The Catalyst for Change: How “The Innovation Summit” Approach Accelerates Innovation in the Public Sector
Introduction:
Innovation has long been synonymous with the private sector, where competition and profit motives drive the development of new products, services, and technologies. However, in recent years due to advancements in technology and digitalisation of services, there has been a growing recognition on the importance of innovation in the public sector as well. Governments around the world are increasingly turning to innovative approaches to address complex challenges, improve service delivery, sustainability of operations and enhance the well-being of their citizens. From digital transformation to data-driven decision making, innovation in the public sector is reshaping the way governments operate and interact with their constituents.
A thriving UK science and technology system remains critical for our future prosperity, security, and the health of our citizens. The dizzying pace of technological advancement confirms this, whilst it demonstrates the potential of advancement to boost productivity and transform our sectors, it also highlights the importance of making innovation safe, secure, responsible, and trustworthy to fully benefit from the opportunities it brings. Public spending on R&D is at the highest ever level, and we are fulfilling our commitment to spend £20 billion across the next financial year with every £1 of public expenditure leveraging double the amount of private investment. The Rt Hon Michelle Donelan MP- Secretary of State for Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (The UK Science and Technology Framework: update on progress 9 February 2024 - source: gov.uk)
Dubai is a great example of this as an agile emirate state equipped for the 21st century. They have appointed a Chief Innovation Officer (CIO) in every federal agency — over 50. Who are responsible for spending 1% of the government budget on fostering innovation. The nature of creating these roles embraces the need to push and champion change. The government is also realising new entities to tackle the fast changing world including the ‘Artificial Intelligence Office’ for safe guarding public use of AI , the ‘Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority’ for regulating virtual digital content and ‘The Future Foundation’ to provide a platform for emerging technology trends and regulatory innovation. (Source: aplolitical.co)
The Applied Innovation Exchange:
The Capgemini Applied Innovation Exchange (AIE) is the platform designed to foster innovation and collaboration between Capgemini, its clients, and partners. It serves as a space for ideation, experimentation, and co-creation, where emerging technologies and innovative solutions are explored and developed to address business challenges. The AIE is the catalyst facilitating the exchange of ideas, expertise, and resources to create value for organisations.
Introducing A New Approach:
At the end of 2023 the London Capgemini Applied Innovation Exchange ran a highly successful “Innovation Summit” in partnership with our Capgemini internal business unit and public sector client…What is an Innovation Summit you ask?
Innovation Summit: A platform that brings together thought leaders, experts and visionaries from diverse fields to demonstrate and discuss ground-breaking ideas, emerging technologies and creative solutions aimed at driving real value and fostering innovation across the organisation in a short time period.
The Innovation Summit represents a pioneering approach to redefining the collaborative process. The summit brings stakeholders on a journey utilising unconventional, engaging facilitation methods and tools to rapidly drive decisions, explore and co-create innovative solutions that are closely aligned with crucial business challenges, objectives and requirements. Generating real transformative value and tangible concepts for client organisations.
The innovation Summit spanned 3 months. The process is as follows:
- Kick — Off Identifying many organisational challenges and problems by asking questions (How Might We..). Prioritise and refine selection of these hypotheses to 3 key focus areas that best align with customer needs and organisational objectives.
2) Design Thinking double diamond approach consisting of:
- Inside-Out and Outside-In Research to build data and deeper understanding of the pain points, user needs, market and technology trends. Data-driven decision-making played a crucial role when building insight into citizen needs, evaluating existing services and performance trends.
- Problem Definition where we converge and refine the key problem statement to inform our direction.
- Concept exploration, Ideation and co-creation to explore multiple ideas and concepts imagining the art of the possible, the technology partners, user experience and benefits.
- Concept selection & Evaluation using 3 key criteria. Desirability — How much does the user need this product? Viability — Is there a commercial value to introduce this product? Feasibility — Is this practical and are there any technical constraints to create this?
- Concept Design. Further iteration of the select concept exploring user journeys and interface.
-Prototype Development and testing. The team rapidly built Proof of Concepts (PoC). A functional interactive demonstration of the concept and technology to test with users.
3) Innovation Event Day. The culmination of this work lands on an event day that can be hybrid or physical where the business case is told through a story with an interactive demonstration of the concept/s. In this case to be more eco-friendly the event was hosted in a hybrid fashion. Working with Accelerated Solutions Environment (ASE) team, we live broadcasted the event and utilised state of the art green screen technology.
