We are in a time of multiple complex global challenges that will require a great deal of cooperation, creativity and innovation to solve. But, in areas such as education, climate change and health we are seeing the rate of decline outpace the rate of innovation on a global scale. If this pace does not accelerate then our organisations and institutions - even our societies and nations - will be left behind. What is required is a concerted effort to evolve, to generate the necessary transformational breakthroughs, and to stay abreast of all that is coming next.
This kind of innovation mindset is not about achieving a single breakthrough. It is about committing to an ongoing culture of discovery. A systematic and intentional approach, capable of driving change across larger systems through continuous learning, improving, and scaling.
At Brink, we believe that this need for continuous evolution through transformational initiatives is as critical for governments, philanthropists and donors. Without today’s innovation portfolio becoming the ‘core’ of tomorrow’s delivery, these organisations, institutions, and even entire countries will see that steady decline in their ability to serve citizens and tackle the world’s most pressing challenges in health, education, climate and other sectors foundational to flourishing lives and communities.
“It's easier to sign off a £50m project here than it is to sign off a £50k one.”
At first glance, a statement like that might feel counterintuitive, but you’d be surprised how many times we've heard something close to it from those in government departments, NGOs, financial institutions and even the corporate sector.
The reason is a simple one: Fear.
Unlike the big, multi-million projects with their strategic roadmaps, concrete outcomes, KPIs and feasibility checks; the £50k project is likely to be a step into the unknown. More often than not, the £50k project will be a bet on something that will surface more questions than it answers, and will require some kind of environment where new ideas can be nurtured before they’re ready to be released into the outside world.
But the potential payoff from these kinds of experiments is huge. They could unlock an entirely fresh set of possibilities that breaks through an organisation’s ‘business-as-usual’ mentality, and have the potential to catalyse more lasting change in the bigger system.
A step into the unknown
Experiments. Bets. Unknowns… These are not words that typically inspire confidence within teams or departments that are already time-constrained, are facing hugely complex challenges, and who are likely to be working with entrenched ideas and budgets made up of tax-payers’ money. But experiments, bets and unknowns are exactly the things you need to get comfortable with (embrace even) if you want to create truly transformative ideas.
Over the years Brink has designed and executed multiple tactics and strategies for navigating through this kind of uncertainty and that (entirely human) fear of failure. With our partners we’ve crafted innovation-friendly environments that can operate away from the usual checks and balances, and created an approach that exists far beyond just a ‘lab’ or ‘accelerator’. This approach unlocks a risk-taking, always-learning culture that means teams can conquer three key challenges:
Designing a space for innovation, outside of the gravitational pull of an organisation’s business-as-usual, that allows for new ideas, which will fail, evolve, and improve.
Collecting the complex suite of evidence that tells us whether or not an idea is likely to work and
Making sure ideas have the best possible shot at scaling successfully across the organisation and into the real world.
We call this new model of innovation ‘Carve-Outs’ and we believe that it holds the key for anyone who is looking to make innovation happen in a large, complex organisation or system but feels blocked by bureaucracy and entrenched ideas. If a team’s ability to innovate is hampered by the idea that there simply “isn’t time” for dedicated discovery and learning, or the fear of squandering public money is too great, then the Carve-Out approach can cut through that uncertainty.
Carving out to cut through
‘Carve-Outs’ is shorthand for the intentional partitioning of resources dedicated to continuous learning and building evidence. Usually they are built around a portfolio model that provides small grants and access to technical assistance which allow teams to investigate, test and prove (or not!) the validity of an idea that has the potential to catalyse change in the bigger system.
We’ve used the model to establish the Frontier Tech Hub with the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office. Here, FCDO staff are invited to submit ideas they typically wouldn’t be able to try out through normal programming. The best ideas are supported and brought to life through the application of lean startup methodologies, behavioural economics and user-centred design. Crucially, teams access funding through providing evidence of learning, not by results; so teams are incentivised to share insights, including those that come from mistakes and failures, something which has been historically hard to accomplish in the public sector. These small, rapid failures help us move closer to what works, quicker.
