Thinkpieces

Aotearoa, rugged individual. Glisten like a pearl. At the bottom of the world.
The tyranny of distance. Didn’t stop the cavalier. So why should it stop me.
I’ll conquer and stay free.

- Split Enz. Six Months in a Leaky Boat

The tyranny of distance has made Australia and New Zealand (Aotearoa) rugged “individuals”, historically known for our innovation or as kiwi Ernest Rutherford[1] once stated “Gentleman, we didn’t have the money, so we had to think”.

Foreground

In a speech on 12^th August 2010 to the Australia New Zealand School of Government, New Zealand’s Minister of Finance, the Honourable Bill English, stated that “We owe it to them (the next generation) to innovate, to take risks, to push the boundaries and to pay our own way. The clock is ticking.”

Earlier in his speech he also queried where we would look for new directions and ideas, stating “To be frank – they will not come from Australia and New Zealand.” He implies that this is because we compare ourselves with the US, UK and Europe who have burning platforms that call for cost-crunching innovations.

I disagree and believe that new ideas for the public sector can come from within Australia and New Zealand. Our countries have been very innovative in the past in both the public and private sector. We can continue to be so.

We do not need to be on the same intensely burning platform as our northern hemisphere counter-parts. We have powerful drivers of our own, and a track record of ingenuity and innovation. We can co-design with our insightful designers and innovators in the private sector. We can bring a unique New Zealand and Australia approach to innovating.

We only need to look at the Kiwi-Aussie Fred Hollows who looked at the poor state of eyesight in poor countries. He innovated to restore thousands of people’s vision using new operating techniques at very low cost.

Fred also challenged Kiwi-ex-Englishman Ray Avery to develop intraocular lenses in “one of the most poorest, most technically-compromised countries in the world”[2] Eritrea, and then Nepal. Not only did Ray build a factory to produce the highest quality lenses at a fraction of the normal cost ($10 to market), but also he created a knock-on global effect causing the cost of the generic lens market to plummet. There are many other such examples from New Zealand and Australia.

Private and Public sectors co-creating

We need to rethink our business models, products and services across our economies. We also need a strong, smart and enabling public sector behind us. Australia and New Zealand may have a “tyranny of distance” challenge to overcome. For the private sector this means not just filling up ships with goods but filling up bandwidth with IP and value-added goods. In the public sector, it means not relying solely on parachuted overseas solutions from larger more complex administrations but tapping into the rich seam of seeing things differently down-under and innovating.

While our comparator countries struggle to overcome the inherent inertia of changing large and complex administrative systems, Australia and New Zealand are small enough to co-create, prototype, refine and implement new ideas at pace. These ideas can be sourced from within our countries and also adapted from those emerging internationally.

So what is public sector innovation?

There is a growing awareness that innovation is just as important in the public sector as it is to a healthy private sector. The public sector is facing a perfect storm of unproductive operations, pressures to significantly reduce public spending and out-dated service experiences.

Public sector innovation is now seen as being critical to delivering excellent value for money over a sustained period of time. However as Gary Hamel once stated “Despite all the pro-innovation rhetoric, most still hold the view that innovation is a rather dangerous diversion from the real work of wringing the last ounce of efficiency out of core business processes.”

As in the private sector, the public sector embraces efficiency generating methods such as lean thinking, six sigma. These are great approaches for wringing the efficiencies out of where you already are; however they tend not to produce significant breakthroughs. These approaches rely on deductive and inductive logic where variation is the enemy and management by fact is the friend. The nature of innovation is to come up with new solutions that have not been thought of before in your context. As Roger Martin[3] puts it “you cannot prove a new thought in advance” you need to apply abductive logic, the logic of what could be.”

Successful innovation requires us to focus on what is desirable from a customer’s perspective, what is viable from a business perspective and smartly leveraging technology to its maximum.

Swimming in millions of innovation definitions

If you Google search innovation and design definitions, you will obtain in excess of one hundred million hits for both! Geoff Mulgan[4] is one of the definition authors. He elegantly states that public sector innovation is simply “new ideas that work at creating public value”. He also has authored a number of useful papers highlighting the challenges of innovating in the public sector.

The challenge becomes one of generating new ideas which are useful, usable, efficient and of value to our citizens. These ideas also need to make it from the drawing board to the street; they need to be implementable and implemented.

Where do new ideas come from?

For some people new ideas spring up randomly, but for others new ideas frequently occur in the shower, dropping off to sleep or walking the dog.  These tend to be random moments of inspiration and insight.

So how might we create “new ideas that work at creating public value” on a consistent basis? How might we improve our ability to innovate within the public sector?

Just as organisations invest in improving their ability to project manage after ideas are converted to scopes, so too can organisations invest in a capability to consistently innovate. As Kohli and Mulgan[5] state in “other fields such as science and medicine – innovation doesn’t happen by accident. There are well-developed systems to foster innovation”.

These systems and approaches involve improving the consistency of discovering new needs-based and problem-solving insights, generating new ideas, making them really fast through prototyping and developing useful solutions. This can be achieved in the public sector through the application of design thinking approaches and co-design capabilities.

Design thinking seeks to make these random moments less random and more intentional. Design introduces a broad-based approach to explore the user world, unearth insights, prototype possibilities and configure new activity systems to make them real. Design is concerned about the whole solution, made up of all its parts working in an integrated fashion. The discipline of design brings a mindset, methodology and a toolkit, which enables innovative solutions to be manifested on a consistent basis.

Looking through different eyes

The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes

- Marcel Proust

A significant portion of policy and services designed for the citizens of our countries is conceived by people with great intent who reside in our large and/or capital cities. Although they have authentic intent, these people are usually not representative of the citizens they are designing for. They are looking through their own perspectives and experiences.

Hence, although the policies and solutions produced are workable, they are not always usable, understandable or desirable. The right intent but a lack of broad perspective or “new eyes” can lead to inside-out incremental solutions, which often complicate our lives and add to our compliance burden. We think we are helping, but often we are not.

Design provides a proven set of approaches to see the citizen’s world from new and insightful perspectives; it then translates those needs-based and problem-solving insights into a new activity system. This has been called taking an outside-in perspective or looking through a different lens.

Customers and public sector delivery staff are often the forgotten innovation enabler. Unless there is an explicit approach, this critical source of insight and ideas won’t be leveraged to its fullest potential.

The clock is ticking

In summary, innovation in the public sector is critical at this time more than any other time in recent memory. As Bill English states “the clock is ticking” and we cannot leave innovation up to future generations. Australia and New Zealand are innovative countries with down-under can-and-must-do talented people. If we are committed to consistently generating new possibilities and not just tweaking our current reality then design thinking is the proven vehicle for innovation.

The tyranny of distance. Didn’t stop the cavalier. So why should it stop me. I’ll conquer and stay free.

[1] known as the “father” of nuclear physics for splitting the atom

[2] Ray Avery. Rebel with a Cause. .Auckland, NZ: Random House, 2010.

[3] Roger Martin, The Design of Business: Why design thinking is the next competitive advantage. Toronto: Harvard Business Press, 2009.

[4] Geoff Mulgan, Chief Executive, the Young Foundation, UK. http://www.youngfoundation.org

[5] Jitinder Kohli and Geoff Mulgan. Capital Ideas: How to generate innovation in the public sector. July 2010. http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/07/pdf/dww_capitalideas.pdf