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

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 CC BY NC SA

Foreword

James Anderson

"There's no reason for every city to start its efforts from scratch."

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.

Geoff Mulgan

"All governments need institutions to catalyse innovation."

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.

Introduction

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.

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.

Key Elements of i-teams

• Leadership: How the team is led and managed, including by the team's director, and political sponsorship and buy-in
• Team: The size, skill set, dynamic and culture of the staff, as well as specific recruitment and staff development strategies
• Methods: The tools, techniques, and approaches that the team uses, as well as the outputs produced
• Resources: How the team is financed, including leveraging funds from external sources, as well as how resources are allocated and spent
• Partnerships: The key relationships with government, and external agencies, groups, and citizens
• Impact measurement: The use of data to inform strategy development, as well as evaluation frameworks to measure impact

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.

The i-teams

The following are the i-teams profiled in this report:

• 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 & Delivery Unit (PEMANDU)
• PS21 Office
• Seoul Innovation Bureau
• Sitra
• The Australian Centre for Social Innovation (TACSI)
• VINNOVA

Who are the i-teams?

The Americas

• Centro de Innovación Social (Bogotá)
• Investing in Innovation Fund (i3) (Washington D.C.)
• Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics (Boston)
• New Orleans Innovation Delivery Team (New Orleans)
• New York City Innovation Zone (iZone) (New York City)
• NYC Center for Economic Opportunity (New York City)
• Open Mexico (Mexico City)

Europe & Africa

• Barcelona Urban Lab (Barcelona)
• Behavioural Insights Team (London)
• Centre for Public Service Innovation (Pretoria)
• Fonds d'expérimentation pour la jeunesse (Paris)
• La 27e Région (Paris)
• MindLab (Copenhagen)
• Nesta Innovation Lab (London)
• Sitra (Helsinki)
• VINNOVA (Stockholm)

Asia & Australasia

• Performance Management & Delivery Unit (PEMANDU) (Kuala Lumpur)
• PS21 Office (Singapore)
• Seoul Innovation Bureau (Seoul)
• The Australian Centre for Social Innovation (TACSI) (Adelaide)

Location in Government

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

Date Launched

1967 * Sitra

1995 * PS21

2001 * Centre for Public Service Innovation * VINNOVA

2002 * MindLab

2006 * NYC Center for Economic Opportunity

2008 * Barcelona Urban Lab * Fonds d'expérimentation pour la jeunesse * La 27e Région

2009 * Performance Management & Delivery Unit (PEMANDU) * Nesta Innovation Lab * The Australian Centre for Social Innovation (TACSI)

2010 * Behavioural Insights Team * Investing in Innovation Fund (i3) * Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics * New York City Innovation Zone (iZone)

2011 * Centro de Innovación Social * New Orleans Innovation Delivery Team

2012 * Seoul Innovation Bureau

2013 * Open Mexico

Barcelona Urban Lab

"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.

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.

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, 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.

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 to 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, Urbiotica 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"⁴.

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.

Interesting features

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.

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.⁶

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.

One of the main areas of impact is helping Barcelona-based 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.⁵

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.

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.

---

Footnotes

Behavioural Insights Team

Where they are based London, UK (population of UK: 65 million¹)

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 governments²

Launched 2010

Example of impact Achieved government savings of around 22 times the cost of the team in the first two years of operation³

"Creating services which are easier to use and more effective." David Halpern, Chief Executive, Behavioural Insights Team

Interesting Features

Partnerships

Impact measurement

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.

Background

The Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) was launched in 2010, but its story started in the early 2000s when BIT's founder David Halpern worked in the UK Government Prime Minister's Strategy Unit and co-authored 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.⁷

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.

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.⁴

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.

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.⁸

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.

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.

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.⁵ 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.

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.

Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT) process

(Source: Behavioural Insights Team (2012) 'Test, Learn, Adapt: Developing Public Policy with Randomised Controlled Trials.')

"Trials are really, really cheap when you're already measuring the outcome and you've already got the systems in place." Owain Service, BIT

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”.⁶

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.⁹ The only cost associated with the intervention was the time of the Team to structure the trial and collect the data.¹⁰

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.¹¹

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.

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”.¹²

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

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.

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”.¹⁶

Centre for Public Service Innovation

Where they are based Pretoria, South Africa (population of South Africa: 52 million¹⁷)

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 million¹⁸

Launched 2001

Example of impact The Multimedia Innovation Centre showcases innovative ideas and methods, with 1,000 public officials visiting in 2013.

