Ingenious Networks
Last year we published a pamphlet called How to be Ingenious, which explored the effect of very resource-constrained environments on innovation – how such situations can sometimes cause innovation to thrive but at other times throttle it. We drew on examples of bricolage, technology races between countries, the Indian concept of jugaad, and interviews with people we thought exemplified the ability to devise ingenious solutions in different domains: an expert in theatrical improvisation, a software engineer and a survival instructor.
Given the state of our global economy (and ecology), the topic of resource-constrained – or ‘frugal’ innovation – is enjoying focus in public and private sector. The Innovation Unit’s blog pointed me to David Cameron’s tribute to the ‘Delhi drive’ to succeed: “When you step off the plane in Delhi or Shanghai or Lagos, you can feel the energy, the hunger, the drive to succeed. We need that here”. The Economist proclaim that frugal innovation will ‘change the world’. The subject has attracted recent business books (Jugaad Innovation) and one fascinating magazine (Makeshift).
Examples of ingenuity in the public sector exist, but how could they be better supported? Matthew recently blogged about the importance of clusters and networks to innovation, which are arguably even more critical to successful innovation in resource-constrained environments. Chatting with a colleague about the shift from top-down ‘best practice’ to more devolved practice and more ’micro-innovation’ to solve problems, we wondered whether an online platform could collect and showcase examples of ingenious or frugal solutions to common problems: perhaps a kind of Instructables for the public sector?
Latest Winners of a Citizen Power Award
This post was originally posted on Project Dirt, where we are building a cluster for all the community-led environmental projects in Peterborough.
Here at the Citizen Power Peterborough* project we’ve been working with community groups that have ideas which could make Peterborough a greener place. One way we’ve been doing this is by running workshops that allow people to develop their ideas and meet others, then help them apply for a Citizen Power grant that will allow them to test that idea on the ground.
So far we’ve funded further development of a well-loved community garden in Paston and a group who are in the process of assuming responsibility for a section of ancient woodland in Bretton. The latest decisions on funding were made at an event last Friday, when eleven individuals and groups applied for grants to allow them to put their ideas into action.
The three judges were environmental innovators Pam Warhurst of Incredible Edible Todmorden and Hermione Taylor of The DoNation, together with Councillor Sam Dalton – the member of Peterborough’s cabinet with responsibility for environmental issues. The judges heard from each group, who pitched the idea of their project for the chance of a grant.
People developing project ideas at an earlier workshop (photo by Adrian Stone)
Among others, the judges heard from one group who wanted to replicate the success of a Cambridge paint upcycling project in Peterborough. Rather than sending paint straight to landfill, they planned to collect waste paint from local recycling centres, store, sort and redistribute it to community groups and families.
A group of students from Peterborough Regional College presented a plan to convert old unused bicycles into safe and usable bikes. The improved bikes will be available for college students to buy at low weekly cost over the course of a year – making travel a more active and healthy experience, as well as being better for the environment.
The judges also heard from another individual who wanted to demonstrate the effectiveness of alternative energy systems like hydrogen power to people at public events. He planned to use an education fuel cell to power a low-energy projector, at the same time demonstrating and explaining the physics behind the post-oil future.
In the end, the judges opted to fund all eleven projects for amounts between £300 and £500 each. Each project will be creating a profile on Project Dirt (if they don’t have one already), so in time you’ll be able to keep track of their progress through the Peterborough cluster on Project Dirt.
Well done to all involved!
* Citizen Power Peterborough is an initiative from the people of Peterborough, the RSA, Peterborough City Council and the Arts Council, East
The full list of winners:
- Peterborough Repaint Scheme from Kevin and Fiona
- The Backyard Food Group Shop from Sophie
- Green Backyard Woodskills from Renny
- Rake and Bake Gardening Club from Parents United
- P£anet Bikes from Peterborough Regional College students
- Pond & Frogs project from Peterborough Regional College students
- An Introduction to Hydrogen Fuel Cells, HHO and Alternative Energy from Jordan
- Bike workshop from Dominic
- Slow Sewing from Lorena
- The Little Miracles Peterborough Sensory Garden from Michelle
- The Olive Branch Community Garden & Allotments from Mark
Learning how to bow out gracefully
How often do we ask ourselves: is what I’m doing truly working? It’s a simple question and one which makes intuitive sense to ask if we ever intend to learn from our mistakes and improve the impact of our work. And yet despite this it is something we tend to ignore time and again. Both at an individual and institutional level, many of us are reticent to the idea of evaluating the policies and practices that shape the effectiveness of our public services and which dictate their value for money. Indeed, these days it is quite rare to hear or see the term ‘evidence-based policymaking’.
