This article is written by Jakob Schjørring, concept developer at Bikuben Foundation, a Danish philanthropy working within the social area and the arts. Jakob is former account director at MindLab, the world´s first public innovation lab, where he worked for 10 years

The start-up community in Silicon Valley has always been good at developing innovation frameworks that can improve the likelihood of developing a new product or service that can succeed on the market.

For the public sector innovation community, many of these frameworks and approaches might seem too commercial for tackling big, complex societal issues. But some of them are indeed relevant for public servants as well.

Take user-centred innovation and design thinking as examples. Hardly used in the public sector in the 2000s but are now widely acknowledged as efficient ways of doing public sector innovation in a complex world.

Now the talk of the town has shifted in Silicon Valley and a new paradigm — the Lean Start-up — is on everyone’s lips

In the last four years I have explored what public servants can learn from the Lean Start-up approach... I have concluded that the most promising contribution of this framework is that it fundamentally challenges our understanding of feasibility when we assess the cost of launching new public initiatives. Lean Start-up experiences show that if public servants want to know which initiatives have the biggest long-term impact for the lowest price, they should start by launching small-scale initiatives that are initially too expensive to scale.

From fast earning to fast learning

The Lean Start-up approach was developed in the late 2000s as a response to the need for Silicon Valley tech start-ups to shorten product development cycles and to rapidly discover whether their new product or service concepts had market potential. It was conceptualised by the US entrepreneur Eric Ries and played a central role in the development of famous digital services like Dropbox and the online retail store Zappos.

A key element of the Lean Start-up is a shift in the main purpose of a start-up’s first product or service launch.

Time-to-market has traditionally been associated with the need to make fast earnings in a competitive environment, but in Lean Start-up it is different. Here, the main purpose of a start-up’s first launch shifts from fast earning to fast learning. One of the ways companies put themselves in a position to learn more is by launching a bare-bones version of their product or service, what’s also known as a "Minimum Viable Product" (MVP).

For the start-up CEO, the success of this first launch is not defined by the income that this first launch generates

For the consumer, the MVP is perceived as a "real" new product or service on the market in the sense that they will only buy or use it if it resonates with their needs and desires. But for the start-up CEO, the success of this first launch is not defined by the income that this first launch generates. Rather, success is defined relative to the way that the market response to this first launch can help him and the rest of the management team take sound decisions on how to progress with the next phase of the product or service development.

In other words, which customer needs and desires that the core concept is best suited to meet and what new features that would heighten the chance of market success. Obviously, the hard question of whether the core concept should be abandoned altogether is also a decision that the launch of an MVP should help the CEO to make.

In a Nesta opinion piece from 2016, I argued that launching new political initiatives as MVPs could be a way to connect A: the need for public servants to deliver fast political responses to political hot topics with B: the fact that lasting solutions that accommodate the complexity of the political issue takes time to develop.

Since then my colleagues and I at Denmark’s MindLab have tested that hypothesis and found that certain approaches can indeed be copied with great success in the public sector.

Introducing the concierge MVP

When I started this research, it quickly became clear that the MVP approach is borne out of a tech-centred start-up environment and not out of a public sector innovation context. Start-ups use a variety of MVP models, but I was unsure which would be relevant in the public sector. In government, innovative solutions are often a complex mix of humans, places, tech, tweaks of economic incentive structures and organisational silo-busting.

Take the "Smoke-test" MVP, for example. This is typically a one-page website that describes the product and gives the user the opportunity to sign-up to hear more about when the product or service is available, thus giving the company an indicator of the initial market interest. Very relevant for Dropbox when they probed the demand for cloud-based filesharing, but way too rudimentary when developing solutions for complex, societal problems that governments wrestle with.

The core vision for Food on the Table was to make a mobile app that provides easy-to-cook recipes to families based on their eating preferences and information about which items were on sale in supermarkets nearby

However, one type of MVP is, in my experience, very powerful for public sector use: the concierge MVP. The most famous Silicon Valley concierge MVP launch is "Food on the Table". The core vision for Food on the Table was to make a mobile app that provides easy-to-cook recipes to families based on their eating preferences and information about which items were on sale in supermarkets nearby. Even though launching a mobile app was the company goal from the very start, the first launch of Food on the Table took an entirely different form than a mobile app.

The MVP version of Food on the Table was a personal shopping service free of charge. Staff went to visit their first clients in their own homes, made individual meal plans for them and went shopping and delivered groceries to each of them personally. The company chose to launch a concierge MVP because they simply did not know yet what exactly it would take for an app to fulfil the Food on the Table vision for the customers. But a hand-held, human-based version of the service would allow them to start with the specific needs and desires of the individual customers and freestyle from there.

In it for the long run

As the example above illustrates, the essence of a concierge MVP is a product or service that is launched with a strong value proposition or a strong high-level vision statement. But company staff continuously work with each buying customer one-on-one to find out what activities are needed to fulfil the vision in practice for that person.

This in sharp contrast to a traditional product/service launch, where months are spent on developing a detailed blueprint on how the product/service vision is manifested in a list of specific features and activities. This is the reason why the concierge MVP has taken its name from its hotel lobby counterpart, whose job is exactly to start from customer needs and freestyle from there.