Similarly, the ‘sandboxes’ we created for the EdTech Hub are small, contained spaces (that, crucially, exist in the real world) in which proposed interventions can be safely tested. They allow teams to safely learn and adapt in a small yet real-world space before rolling out promising ideas more widely. The term ‘sandbox’ itself comes from software engineering and was originally used to describe a space that allowed developers to safely test new code before using it across the board.
Carve-out considerations
For anyone working in government who is looking to understand how they can create the conditions and mindsets needed for people to test, learn and evolve, there are some fundamental things which must be in place. Below we’ve listed the five core principles that form the backbones of the kind of catalysts capable of producing insights, surfacing risks, and generating the kind of ideas that can truly bend the curve of progress.
Commit to evolving and create structures to enable it. Transformational initiatives can only come from a deliberate and structured approach to creating meaningful change. Without this deliberate intent there’s no way of knowing if the organisation will be ready to adopt the ideas that are generated. Creating strategic intent means ring fencing funds, carving out of resources, ensuring that there is buy-in from the very top of the organisation, and using that buy-in to make sure you’re not leaving innovation to luck or chance.
Keep the people, change the mindsets. The people already working within your organisation are those who are closest to the problems and challenges it faces. They know the landscape, the audience and their unmet needs, as well as the processes that need to be navigated. By appropriately designing an enabling environment an innovation mindset can be cultivated in those same people. Plus, scaling innovation is far more likely if there’s continuity in the team driving it through from start to finish.
Learn fast, fail small. Organisational innovation is not about a single breakthrough, but continuous evolution - a discipline of ongoing discovery. Small scale initiatives, like testing new education methods in select schools or trialling frontier technologies in pilot programs, are not the end goal. Rather, they are strategic landmarks on the way to driving change across larger systems. When they don’t work, the failure is small and contained. When they do work, they create a lighthouse effect that illuminates the path forward for the whole organisation.
Invest and scale in line with confidence. Financial accountability in innovation involves transforming ideas into quantitative experiments, where investment is gradually increased as your confidence in the idea grows. Rather than committing heavily to untested concepts, the focus is on iterative learning and accepting that uncertainty is part of the process. Ideas are initially tested through minimal viable products (MVPs) or ‘pretotypes’, which allow for fast, cost-effective insights. As these experiments provide more data, the investment grows in proportion to the demonstrated potential.
Do in order to learn. There’s a limit to what you can learn in order to do. You will have to get out into the real world and try things with real people - and the sooner the better. If you are seeking to be genuinely innovative then, by definition, you are looking to do something that hasn’t been done before, so there’s only so far theory and research will get you. Carve-Outs will always contain a real world element that involves taking your idea out into the wild and learning from experience. It’s almost certain there will be flaws in your planning. Taking it out into the real world sooner will quickly show where the flaws are so you can resolve them.
The Carve-Out is not simply about generating a single innovative idea. It’s about creating a new way of working, an ongoing process of exploration and discovery. By adopting this approach, government teams can unleash the innovative potential in their people and achieve outsized results with a relatively small investment.
Our new whitepaper 'Innovation Carve-Outs: Curating the Space for Innovation' looks at the limitations of existing innovation models, explores the foundations of the Carve-Out method by drawing on the behavioural sciences and organisational psychology, and presents a practical framework for fostering a culture of innovation with actionable steps and strategies for facilitating collaboration and creating the kind of culture that allows for a dynamic and sustainable ecosystem for innovation. Download it here.
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Brink is a team of psychologists, strategists, designers, creative thinkers and technology optimists. We use a framework we call behavioural innovation to shape our work and our worldview. We are lucky to work with governments and public servants around the world, with donors and philanthropic orgs through:
Open innovation: designing and running funds to invest ideas, unearth deep insight and create spaces for learning.
Innovation carve-outs: creating spaces for innovation to be freely pursued within existing organisations and systems. Typically this is a small grant and technical assistance to investigate, test and prove (or not!) the validity of an idea in order to catalyse change in the bigger system.
Innovation Missions: moving systems forward with cross-sector collaboration, bold goals and a participatory approach.
All in service of accelerating impact and delivering the innovation we need for people and planet.
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