For youth services at least, Project Oracle is attempting to change all of this. The initiative was set up by the Mayor of London’s office to help smaller organisations that are working with young people evaluate their programmes using ‘rigorous and internationally recognised’ standards. The way it works is that once organisations have signed up they are provided with free advice and support on how to assess their work, and are guided through different ‘levels’ of evaluation that gradually become more sophisticated. The Project has the added benefit of creating a sound structure for collecting and disseminating cross-comparable data that everybody in the sector will find meaningful – at least in the capital.
While attending a recent seminar at NESTA to learn more about the project, I heard a number of interesting points being raised about the obstacles to undertaking evaluation schemes and the subsequent difficulties of making use of the data once it gets collected. Many of those attending, for instance, said they feel as though there are cultural differences between people working in the voluntary sector and those in the academic/policy world; academics may insist on gathering quantitative data but service practitioners find anecdotal evidence far more useful. Another key issue raised was that although many funders are willing to pay for the evaluation of an organisation’s operations, only ever a handful actually commit to providing the resources for the implementation of recommendations that emerge from the research.
While all of this is no doubt interesting and useful, it felt as though the conversation side-stepped one of the biggest impediments to the initiation, the quality and the utility of evaluation schemes. This is the simple fact that many of us have difficulty in accepting defeat and apportioning fault. Whether a frontline practitioner or a senior manager, taking part in an evaluation process may open up a Pandora’s Box of knock-effects, which at best may lead to the radical restructuring of the organisation and at worst the termination of projects and ultimately job losses. Vested interests aside, there is also the challenge to service users and colleagues who may find themselves in the uncomfortable position of saying, albeit honestly, that someone’s efforts and practices are ineffective. It is one thing to acknowledge failings in our own work, but to highlight the caveats in someone else’s takes some courage.
The reason why this is doubly important is because there has rarely been a greater time when we have had to identify failure in our work and be open to new approaches. Whereas in previous years public service innovation was characterised by the sharing and adoption of universally recognised ‘best-practice’ approaches at home and abroad, the next stage is arguably going to be an era of localised, radical experimentation. In other words, it is likely that organisations providing public services will be encouraged to become their own ‘innovation labs’, testing different methods and practices until they land on the thing that works best for them. In practice, this could mean a school experimenting with different ways of teaching maths, or it could mean a GP consortium trying out innovative new health treatments with their patients.
Wherever this new wave of experimentation and rapid evaluation takes places, it will demand that service users, practitioners and those in senior management have a certain type of mindset which is comfortable with ambiguity and not afraid of failure.
It could be said that in the future there will be two sides to the coin when it comes to public service transformation. The first is that success depends on learning what works and adopting these approaches; the second is that we learn what doesn’t and ensure that these styles gracefully bow out. To date, it seems we have focused too much on the former at the expense of the latter.
Responsible capitalism through the eyes of future generations
The financial crisis and the resulting fiscal crises have put capitalism in the spotlight. In an era when public spending is being tightened, a question often asked is how can the private sector help alleviate social problems? So I thought this would be a good opportunity to turn people’s attention to the Future Quotient, FQ, a new idea from a Volans report I recently read, co-authored recently by Fellowship Councillor Charmian Love FRSA.
I think this collection of people and organisations that bring the interests of future generations into our decision-making today can inspire new ideas for businesses and social enterprises
To help define it Volans identifies 50 people, projects, organisations and states that have a strong Future Quotient. With nods to a diverse set of emerging business models – like biomimicry, collaborative consumption, open-source and freemium – it is an interesting collection. (If you think I’m in danger of buzzword overload, I urge you to familiarise yourself with the links.) I think this collection can inspire new ideas for businesses and social enterprises. And obviously we will look to support any ideas our Fellows have through our Catalyst programme – of which Charmian is a member of the working group that decides grants.
