Innovation isn't enough

Letting a thousand flowers bloom and fade

Now that political debate about public spending has moved from the synthetic argument about whether savings will be made to how, there is space and an urgent need to focus on how to shape the post recession economy. Innovation could be key to driving future growth but only if investment is there to propagate good ideas and scale them up.

The love of the new

Our sector is proud of its ability to find novel ways of combating social need. Take any discussion of the contribution of the third sector and it will be a matter of moments before its role as an innovator is introduced. Funding programmes tend to fuel this love of the new by prioritising innovation to the point where it can be difficult to find support for successful projects unless they are re-packaged as novel and untried.

But what happens to all of this innovation and are we really getting the full benefit of the investment in it? We seem to have become so wedded to experimentation that we have consigned to the 'too difficult' drawer the complex and resource intensive task of taking brilliant ideas and refashioning them to fit within new settings or on a wider scale.

Groundbreaking interventions with proven outcomes often go no further. They are not passed on as successful examples for others to adapt and scale up because of a lack of incentives, technical skills and investment in nurturing. Energy and creativity can be dissipated and exemplary projects allowed to degrade at the end of a short-term funding spurt.

Cloning or propagating?

Attempts to clone or franchise projects and drop them into new settings overlook the fact that what makes a community project successful will often be highly context-specific. It will have been fine tuned to the needs of a particular client group and driven by individuals and agencies with their own unique mix of passions and skills. Considerable resources over a sufficient period of time are needed for the idea to be properly evaluated, adapted and piloted in new settings for new audiences.

Why isn't it happening?

When it comes to spreading ideas that have been shown to work well, what are the barriers?  In her classic study on replicating successful projects for the Association of Charitable Foundations, Diana Leat looked at a number of disincentives. Although carried out 6 years ago, worryingly her research is as relevant today in spite of unprecedented investment in the sector.

Some of the barriers are cultural and peculiar to the third sector and its funding environment. The sector has come to wear innovation as a badge of honour and developed a wholesale aversion to duplication and 'wheel reinvention'.  Where the idea has been generated by an organisation serving a particular locality or client group, there are few incentives and powerful barriers to giving the baby up for adoption.

Organisations with capacity to adapt and propagate a service idea to reach new audiences may lack the will and resources. Unless they generated the idea themselves, there's no obvious mechanism for them to become aware of it in the first place. If evaluation happens at all it generally focuses on satisfying accountability demands rather than dissecting promising projects to examine what was critical to success and what can or should be changed if they are to be transferred to other settings.

The 'In and Out of Sync' report from NESTA in 2007 argued that while there are strong 'pulls' from politicians, public bodies and the public for social innovations, and strong 'pushes' from people with creative ideas, in the social sector at least there is a striking absence of institutions that link the two. Consequently most promising social innovations fail to grow.

Moving forward

There are encouraging signs in the willingness of BIG and independent foundations to put resources into the sharing of learning from evaluation with a view to encouraging replication. Others are getting on and doing it. The Cripplegate Foundation in Islington has developed a suite of services to combat debt and isolation. Its evaluation will be shared openly, and prospects for public investment to scale up seem promising.

Seed corn funding for community based innovation is understandably a seductive option, but while necessary it isn't sufficient. We need powerful incentives for public agencies and NGOs to copy or fund scaling up, intermediary institutions and networks that specialise in connecting up the pull and push of new solutions, resources for research and development as well as capital to fuel growth. With the prospect, post-election, of deep cuts in social spending, the shelving and squandering of hard earned knowledge has to change.