Why you should consider a narrower scope for your next design-led public sector innovation process

This post is written by Jakob Schjørring, Concept Developer at Bikuben Foundation.

• The problem: Too often, public sector innovation processes do not spark any direct change.
• Why it matters: We do not leverage the change potential that these innovation processes represent.
• The solution: Scoping your next innovation process narrower, focusing on known but still untapped opportunity areas.

Most of us who have been in the public sector innovation business for many years know the drill: gather a group of highly skilled people in a design-led exploration of a very complex societal issue with the aim of identifying novel and actionable ways of dealing with the issue at hand. But for me at least, I have more than once led or participated in innovation processes that did not spark any direct change.

I will not question that such “Innovation Holidays” (thanks to Charles Leadbeater for this lovely phrase) do give the participants both energy and inspiration that the individual participants bring along in their activities back home. Just like a holiday trip abroad brings renewed energy and inspiration into your work life. But since most innovation processes are kicked off to spark action, not just thoughts, this is a problem we need to take seriously.

From method mastery to necessary prerequisites

In the search for answers on how to make design-led innovation processes more impactful, I am thrilled that we in the public sector innovation community have moved beyond a one-sided focus on method mastery. This shift has been a natural consequence of the fact that the level of ambition in the public sector innovation community has also increased: from developing individual policies and services to creating systemic change.

Five years ago, we started this shift towards systemic change in the Bikuben Foundation. With this aspiration, we run cross-silo and cross-sector innovation processes and fund the most promising initiatives. And we are continuously exploring what prerequisites should be in place to enable design-led methods and thinking to do their magic. And in our current innovation process we are experimenting with one such prerequisite: how to scope the societal problem that we seek to address in the process.

In this article I will share why we scoped our forthcoming innovation process, focusing on youth in out-of-home placement, narrower than we have done before. I will also share how this narrower scope has helped us to mobilise organisations to participate in the process. Finally, I will share what we hope to learn when we run the process in the coming months.

Following your FOMO comes with an increased risk that your innovation process turns into an innovation holiday.

Letting go of your FOMO when scoping

One key question when organising innovation processes is how broad or narrow you should scope the societal problem for your innovation process. And in my experience, there seems to be a tendency to prefer very broad definitions of a wicked, societal problem. e.g. “improving mental health” or “carbon neutrality”. Starting with such a broad scope is brilliant if the purpose is to spark public imagination as the former Nesta CEO Geoff Mulgan calls for in his most recent thinking. But if the purpose of the process is to come up with actionable initiatives, my experience is that these very broad problem definitions make process success less likely, no matter how advanced the design-led methods are.

I believe that the bias towards very broad issue scoping can partly be explained by FOMO – fear of missing out. As curious individuals, we are excited about the opportunity to use a design-led process to identify a brand-new, never-thought-of opportunity area – even though we are already aware of numerous opportunity areas that are still untapped. I am too. But I also think it is important to recognise that following your FOMO comes with an increased risk that your innovation process turns into an innovation holiday. Simply because you end up spending all your time exploring broad and shallow instead of going deep and concrete.

Relying on trusted experts is often a shortcut to a narrower scope for your innovation process.

Engaging trusted experts in scoping

Because of the above, we at the Bikuben Foundation wanted to scope our forthcoming innovation process quite narrowly. Our mission is to create systemic change enabling youth in out-of-home care to successfully transition to living on their own. But the scope of our forthcoming innovation process focuses on three very specific opportunity areas related to this transition, that are known but still untapped:

• How might we heighten the chance that the youths’ existing (weak) relations will be valuable for them in their transition from foster care to living on their own?
• How might we heighten the chance that young people feel important to others when transitioning to living on their own?
• How might we enable a more need- and desire-based choice of living arrangement when the youngsters transition out of foster care?

Narrowing in was done in a two-step process: First we informally reached out to a good handful of top managers in organisations that play a central role in the domain. We asked them to come up with their best bet on what untapped opportunity areas held the biggest change opportunity. Afterwards we teamed up with ‘De Anbragtes Vilkår’ (DAV) – a Danish Care Leavers Association founded by former children and youth in out-of-home care. We gave them the mandate to look at the gross list of opportunity areas and from that define the ones to explore in our innovation process. Giving DAV this mandate was in line with the Bikuben Foundations youth-centric strategy. But the general point to make here is that relying on trusted experts is often a shortcut to a narrower scope for your innovation process.

Three ways that our narrow scope has influenced our mobilisation of participating actors

We have spent the last four months identifying and mobilising a total of nine partners from municipalities and NGOs to participate in our forthcoming innovation process. Here is what we have learned about how our narrow scope has influenced this mobilisation process:

1. Creating aspirations for real change

The mobilisation process did – fortunately – confirm that the three opportunity areas are indeed both relevant and untapped. And it was very clear that the concreteness was perceived by the municipalities and NGOs as an indicator that the ambition of this process was to spark action, not just thoughts. This was very important for them since action is what motivates them in their professional life.

There is no doubt that it would have been embarrassing, had the three opportunity areas been totally out of sync with the municipal and NGO experiences. But after these emotions had subsided, we would hopefully have recognised that this failure had also been an accelerated learning opportunity on what untapped opportunity areas might be relevant to explore.

2. Screening for cross-pollination potential

We believe in the power of cross-pollination, i.e. connecting and combining concepts and practices that on the surface seem unrelated. But assessing the cross-pollination potential of different organisations and actors is always tricky. This has been much easier with the narrow scope, both when identifying relevant organisations and in the initial dialogues. I have been impressed how reflective the municipalities and NGOs have been on how their existing practices might inspire new practices.

3. Laying the ground for cross-organisational experiments

The goal of our forthcoming innovation process is that the nine municipalities and NGOs partner up to conduct joint learning experiments. From past experiences we know that teaming up is not something that happens by itself, one of the reasons being that different organisations have different opinions on what is the most promising opportunity to act on.

In the initial dialogues with municipalities and NGOs, a lot of ideas have come up that are out of scope of the three opportunity areas. But even though it has been tempting to allow for these ideas to be explored as well, we have been quite strict in ruling these ideas out of scope. Our argument for this has been that a shared agreement amongst all participating organisations to work on exactly these three opportunity areas will enable them to collaborate better. With this argument, the rigour has not only been accepted, but also appreciated. Simply because they all agree that cross-sector partnerships are needed if we are to succeed in transitioning youth from out-of-home care.

What we look forward to learning about

Together with our process partner Danish Design Centre, we kick off the design-led process activities in September 2022, expecting to decide what experiments to fund in January 2023. When designing and running the process activities, we are particularly curious about:

• how to support ongoing sensemaking of the three opportunity areas amongst the nine participating organisations;
• how to continuously motivate the exploration of cross-sector opportunities, laying the ground for joint action;
• how to identify radical new ways of untapping the potential of the three opportunity areas, e.g., through major shifts in purpose, power, resources, or relationships.

Please reach out to us If you have thoughts and experiences on these questions. I will be back in January 2023 with a report on what we learned. In the meantime, I hope that this article will spark debate on the noble art of finding the right scope for your innovation processes.

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