One of the organisations featured that everyone will have heard of is B&Q (and their parent company Kingfisher). They made it in because they actively seek input from the next generation to work out how their values compare to their business model. They do this by getting the children of employees to give their impressions of their parent’s work.
B&Q run DIY free classes… helping people mend and repair their homes at less cost to themselves and to the environment as well as improving B&Q’s trade
I also wanted to mention the way the report engages readers in its findings. Alongside The Future Quotient report, Volans, with the help of MindTime, invites readers to participate in a quick survey. This both engages the reader in the topic – giving me some questions to remind me what it meant to be future-minded – and provides them with more data – about the FQ of its stakeholders by age, sector etc.
This is relevant for us because, as Matthew Taylor states, “nearly all our major research and development projects are now designed to engage Fellows.” One example of how we do this already is the RSA Fellows’ Profit with Purpose Network who are collaborating with our Enterprise programme.
For those readers interested in learning more about this area I would suggest John Elkington’s Guardian blog and the FT’s Capitalism in Crisis blog.
You can find out more about RSA Catalyst and apply for grants and support at www.thersa.org/catalyst
Alex Watson is Networks Manager responsible for RSA Catalyst – follow him @watsoalex
What to make of an afternoon
Bringing nearly thirty social entrepreneurs supported by RSA Catalyst together with Fellows leading social enterprises and from social enterprise intermediaries meant that there were many opportunities for good things to happen…
I’ve already blogged about some of what happened on the day here, but wanted to give a further update after collecting feedback from the Catalyst winners about the event over the past few weeks. What were some of the achievements of the day? How could we (and hopefully other Fellows looking to put on similar events) make it better in the future?
Firstly, we watched relationships grow as people had the opportunity to informally network, as evinced in this graphic mapping the connections made by a sample of the Catalyst venture leaders:
There were also specific collaborations started during the afternoon. This photo shows Richard Butler FRSA swapping cards with a lawyer who specialises in advising on different legal formats project like his venture could adopt. In the background, a Catalyst-supported venture in Cardiff is meeting another Fellow who gives charities and social enterprises access to empty spaces. They are now pursuing access for the venture to a 3space in Cardiff.
This opportunity to strengthen relationships and encourage collaboration was talked about by my colleague Vivs Long-Ferguson on her recent post evaluating recent Fellows’ events.
But in addition to this, the afternoon aimed to help those Fellows leading Catalyst supported ventures to overcome specific challenges they were facing areas on the day itself – over and above any connections and collaborations started on the day. We used information gathered from our survey of Catalyst projects that have delivered the outputs promised with their grant to assist with this. Kate Welch OBE FRSA leads a venture currently based in Durham working with prisoners to build outdoor living products. And here she is having a one-to-one talk with marketing professional to build a plan for getting their projects or services to market.
It is always impossible to make the event perfect for everyone in the room. For example, those who had read all of the event brochure on the train to the event were frustrated that people took too long introducing themselves; those who hadn’t read anything felt things moved too quickly.
Another example is that we couldn’t get all the expertise there on the day that people had requested in their survey – the requests were wide-ranging. We are looking at covering some of this through follow-up with the individuals in question.
One interesting suggestion that came in after the event was to split the room up according to different common threads between the projects, rather than letting people select their workshops. This might go as follows: a social impact workshop might be more productive where the beneficiaries of the social venture were similar; funding workshops might be more productive to be discussed among social ventures that employed similar means of achieving their impact, or were at similar stages of progress.
There were also suggestions that as well as hearing from successful social entrepreneurs from the RSA’s Social Entrepreneurs Network and Skills Bank, we might turn the focus on one or two of the Catalyst projects for a part of the afternoon.
This is all really good feedback that’ll go into the planning of next year’s Catalyst event.
Meanwhile, I will finish with some of the extremely positive feedback: comments on the presentation from Albert Medal Winner Albina Ruiz ranged from “very inspiring” to “mind-blowingly brilliant.”
