This booklet offers practical tips to service leaders on how to start developing different, better and lower cost services.

Key findings:

• Radical efficiency is an innovative approach to redesigning services that saves money and improves outcomes for users. Our case studies of radical efficiency from across the globe demonstrate cost-savings of between 20 and 60 per cent.
• From our research – including the case studies in this report – we have extracted five key lessons about how to do radically efficient innovation: Make partnership with users the best choice for everyone; enable committed and open-minded leaders to emerge from anywhere; start with people’s quality of life not the quality of your service; work with the grain and in the spirit of families, friends and neighbours; and manage risks, don’t just avoid them.
• The report also contains guidelines on applying radical efficiency within your organisation.

Radical efficiency is all about different, better and lower cost public services. It is about innovation that delivers much better public outcomes for much lower cost.

The content of this booklet has been drawn from the full report Radical Efficiency: Different, Better, Lower Cost Public Services published by Nesta and the Innovation Unit, June 2010.

This booklet outlines a constructive way to make between 20-60 per cent cost savings and improve outcomes for service users at the same time – radical efficiency. It is not simply about improving current services, but creating new and different services with much better outcomes for the people you serve.

Authors:

Nesta Lab, Innovation Unit