Toying with new ideas

Who wouldn't like to have a government that's both as innovative and well managed as companies like Nokia, 3M, Shell, LEGO or Apple?

There is a lot of discussion currently on public sector innovation in many countries, but hardly anyone is willing to look at the way business organises innovation. The standard argument for this neglect is that politics and government are so different from business that it's not useful to transplant business practices to the public sector.

However, I think that we can learn a lot from innovation models from some excellent companies in the world to create a better and faster moving government.

The result could be a government that is more responsive to new ideas, has a professional way to set up experiments and learn from them, is better equiped to turn feedback from citizens into new stuff, gives tools to citizens to create their own stuff and is (much) more fun to work for.

It all starts with a simple assumption: that developing and implementing a new policy is not all that different from an innovation process in a business. Any innovation starts with an inspired idea of a new possibility, be it a solution for an existing problem or a new opportunity altogether.

This applies to government as well as business. The big difference is that business over the past 50 years has developed professional tools to nourish these new ideas, make a tough assessment to select the best, and test them in proof-of-concepts and from there to quickly deliver new products and services to customers.

Let's take a look at Nokia. The Finnish company of mobile phones and networks has an interesting way to generate more than one solution to a problem.

Instead of setting up one team, it will give the assignment to different, multi-disciplinary teams. The teams are in a creative competition with each other, pitching their own solution. It's a perfect way to prevent groupthink and lobbying from special interests within the company.

Anyone who has worked in or around government knows that policy development is easily caught up in groupthink and often frustrated by lobbying from interest groups. Wouldn't it be great if a minister or a cabinet could get three possible solutions instead of one?

Those three would of course be less developed, but they would also be fresh. The classical way brings one solution that is more often than not a heavily compromised proposal. The common denominator has very likely sucked out most of the originality, inspiration and clarity that started of the process.

It would also be worth looking at a company like 3M. The company wants to create at least 30 per cent of its revenue with products and services that are less than two years old. To be able to do that requires a huge commitment to innovation.

People within the company that have a good idea get time allocated to develop it. Furthermore, the company nourishes failures. People are invited to share errors that are made and share the lessons with colleagues.

To give you an idea of the impact of this “Culture of Innovation”: one researcher, working on a new type of glue, ended up with a messy, sticky substance that simply wouldn't dry up. He shared this failure with his colleagues. One of them was a singer in a church choir. He figured out that sticky glue that never dried would be a great solution for the page markers that kept falling out of his songbooks during concerts. After testing that successfully he came up with the small yellow sticky notes that can be found in every business and household.

Now let's take that example to the public sector. Learning requires in many cases admitting failure, but there are not many politicians willing to do that. Likewise, civil servants are hardly rewarded for taking on risky projects. For career driven people it's much more important not to make mistakes.

This attitude is hard to change. A good start would be to see new policies as experiments, explicitly state in discussions with parliament and the media that innovation inherently involves risk, pre-define the risks involved and create a feedback process to evaluates the results and promise “aggressive learning” if the experiment fails.

How about Shell and its Gamechanger-program? Big companies are not that different from government organisations in the sense that they have many management layers, a lot of formal rules and are dominated by the daily routine.

Within big organisations it's very hard to get good ideas from the bottom to the top, not to mention getting it from the top down to the bottom again.

An inspired idea of a new possibility at the bottom of the organisation loses most of its originality and edge on the way up. Shell's management knows that if it can't tap into the knowledge and ideas of its people in its daily operations, the company has a serious problem. So it set up a program to get radical ideas from everybody inside (and even outside) the organisation and created a high speed track for those ideas.

Let's say that you have a radical idea for Shell. You can submit that to the Gamechanger-program via a website. A small team that reports directly to the CEO Jeroen van der Veer assesses the potential. If they like your idea you have a meeting with them two weeks after your submission. If they like you they will give you budget to further develop your idea into a “proof of concept”.

Depending on how promising and big the idea is, the Gamechanger-people will bring you to the right executive people directly and you get a chance to pitch. Shell puts around 45 million euros into the Gamechanger program every year, about 10 per cent of its total R&D budget. One of the strongest indications that it's working: middle management hates it.

It wouldn't be hard to set up a Gamechanger-equivalent in the public sector. If you're a politician or public manager, create a way for the really smart civil servants to escape from the formal hierarchy that you are responsible for. Find a way to select the best ideas, invite the people directly to your table, give them a budget to test those ideas and support them during the testing. There are a lot of entrepreneurial minds working in the public sector, but we hardly have ways to tap into them.

There are also a lot of creative minds among the customers of LEGO. The company came up with a brilliant way to get those minds working for its business. It created LEGO Factory, software that anyone can use to create a new LEGO-model. When you're finished designing your model you can order the right LEGO-pieces with one mouse click and get it sent to your home.

The company didn't stop there. It opened up the possibility for other LEGO-fans to order those self-made models. It even promised to bring the ten most popular models into its retail channels. The designers receive a percentage of the revenue.

Now how about the government giving a tool like this to its citizens? What would it look like? We could start with a city website where people can create or post their idea for their neighborhood and let visitors select the top ten.

The city could post a problem that the government is trying to solve and ask people to do the same, see what they come up with and let the community of involved people do the selection of best ideas for you. It would increase the number of smart brains involved in the problem solving and would again reduce the risk of group think.

The principle behind this is “crowdsourcing”. It's the Internet's equivalent of the classical call in a theatre: “Is there a doctor?” when someone is unwell. Wikipedia, the world’s biggest encyclopedia, is built on this principle. Set up by volunteers, it created an infrastructure where anyone can contribute.

As the saying goes, nobody knows as much as everybody. It's very likely that the best solution for a government problem is somewhere out there, you just have to involve the right people. The richer the network a government can tap into, the bigger the chance that it will find someone with a very elegant, smart, simple solution.

And what can we learn from Apple? Well, just take a look at the iPod. See how beautiful its design is, the smooth curves, the thinness, the wonderful look and feel of it. Pure eye candy.

However, you shouldn't underestimate what a powerful, complex machine it is. Yet it's extremely easy to operate. It just works. And the secret behind it is: no matter how great you or your ideas look, it's worth nothing if it doesn't work properly every day.

Apple has always had by far the brightest ideas of the computer industry, but in the late 90s it failed to deliver those ideas to the customer in a high quality way. Luckily the company learned and put itself back on the right track. It learned the hard way that the proof of the pudding is in the execution. That's 90 per cent of the work, both in business and in government.

Now I've met many people in many countries that work in government. All of them love to work for the public good, however many of them are frustrated about the organisations they work in. Especially the inability of their organisation to innovate and pick up new ideas is very frustrating.

I often find that it's the most creative, entrepreneurial and inspiring people that leave the administration. They are tired of fighting the bureaucracy, they feel undervalued and have the choice to step out. They often end up in consultancy jobs or think tanks, still working on public issues.

That's partly good, because we don't loose their minds. But it's a shame too, because we really need very good people inside government to solve issues like global warming, worldwide security problems, energy dependency and maybe even a few national problems as well.

We can redesign our public sector organisations so that they are open for innovation and know how to embrace inspired ideas of new possibilities. Learning from methods that work successfully in business is a great starting point. Those public organisations that succeed will make working for government much more fun, and that's the best way to attract and retain talent.