Thanks to the RSA’s social media reporter Matthew Mezey, we have videoed some fantastic interviews of Catalyst venture leaders. So in the New Year we hope these will offer a good chance to share the progress of Catalyst projects more widely.
You can find out more about RSA Catalyst and apply for grants and support at www.thersa.org/catalyst
Alex Watson is Networks Manager responsible for RSA Catalyst – follow him @watsoalex
Holding our Nerve
In Tessy Briton’s insightful blog on How Do We Create New Knowledge for Creative/Collaborative Participatory Paradigm?, Tessy outlines some vulnerabilities for this time of emergent shifts in ways of working together and how this reflects changes in our own thinking and behaviour. This link between organisational change, for example, change in how we deliver services and how we reconsider our own personal responsibility in this, is one we are examining within our work with the public services in Peterborough. And Tessy is so right – it is difficult and can be deceptively difficult because it must be about the doing and not the talking about doing – a much easier option. The Wikipedia entry on the principles of positive deviance suggests it is easier to change behavior by practicing it rather than knowing about it. “It is easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than think your way into a new way of acting”. This is the route the RSA team of Citizen Power and The Map are taking with an ambitious cross public sector delivery programme in Peterborough called the single delivery plan. We are most definitely seeing seeing a new participation ‘Creative/Collaborative’ paradigm emerging.
This programme has emerged from a strong set of working principles to help transform communities in Peterborough:
- Outcomes, not organisations
- Addressing the root cause of issues – a preventative agenda
- Innovation – doing things differently for less
- Prioritisation – clear focus, not everything we do
Remarkably, we are approaching this through the arts, utilizing the tools of creative processes to enable discoveries and change with a committed group of 45 senior leaders across the city. It is big, and risky and a bit of a miracle that we got here at all. One of the key reasons we did is through the leadership of Gillian Beasley, Chief Executive for Peterborough , who leads by example in taking a full and active part, identifying the long term aim as being about a mind-set change, urging colleagues to try things differently and not seek immediate and band-aid like solutions.
There is the inevitable temptation to make a plan of action and not take advantage of the opportunity to explore, reflect and observe patterns of behaviour in one’s own working life and act instead upon this. To make this manageable, we are in small cross sector groups of 6 – representing health, the fire service, enterprise, police, council services, the voluntary sector and facilitated by someone with a background in how arts can make change. We have all identified behavioural changes and lines of enquiry that can address the changes we want to make and are now at the stage of designing ‘experiments’.
We are trying to find our way without a road map, as Wikipedia says, – acting our way into a new way of thinking. It is transparently a ‘top down’ approach at the start, given the roles of the participants, but remember this is led by a commitment to a personal and organisational change in working practices. We are doing ‘bottom up’ and ‘from the middle’ approaches in other programmes in the city. And over the next year, we hope to uncover some of those key factors Tessy refers to. So far, the toughest thing is just keeping our nerve, holding on to a fragile confidence that working with those we don’t normally engage with and trying experimental approaches together is worth doing.
The Ecology of Innovation
One of the component parts of Citizen Power (a two year programme of innovation, participation and place-making in Peterborough) aims to spark and support local people’s ideas that could make “green” behaviour easier throughout the city. When planning the project we were inspired by insights into what can influence people’s behaviour and decision-making (such as the dramatic effect of social proof).
Our approach has been to teach these principles to local residents and help them apply them to the behaviours that underlie local environmental problems. We think that giving community activists the knowledge and support to “nudge” their neighbours could be a better way of encouraging behaviour change. National attempts to apply these principles could leave people feeling preached at, or alienate people by taking covert approaches.
Instead, we think that training community activists with the knowledge they need to nudge their neighbours can harness their local knowledge, their “one-of-us” status, and their existing trusted relationships with their community.
Towards the end of last year we tested this approach in a two-day workshop. Twenty-five enthusiastic residents learned about the effects of personal, social and infrastructural factors on human behaviour, then worked together to apply this knowledge to Peterborough specific problems. After a pitch to a panel of judges, two ideas were selected for seed-funding and non-financial support to allow them to become pilot projects.
One of the pilots will encourage a wider segment of the community to manage local plots of unused land. The group behind this project plan to map unused land in their neighbourhood and throughout Peterborough, then run small interventions to encourage local people to take an active role in stewarding the land.