"To create an innovation culture across the South African Government"

Interesting Features

Partnerships

Leadership

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.

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).

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.¹⁹

Another element of CPSI's work is sharing innovation methods and ideas. This is managed by their Multi-Media Innovation Centre (MMIC), an innovative learning facility for public servants.²⁰ 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.²¹

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.²²

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,²³ 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.²⁴

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.²⁵

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.²⁶

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,²⁸ 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.

Centro de Innovación Social (Centre for Social Innovation)

Where they are based Bogotá, Colombia (population of Colombia: 47.1 million²⁹)

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)³⁰

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.³¹

"Focused on social innovation to benefit the most vulnerable people in Colombia." Natalia Currea Dereser, Centro de Innovación Social³²

Interesting Features

Team

Resources

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.³³ It is the first innovation unit of its kind in Colombia,³⁴ and was described by another government agency as “doing things that no one else will dare to do”.³⁵

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 £158,000³⁶ 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.

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.³⁷ 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 Colombia³⁸. 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 Hilando³⁹ is mapping innovations and innovators across the country, helping connect challenges with solutions and fostering the exchange of best practice and knowledge.

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.

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.

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”.⁴⁰

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 2012.⁴¹ 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”,⁴² enabling projects to be more easily and quickly developed.⁴³

Fonds d'expérimentation pour la jeunesse (Experimental Fund for Youth)

Where they are based Paris, France (population of France: 66 million⁴⁴)

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, and £7m from other sources)⁴⁵

Launched 2008

Example of impact Supported more than 554 projects and experiments, which have served an estimated 498,000 young people.⁴⁶

"The fund aims to inspire evidence-based policies related to youth." Mathieu Valdenaire, Fonds d'expérimentation pour la jeunesse⁴⁷

Interesting Features

Impact measurement

Resources

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.⁴⁸ 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.⁴⁹

The Fund holds open calls for proposals, with 16 held to date. Each call is focused on a specific youth-related 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.

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.⁵⁰

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.⁵¹

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.⁵²

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).⁵³ 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.⁵⁴

---

Footnotes

Investing in Innovation Fund (i3)

High school students develop their math and science skills as part of an i3 backed programme. Image courtesy of U.S. Department of Education

"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." ⁵⁵ Jim Shelton, Deputy Secretary, U.S. Department of Education

Where they are based Washington D.C., USA (population of USA: 314 million ⁵⁶ )

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) ⁵⁷

Launched 2010

Example of impact During 2013, i3 ran its fourth competition, selecting 25 programmes to receive more than £82 million

Interesting Features

• Impact measurement
• Partnerships

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.

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. ⁵⁸ 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". ⁵⁹

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. ⁶⁰

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

3 Types of i3 grants

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 grants, 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 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." ⁶² 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. ⁶³

"Fail quickly, learn your lessons and move forward." Nadya Chinoy Dabby, Department of Education

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. ⁶⁴

During 2013, i3 ran its fourth funding competition, selecting 25 programmes to receive more than £82 million ⁶⁵ 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. ⁶⁶

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. ⁶⁷

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". ⁶⁸

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" ⁶⁹

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. ⁷⁰ 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, ⁷¹ helping build closer working relationships between government and philanthropy.

La 27e Région

"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 Région ⁷²

Where they are based Paris, France (population of France: 66 million ⁷³ )

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) ⁷⁴

Launched 2008

Example of impact La 27e Région has helped to design more than 20 social innovation pilots across 9 French Regional Governments

Interesting Features

• Leadership
• Team

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.

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." ⁷⁵

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.

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. ⁷⁷

6 Principles of The Friendly Hacker

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'." ⁷⁸

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.

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 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.

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 Champagne- Ardenne 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 £41,000 ⁷⁹ 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.

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, MONUM ⁸⁰

Where they are based Boston, USA (population of Boston: 636,500 ⁸¹ )

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 sources ⁸² )

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.

Interesting Features

• Partnerships
• Methods
• Resources

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.

Background

The Mayor's Office for New Urban Mechanics (MONUM) was launched in 2010, at the start of Boston Mayor Menino's fifth term. ⁸³ 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-to-day 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, "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". ⁸⁴

What it does

MONUM has been described as the Office of Research and Development for the City of Boston. ⁸⁵ 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. ⁸⁶

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.

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.

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. ⁸⁸

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". ⁸⁹ Citizens Connect has been successful in reporting and resolving problems, leading to a positive impact on the delivery of services. ⁹⁰

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.

