (2012) ‘Family
by Family Evaluation Report 2011-12’. Available online: http://www.tacsi.org.au/assets/
Documents/Publications/Family-Project/
TACSI-FbyF-Evaluation-Report-2012.pdf [Last
accessed 4 April 2014]
285 The Australian Centre for Social Innovation
(TACSI) (2013) $2.8 Million Announced to Help
SA Families Thrive. Available online: http://
www.tacsi.org.au/assets/2.8m-announced-tohelp-families-thrive.pdf [Last accessed 4 April
2014]
286 Carolyn Curtis, CEO, TACSI, email correspondence to Nesta, March 2014
287 The Australian Centre for Social Innovation
(TACSI) (2014) ‘A new tool set for social innovation’. Forthcoming publication, shared with
Nesta 13 March 2014
VINNOVA
288 Nesta interview with Charlotte Brogen, CEO,
VINNOVA, 16 August 2013
289 Population of Sweden in 2014, as cited in Statistics Sweden. Available online: http://www.
scb.se/en [Last accessed 9 May 2014]
290 Confirmed in email correspondence with
Nesta, May 2014, conversion: SEK 0.0935708
to £1, as exchange rate on 21/01/2013, taken
from http://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/full/
291 In addition to its core budget, VINNOVA leverages external funding of around 100% matched
funds from public or private partners in most
projects.
292 VINNOVA (2013) ‘Arsredovisning VINNOVA’
(2013). Available online: http://www.vinnova.
se/upload/EPiStorePDF/vi_14_03.pdf [Last
accessed 4 April 2014]
293 Confirmed in email correspondence with
Nesta, May 2014, conversion: SEK 0.0935708
to £1, as exchange rate on 21/01/2013, taken
from http://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/full/
294 VINNOVA (2013) ‘Arsredovisning VINNOVA’
(2013). Available online: http://www.vinnova.
se/upload/EPiStorePDF/vi_14_03.pdf [Last
accessed 4 April 2014]
295 VINNOVA (2012) ‘Arsredovisning’ (2012) p 13.
Available online: http://www.vinnova.se/upload/dokument/Om_VINNOVA/Anslag_budget/
VINNOVA_%C3%85rsredovisning_2012.pdf
[Last accessed 4 April 2014]
296 VINNOVA (2012) ‘Arsredovisning’ (2012) p 13.
Available online: http://www.vinnova.se/upload/dokument/Om_VINNOVA/Anslag_budget/
VINNOVA_%C3%85rsredovisning_2012.pdf
[Last accessed 4 April 2014]
297 VINNOVA (2013) ‘Arsredovisning VINNOVA
(2013). Available online at annual report 2013-
http://www.vinnova.se/upload/EPiStorePDF/
vi_14_03.pdf [Last accessed 4 April 2014]
298 OECD (2012) ‘Reviews of Innovation Policy:
OECD Reviews of Innovation Policy’. Available
online: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=sTjsUDYCGzoC&pg=PA265&lpg=PA265&dq=vinnova+public+sector+innovation&sourc
e=bl&ots=sXtkaleapM&sig=wMLuypvZt0CdfApEO6CJAG_x1iM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=B8kqU82DOY_L0AWDroDYCQ&ved=0CIIBE
OgBMAc#v=onepage&q=vinnova&f=false
[Last accessed 4 April 2014]
299 VINNOVA (2008) VINNOVA’s ‘Focus on Impact: A Joint Approach for Logic Assessment,
Monitoring, Evaluation and Impact Analysis’.
Available online: http://www.vinnova.se/upload/EPiStorePDF/va-08-01.pdf [Last accessed
4 April 2014]
300 Elg, L. and Håkansson, S. (2012) ‘Impacts of
Innovation Policy: Lessons from VINNOVA’s
Impact Studies’. Available online: http://www.
vinnova.se/upload/EPiStorePDF/va-12-01.pdf
[Last accessed 4 April 2014]
124
Acknowledgements
We are incredibly grateful to Bloomberg Philanthropies,
our research partner who supported the project and
provided incredibly insightful input and guidance.
They have helped shape and guide the project, sharing
their own experiences of public sector innovation in
the USA, and from around the globe. Particular thanks
to James Anderson, Matt Segneri and Cristina Guido.
Our warmest thanks to the staff of the i-teams, without
whom this research would not have been possible.
They generously gave their time to share their
experiences and insights, openly sharing rich lessons
from attempting to change innovation practice in their
host and partner governments. The i-teams willingly
made introductions to their colleagues in government
and to other experts in their wider networks, helping
provide a fascinating perspective into their work.
Thanks to our colleagues at Nesta, particularly Geoff
Mulgan, Jo Casebourne and Stian Westlake who all
provided thoughtful comment, critique and guidance
throughout. Thanks also to Sophie Reynolds, Henry
Lane, Georgina Smerald, and Francesca Sanders
who provided research and administrative support
at different stages of the project.
Over the course of this project we have spoken to
numerous experts in the UK and internationally,
some of them are researchers or commentators, others
are working in innovation teams, and some were
planning to create new i-teams in their city or national
government. There are too many to name here, but
we thank them all for sharing their successes, lessons
and experiences.
As ever, all errors and omissions remain our own.
Ruth Puttick, Peter Baeck & Philip Colligan
Nesta
1 Plough Place
London EC4A 1DE
research@nesta.org.uk
twitter.com/nesta_uk
facebook.com/nesta.uk
Nesta is a registered charity in England and
Wales with company number 7706036 and charity
number 1144091. Registered as a charity in
Scotland number SCO42833. Registered office:
1 Plough Place, London, EC4A 1DE.
ISBN number
978-1-84875-153-8 |