The other pilot will encourage residents living near an area of ancient woodland to take an active forest management role. Currently neglected and the scene of anti-social behaviour, the community decided to create a woodland walk to make walking through the forest a normal activity for local residents.
Part of this approach to local nudging was informed by a paper – The Ecology of Innovation - that we published just before Christmas. It presents a few simple principles that could be used to encourage and support local people in getting projects off the ground. These principles include ensuring that local community organisations are able to participate in contributing their ideas, and supporting their ideas with financial and non-financial support so that they can be tested. You can read the paper online or download it here.
In 2011, we’re looking forward to getting these ideas off the ground, and also holding more workshops to encourage and support more ideas that could make Peterborough into an even greener place to live!
The Need for Design and Designing for Need
“Design isn’t radical enough.”
“Design is less innovative than business.”
“Designers don’t know how to make.”
What?! But jazzy, animated (literally, in some cases), colourful design is everywhere. Now with the London Design Festival in full swing, design, not just the stuff, but the very word itself, abounds. So, who says that design isn’t radical, innovative or curious? The speakers at yesterday’s debate at the RSA on ‘What should we be teaching professional designers today?’ that’s who.
Indeed, from an outsider’s perspective, design definitely does seem to be everywhere. Actually, from an insider’s perspective, too, but therein lies the problem. Designers have ‘won’ status for design, but with a changing and increasingly diffuse definition of design, much of design has lost the ability to identify and meet need. Thus, the debate asked three experts to tackle the questions: what are the skills that a designers needs today and how can we teach them?
Sam Hecht, an industrial designer and former teacher at the Royal College of Art, distilled the issue right down to its essence. By contrasting design for media (the Milan syndrome) and design for use, Hecht senses a disingenuous relationship between design education and the true need for and importance for design. Design students are enroling in advanced university design courses without ever having taken an object apart to see its parts and see how it fits together. Now, that might not sound too shocking to many of you, but this causes great concern for the professional design industry. Designers should know how to put things together (and you can’t know how things are put together without taking things apart). With a lack of understanding of design as a system of making and a system of use, design becomes utterly marginal. It is artists today, rather than designers are asking why things are the way they are…
Roberto Verganti, Professor of Innovation Management at the Politechnico di Milano, addressed the issue from his own experience of teaching design thinking to businesses. Verganti acknowledged that ‘design thinking’ has become a hot-topic in international MBA programmes and front-page news on business weeklies, but that as designers learn the language of business, design is becoming less and less innovative. Designers must return to their roots: identifying needs, pursuing radical visions and ultimately, delivering ingenious solutions. Hecht and Verganti agreed: designers are losing their language, being usurped by artists. He argued that designers need to be ‘radical’ again (citing Ettore Sottsass and the Memphis Group) and they need to resist the urge to be ‘culturally neutral’ if they are to continue to work with and influence not only business, but also design!
Ellie Runcie, Director of Design Support Programmes at the Design Council, introduced us to the power of design interventions from a policy perspective. Highlighting the Designing Demand and Public Services by Design initiatives, Runcie illustrated how design teaches people to think differently. Designing Demand supports businesses to become more innovative, competitive and profitable by giving managers a sort of ‘designer’s toolkit’ to spot opportunities, respond to a brief and work with clients. Public Services by Design builds capacity for managing innovation in the public sector and asks the crucial question: ‘How can design simplify public services around the needs of citizens?’ Runcie cited Lewisham Council’s successful engagement with the Public Services by Design programme to tackle the problem of homelessness (no small feat). By highlighting the strategic role of designers to think in a systems way (in this case, working with the public sector), Runcie summed up the quartet of essential skills for a designer:
- understanding people’s needs
- working visually and tangibly
- prototyping to manage risk
- working inclusively and collaboratively
So, there you have it: designers need to be radical, designers need to think in a systems way and designers need to rekindle their curiosity and the urge to make. Three different perspectives that provoke many more questions about design, its role and how its taught, but no matter whom you talk to or what you agree with, that old Eames adage still resounds: ‘Recognising the need is the primary condition for design.’ Oh, and it helps to take things apart once in a while.
