Government looks inwards for nonprofit innovation

The Cabinet Office has chosen a Government-funded unit to lead development on the Third Sector Innovation Exchange. This is the project where a group of us tried to be innovative by running an open process to develop the project, and were shortlisted for plans for an Open Innovation Exchange.
Work on the £1.2 million project will now be led by the Innovation Unit. Press release and advert for the £60,00 a year job of director here.
The Unit was set up in 2002 by then Prime Minister Tony Blair  to promote innovation in education, and is now funded by the Department for Education and Skills. Their partners are the voluntary sector chief executives' body ACEVO and social software developers Headshift, who created the award-winning site for Demos.
I don't want to sound a note of sour grapes here. This is clearly a very strong and competent consortium. However,  I feel that innovation among nonprofit organisations (and elsewhere, as I wrote here) is most likely to come from open, collaborative processes, not just from inside. Of course, the innovation unit may well be planning something really innovative here. Maybe they could now post their winning bid. You can see our (failed) one here, as well as the process by which we developed it.
We haven't given up on open source innovation, and will now be developing an exchange focussing on new media. I do sincerely offer congratulations to the winning consortium, and have no doubt my friends at Headshift will do them another whizzy site ... so we'll certainly be able to see what's happening.

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Comments

[Shane McCracken]

I hope the winning consortium do deliver an innovative solution and I support your challenge for them to publish their bid.

The fact that the project has gone to a govt. funded organisation raises an issue over competitiveness and long term innovation. I imagine that when you and you colleagues put together your bid you were spending your time and money doing so. For a Govt funded organisation are those costs already covered or do they have to build them into their proposal? As a company limited by govt guarantee do The Innovation Unit have to build an element of risk cost into their proposal as would a private or 3rd sector organisation?

Leaving aside the issue of "revolving doors" and access to decision-makers if private sectors companies sense that "insiders" have an unfair advantage in the pitching process than they will cease to pitch and that is when innovation and competitiveness will be reduced.

There is a danger of sounding like a whinging private company but we have recently withdrawn from a tender process because the perception was that it was a foregone conclusion that an "insider" was going to win. I wonder if others have felt the same.

[Jonathan Robinson]

We admire your bid, and identify with your core approach. Your emphasis on open source, on fostering a 'remix culture', on the aggregation of information and on collaborative production and delivery feels critical. If the Third Sector is to radically improve its capacity to scale innovations it will need to embrace these principles far more widely. I hope, that with your help and the brilliant team at Headshift we can build the tools and cultivate the culture to support this.

We agree with you, that in the words of Geoff Mulgan 'people who have seen the trials and tribulations of past innovations are much better placed to make judgments than generalist officials or Ministers'. This, we hope, is reflected in the team kicking off the project who represent networks of innovators working 'at the edge' of current practice. So this is our starting point, but it will be the quality of connections between third sector innovators, public service commissioners and social investors that will be critical to success. We'd very much welcome your input on the approach to transforming the quality of these relationships.

Do you have time to meet for lunch?

Jonathan

Interim Director, Innovation Exchange & co-founder of The Hub

[David Wilcox]

Jonathan - thanks for the kind words. I'm a great admirer of The Hub ... yes, let's meet and do some joining up.

[alex]

David

Please let us know how the lunch goes / went