The money the company lost in the short-term by launching a hand-held service that was far from economically feasible was considered an investment in a long-term market success

Obviously, it was impossible for Food on the Table to scale this hand-held shopping service. But this first launch gave the start-up a ton of learning on what customer needs and desires the Food on the Table concept was best suited to meet, and what features in the mobile app were crucial for market success. The money the company lost in the short-term by launching a hand-held service that was far from economically feasible was considered an investment in a long-term market success.

Likewise, public servants can use the concierge MVP to identify initiatives that have the best cost/impact ratio in the long run by first launching a "limited time/limited number of citizens/businesses" offer, even though this wouldn’t be feasible to scale. Doing so would create key insights both on what "value" is for citizens and businesses and how that value is created most efficiently. Likewise, the value of a public sector concierge MVP should be judged relative to its cost/learning ratio, not its cost/impact ratio.

Three real-life cases

At MindLab, we were tasked with helping a team of public servants develop a "get started" package for newly opened restaurants and cafes that could heighten their compliance with tax-, food safety- and work environment rules and regulations.

As part of the brief, the package needed to combine printed/online guidance with a 30-minute personal, on-site visit by a civil servant that gave advice on what rules and regulations to comply with and how to do it in practice.

As a way to design an efficient and scalable "get started" package, the ministries launched a "premium version" in 2015 to 100 newly opened restaurants and cafes that were selected randomly. They were offered more personal advice than we could afford at scale. The 30-minute visit was extended to one hour and the civil servant who was on-site had the opportunity to make direct phone calls to colleagues in three different ministries. We also offered the company follow-up advice on questions that could not be answered straight away.

In hindsight, I wish we had been more radical

In hindsight, I wish we had been more radical, offering those 100 companies even more personal advice or even cash that the owner could use for whatever "get started" support she found relevant. The extra cost of this would have been minimal compared to the cost of running the "get started" packages on a national scale. But it would have given us even more insight on what business needs and desires that the "get started" package was best suited for and how possible features of the package would contribute to higher compliance.

In another case, I advised a government agency that is responsible for doing research within the social domain. The agency wanted to rethink the way they made their results accessible to the sector so that. for example. municipalities and local institutions could use the results more actively in their local development projects.

The scope of the project was that any form of communication was possible, e.g. online tools, publications, conferences, audio-visual. But case-based consultancy was out of scope. Because of this, the agency was quite surprised when I advised them to do exactly that, to start the process of deciding how to make their research publicly available by launching a consultancy service to a very limited number municipalities and local institutions on how to use the main findings of the research to change their existing practices.

When I explained to the agency that this case-based consultancy was merely a concierge MVP of the written/audio-visual communication that they were to launch later, things started to make sense for them. That by putting themselves "on the line", the agency would get valuable insights on what it takes to make their research relevant, understandable and useable for local institutions.

If you are unsure whether you as a politician or top-level civil servant can justify allocating those resources, I encourage you to make a rough estimate on how much time and money you have spent in the last 12 months on doing analysis and writing up reports as part of preparing launches of new political initiatives

A third example has been launched by some of my colleagues at Bikuben Foundation. As a part of the ambition to create new opportunities within the arts, the foundation wants to find new ways of supporting newly graduated artists in their transition from student life to the labour market. As a first initiative, the organisation has launched a studio program, offering three newly graduated artists a free 11-month studio space on the ground floor of our building.

The graduates will also benefit from individual counselling and advice from an art consultant. The foundation is perfectly aware that it is hardly economically possible for the Danish society to offer all newly graduated artists the same. But by launching this concierge MVP, it hopes to create new insights on the needs, desires and opportunities for newly graduated artists that can inform future and more scalable initiatives that seek to ease artists transition from student life to the labour market.

Three tips for getting started

The most important prerequisite for adopting the MVP approach in your public sector innovation project is to make sure that both top management and the innovation team understand that an MVP is more than just another methodology or process tool. It is a new type of initiative that has at its core that the decision to launch is based on the expected cost/learning ratio of the initiative and not the cost/outcome ratio. This influences the way the development team works in the workshop space and it influences what decisions need to be made in the project stage-gates.

Secondly, you should design your MVP relative to your learning needs. As some of the examples above show, some MVPs are very explorative in their nature, whereas others are more focused on well-defined hypotheses on possible change mechanisms. Listing your assumptions and unknowns for the core concept you want to launch an MVP for is the best way to start the design of your MVP.

Thirdly, it does take time to launch MVPs. If you are unsure whether you as a politician or top-level civil servant can justify allocating those resources, I encourage you to make a rough estimate on how much time and money you have spent in the last 12 months on doing analysis and writing up reports as part of preparing launches of new political initiatives. Being a former civil servant myself, I certainly acknowledge the value of good analysis. But such an estimate will make a good base for discussing whether a combination of analysis and an MVP launch could be the most efficient way to identify efficient and scalable public initiatives.

I sincerely hope that these experiences will inspire public servants to experiment with the use of concierge MVPs so that together we can learn more about the potential and limitations of this approach in public sector innovation. — Jakob Schjørring

(Picture Credit: Unsplash)

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