What’s so new about ingenuity?
Thomas Homer-Dixon argues in his The Ingenuity Gap that the increasing complexity, pace and unpredictability of our world make a greater demand on our ingenuity than ever before. He suggests there is a gap that emerges between this demand and our ability to supply the ingenuity required to match it.
I’ve been thinking a little bit about ingenuity lately, particularly the distinction between ingenuity, innovation, invention and creativity, and there are a couple of characteristics of ingenuity that I like. One of these is picked up in The Ingenuity Gap, which notes that innovation describes new ideas being put into practice, but ingenuity “assumes that ideas don’t have to be new to be useful”. I think this nuance appeals to my distrust of the hype that accompanies technical innovation.
A similar theme was picked up in the excellently-named Hopeful Monsters and the Trough Of Disillusionment blog post last week from BERG. Matt Jones reports on a workshop that re-imagined applications for those commonplace technologies that would fall into the Trough of Disillusionment in Gartner’s Hype Cycle, like low capacity USB sticks, landline 
telephones or accelerometers. Resulting for example in Matt Webb’s comment “cross-breeding thumbdrives and, oh, something else that triggered a thought about audio… and the product that came up was audio textbooks on super cheap hardware for the developing world”.
The RSA is an organisation in the rare position of being able to look back as well as forwards. Its original working practice of giving out premiums “for any and every work of distinguished ingenuity”, has meant that the organisation has a long perspective on many technological developments over many years. Some of these [pdf link] are as relevant now as they were in their day.
I wonder if, when we face huge public spending cuts and the need to use the Earth’s resources more sustainably, some of the solutions might lie in past ingenuity as well as future innovation. So to stretch the original metaphor, might some of the most appropriate bridges over the ingenuity gap be those that have simply fallen out of use rather than ones that need engineering from scratch…?
Civic Geeks
What does “civic behaviour” look like? Voting springs to mind, as does volunteering, with perhaps starting a charity or social enterprise towards the black-belt end of being an active citizen. Debugging a page of code in the evenings is not something many of us would immediately point towards. But this particular example of civic behaviour, hidden to many of us, is going on across the country.
It’s become much more visible to those with an interest in technology through the example of pioneers like mySociety, who presciently argued for public sector data to be freely available in helpful formats to everybody at the same time as demonstrating how it could be put to social use through sites like TheyWorkForYou – created entirely by volunteers. And while the slowly-turning machinery of government chewed the idea over (now manifest in data.gov.uk), ingeniously came up with their own solutions of scraping it from the Government’s very web 1.0 sites and making it available to others.
Other enterprising groups have established their own community websites, which pull local residents around their neighbourhood, achieving in a Big Society-ish way some of what local government would like to do, while hacking events like those run by Rewired State (“Geeks meet Government”) bring people together to make useful and open applications from public data.
Rory Cellan-Jones broke the news today that many government websites could be cut, after a review from the government that highlights some of their soaring cost. This review seems in sympathy with a report the RSA published earlier this year that heard a variety of stories around the depressingly wasteful cost of public sector IT and argued for a more parsimonious approach to technology in a cold economic climate.
When the RSA was founded it aimed to “embolden enterprise, to enlarge Science, to refine Art, to improve our Manufactures, and extend our Commerce”, and offered premiums or awards “for any and every work of distinguished ingenuity”. William Shipley, a drawing master, felt deeply about the importance to Britain of the skill of drawing. One of the first premiums given is recorded in the minutes of the RSA’s very first meeting on 22nd March 1754:
“It was likewise proposed, to consider of giving Rewards for the Encouragement of Boys and Girls in the Art of Drawing; and it being the Opinion of all present that the art of Drawing is absolutely necessary in many Employments Trades & Manufactures, and that the Encouragement thereof may prove of great Utility to the public, it was resolved to bestow Premiums on a certain number of Boys or Girls under the age of sixteen…”
Drawing was a key skill in the eighteenth century, but in the twenty-first, it seems to me as though developing computer code is also important to solving some of the real problems we face. Developing code that helps people to feel attached to their neighbourhood, strengthens community, helps keep the government accountable, and reduces the burden on public money is of course a civic behaviour.
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