Scaling Up Innovation in the Public Sector: Read All About It!

The avid Public Sector Innovation blog readers among you will remember a series earlier in the year entitled ‘The Ups and Downs of Innovation’. These gave readers a personal blow-by-blow account of what it was like for me, Laura Frascona, to work on a collaborative cross-government project. The focus of the project was on finding breakthrough solutions to the systemic challenge of scaling up successful innovations within and across the public sector. The project used an in-house ‘consultancy’ team, drawn from across the public service, to research and tackle this challenge for a day a week for twelve weeks. It was sponsored jointly by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Department for Communities and Local Government and facilitated by the National School of Government.

Well, I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know that, despite the many ups and downs, we did manage to reach our conclusions collaboratively! And, further, these conclusions were made so much richer by the variety of perspectives gained through that collaboration. In response to the challenges of scaling up innovation in the public sector, we identified four areas for priority action:

Create the conditions that maximize the capacity for innovative ideas to scale across the public sector;
Ensure that the public sector have the organisational culture, leadership, and people conducive to supporting the scaling up of innovative ideas;
Establish networks that facilitate the dissemination of innovative ideas that could be scaled, supporting the spread of knowledge; and
Use appraisal and evaluation of innovative ideas to provide the business case for scaling, to ensure the right ideas are implemented and driven forward.

You can read all about the recommendations proposed in response to these four areas in the documents attached. There’s the Full Report, as well as an Executive Summary for those of you who just want the headlines, and you can download both in either PowerPoint or PDF format. If you’ve got any thoughts or comments on the report, please do get in touch by posting a comment below or emailing and letting me know.

Scaling-Up-Innovation-in-the-Public-Sector-Executive-Summary-PDF

Scaling Up Innovation in the Public Sector – Executive Summary-PPT

Scaling-Up-Innovation-in-the-Public-Sector-Full-Report-PDF

Scaling Up Innovation in the Public Sector – Full Report-PPT