We partnered with the client business owners to jointly advocate and present the concepts, stimulating engagement. Participants were able to remotely interact, test and engage with the demonstrations. These were cloud-hosted, enabling remote access.
Participants could role play customer personas, interact and navigate duplicates of existing government digital services showcasing the new features by simulating user scenarios, all via a single web link/ QR code. The team built live tracking and gamified the experiences on the day to be able to measure efficiency, actions and compare results. This was particularly powerful when showcasing the benefit form demonstrators using Artificial Intelligence compared to existing processes.
Driving forces of success: Open Innovation and Collaboration
A key aspect of innovation in the public sector is open innovation and collaboration. The summit explored PoC’s across multiple operations of the organisation, engaging many stakeholders who would not normally interact with each other. By following this approach leveraging our market unit expertise, Sector SME’s and key stakeholders in problem-solving and decision-making, governments can take advantage of a diverse range of perspectives and generate quick innovative solutions and decisions to complex challenges. The Summit fostered new relationships and collaboration across sectors.
Top 5 takeaways on the approach:
1) Empowered smaller teams with clearly defined Concept Owners works well for driving decisions.
Government sectors in their very nature can be large and it can be easy for many stakeholders to become involved and therefore many voices and perspectives making it difficult for quick decisions. After evaluating all stakeholders, it’s important to select primary business owners in a leading role who have a vision, and are decisive with knowledge on their problem.
2) Clear milestones and communication to all involved.
Throughout the research process many parts of the government organisation can be consulted for data collection. It’s important those stakeholders are kept involved throughout the journey. To reduce repetition of information it is beneficial to set up an easy communication strategy. The AIE team produced a regular email newsletter where each PoC lead could weekly document an overview of decisions, progress and activities. Another effective approach was to produce a quick video recording providing a 5-minute summary.
3) The power of quick visualisation for concepts– as soon as possible. Even if in a raw manner — visualise the idea.
For the majority of people seeing something visually helps encourage conversation and for people to really make their own interpretation, imagine and interrogate the potential of the concept. This also helps communicate serious government services or activities in a more simplified, playful and fun way. Concept Cards were a highly effective approach that enabled one page summaries that could be compared and voted upon.
4) Plan ahead for post-summit strategy.
The team put a large amount of focus on the summit event day however it was just as important to consider the strategy for scaling the concepts — post the summit event. Consideration is necessary for how concepts evolve to live services, what could a minimum viable product look like, what is the roll out plan, where does the funding come from and who owns the concepts moving forward. Supporting the client to navigate these conversations would be crucial to the success of the innovations developing from concepts to real implemented services in 3–5 years time.
5) Co-location & a cross-functional agile development team working on multiple concepts.
As the team were building 3 PoC’s simultaneously this was a very effective way to utilise the developers time across the different concepts, when and where their time was needed most. The client also greatly appreciated the speed and efficiency we were able to work at by being one team located in the same environment able to speak in person with each other. This not only gave the impression of a large focussed dedicated team but also of heightened collaboration and community compared with remote working.
Considerations around culture, innovation change management & regulatory innovation:
Regulatory innovation is also playing a critical role in driving progress in the public sector. Governments are needing to rethink regulatory frameworks to foster innovation, encourage entrepreneurship, and address emerging issues. The summit provided the right environment and ensured everyone’s way of thinking and discussions are aligned to being open minded, not restrained by technical infrastructure or policy limitations. This enabled new ideas to be explored without constraint.
Regulatory sandboxes, for example, allow prototyping, experimentation and testing of innovative products and services in a controlled environment, without being subject to full regulatory, accessibility and Government Design System (GDS) compliance during exploration.
Conclusion:
Innovation in the public sector is essential for addressing the complex challenges facing governments today and planning for trends in the years to come. From digital transformation to data-driven decision-making, open innovation, and regulatory reform, governments are embracing a wide range of strategies to drive progress and improve the lives of citizens. By harnessing the power of rapid discoveries with design thinking, innovation frameworks, co-creation, forward thinking technologies and partners, governments can build more responsive, efficient, and inclusive public services that meet the needs of a rapidly changing world.
As we look to the future, fostering a culture of innovation with a change management strategy to funnel concepts into other parts of the organisation will be crucial for ensuring that government can continue to adapt and thrive in the face of evolving operational, consumer challenges and opportunities. The Summit was our first approach at nurturing this way of working and we look forward to adapting and growing the model to support other sectors of government and our clients in 2024.