"We never really want to be engaging in total blue sky work that can never fit with the existing operations." Chris Osgood

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. ⁹¹

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.

Ensuring innovations can be incorporated into the pre-existing 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". ⁹²

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". ⁹³

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. ⁹⁴
• 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. ⁹⁵

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. ⁹⁶

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". ⁹⁷ 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, non-profits, 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". ⁹⁸

MindLab

"Stimulating the dialogue in Denmark on transforming our public sector and creating a different interplay between the state and local level." Christian Bason, Director, MindLab ⁹⁹

Where they are based Copenhagen, Denmark (population of Denmark: 5.6 million ¹⁰⁰ )

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) ¹⁰¹ (£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

Interesting Features

• Methods
• Leadership
• Team

---

Footnotes

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.

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.¹⁰² The existence of an in-house lab holding such a vision of creativity was in itself innovative and unique for the Danish Government.¹⁰³

As it has developed, MindLab has embraced human-centred 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.¹⁰⁴

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.

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.¹⁰⁵

Across each of these areas, MindLab has three strategic objectives:¹⁰⁶

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.

To meet these objectives, MindLab develops projects and change programmes in collaboration with each of its government owners.¹⁰⁷ Human-centred design methodologies, and an ethos of listening to and learning from users, are the central elements of MindLab's work.¹⁰⁸ 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.¹⁰⁹ The diagram below shows the MindLab process.

MindLab's Process Model

(source: MindLab website)

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."¹¹⁰

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.¹¹²

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.¹¹³ As a result of the collaboration, the Business Authority launched a new website to simplify this process.¹¹⁴ This project resulted in a 21:1 return on investment.¹¹⁵,¹¹⁶

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.¹¹¹

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.¹¹⁷

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.

New industry code website

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.

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”,¹²¹ 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.¹²² There is a strong emphasis on hiring people who are adept at working with both citizens and colleagues in the ministries.¹²³ 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”.¹²⁴ 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.

Nesta Innovation Lab

"To incubate and scale disruptive innovation for the public good"

Helen Goulden, Executive Director, Nesta Innovation Lab¹²⁵

Where they are based

London, United Kingdom (population of United Kingdom: 65 million¹²⁶)

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.

Interesting Features

• Partnerships
• Resources
• Methods

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 2012.¹²⁷ 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 early-stage 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

One example of a grant fund is the Digital Makers Fund which backs ideas that get young people involved in activities like coding.¹²⁸ 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.¹²⁹ 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.¹³⁰

The Innovation Lab built on that experience to launch the Centre for Challenge Prizes¹³¹ 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)

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.

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.¹³² 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.

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).¹³³ 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.”¹³⁴

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

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.

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.

New Orleans Innovation Delivery Team

"Dedicated capacity for innovation and delivery has transformed the way we solve big problems in New Orleans"

Mayor Mitch Landrieu¹³⁵

Where they are based

New Orleans, Louisiana, USA (population of New Orleans: 0.4 million)¹³⁶

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

£0.7m¹³⁷ (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.

Interesting Features

• Leadership
• Team
• Methods

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".¹³⁸

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.¹³⁹ 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."¹⁴⁰

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 model¹⁴¹ to generate and implement innovative solutions.

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.¹⁴²

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.

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.

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.¹⁴³ 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.

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.

The Four Steps of the Innovation Delivery Model

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 various situations and still achieve results. As the director of the New Orleans Innovation Delivery Team, Charles West ¹⁴⁴, 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.”

New York City Innovation Zone (iZone)

"...working in schools, working in external markets, and driving systemic reform"

Andrea Coleman, former CEO, iZone ¹⁴⁷

Where they are based

New York City, USA (population of NYC: 8.3 million)¹⁴⁵

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)¹⁴⁶

Launched

2010

Example of impact

iZone's iLearn programme is projected to save £6.6m ($10.8m) by 2015

Interesting Features

• Impact measurement
• Partnerships

---

Footnotes

The New York City Innovation Zone (iZone)

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.

Background

The iZone was set up in 2010 by Mayor Bloomberg and the then chancellor of the New York City Schools system, Joel Klein. ¹ Education reform in the city had started eight years earlier after NYC public schools had experienced decades of poor performance. ² During the first wave of reforms, Children First, the administration, sought to create more leadership, autonomy, and accountability at school level. ³

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. ⁷ 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.

What it does

The iZone acts as an incubation lab for the Department of Education in New York City. ⁴ 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.

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. ⁸

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. ⁵

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. ⁶

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. ⁹

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.