Doing things differently: tips for creating open innovation structures

It seems many organisations are talking about creating open structures for customer-led innovation – but how do you practically make it happen?

Whatever sector you work in there are a huge rise in the number of teams being setup to “drive change” and “promote new working cultures”. All too often, however, the same organisations who are calling for such teams are at the same time internally confused about why or how they will work; often overlooking the fact that meaningful innovation is disruptive by its nature and of the impact that disruption will likely make on the fabric of the organisation.

Our “lab” approach works across Bromford, a Housing Association of 30,000 homes, to reimagine services, inspire new thinking and design new ways of working. We wanted to make sure that when we started upon our own journey, we understood the impact of creating such open and customer led structures, so we spent around a year scoping out what an innovation lab at Bromford might look like.

We could see that there was a need to create a space for other colleagues to think differently about the problems they faced and come up with new types of solutions which could help drive the business forward, but the form that this took was set to evolve over time. Often, colleagues were having ideas, but increasingly found that they had no way of taking them forward, or even worse, took them forward without understanding how they fitted with the rest of organisational strategy.

It’s fair to say that, as an organisation, our focus on doing the right things for our customers has sometimes meant we followed our hearts rather than our heads – designing services around gut feelings, instincts and myths, rather than data, analytics and research

Philippa Jones, chief executive, Bromford Lab

The initial lab was started on minimal resources to encourage agility – following the “two-pizza” rule from Amazon that no team should be so big that can eat more than two pizzas.

Over the past few years the Lab approach has evolved. These days our insight team (data analysis and research) and innovation work closely together, and that has been important learning for us. Working off instincts is an important part of the design process – they can often give us a position to start from, but when we make judgments based on instincts alone, without the evidence to back them up, all we are really doing is making judgments based on what we think we know.

Here is our advice for creating open innovation structures and processes:

• You can’t save the world on your own
  To support open and customer led innovation, the solution lies in creating effective networks, because we all know a problem shared is a problem halved. The problems you are looking to address transcend organisations and sectors, so by sharing knowledge and collaborating on projects, you can learn and exploit opportunities to improve outcomes for all customers.
• Create design thinking organisations
  Part of the role of a Lab environment has to be to help colleagues spot opportunities and help them understand the best way to exploit them. Not every improvement needs to be run as a formal project, but enabling colleagues to understand the key principles of design thinking will help ensure that any changes they make are customer focused and considered as part of a wider ecosystem.
• Link with policy
  Solutions simply cannot scale if they don’t have a place within organisational strategy. In order to be sure that you are getting support to work on the right things, you must have a clear idea of how the work you are doing feeds into your strategy.
• Measure and Communicate success
  Often when working on preventive services, it’s hard to prove that an intervention you designed will achieve a better outcome without access to a time machine. We need to work with the people in the organisation that have the right skills to help us work through the data, but also challenge the organisation to look at different types of metrics, and work with them in order to design them, rather than against them.
• Don’t keep talking about it – try it
  Most of us can’t tell if we like something or not by reading about it in a report. We need to see it, feel it and experience it, so test it. Tests are typically time-limited, minimal resource and therefore low risk. The whole principle is to get things in front of people as soon as possible to reduce spending time and money on potential failures.
• Fast failure and pulling the plug
  The biggest barrier in most organisations is risk aversion – so anticipate this in advance. Show that you acknowledge risk and have put as much cotton wool around your idea as possible. Governance teams can be your greatest enemies or biggest friends.  Also, not every idea or project is destined for success. You need to know when to pull the plug early to avoid spending more money on well-intentioned vanity projects.