Does local government need innovation? Hell, yes. What gets in the way of innovation? Small ‘c’ conservatism and risk aversion. What opens doors in almost any organisation? That nice people from outside say this is a good idea. That’s why the LGiD route strikes me immediately as being a way to do it. Great if it happens organically across regions or councils themselves but let’s be realistic. That’s probably not going to happen any time soon.

It’s one of the reasons I love working in local government is that people are willing to share ideas for free.

Find a way of channeling that and we’ve got something…

For what it’s worth, reading the definition of skunkworks given, that sounds exactly like the kind of thing I have been running in my organisation – basically pushing for us to be able to offer an alternative, WordPress-based solution for web projects which for whatever reason won’t work on the main corporate solution; the hook I was able to hang it off was an internal client was just about to spend £10k on a website, and I fortunately happened to be at the relevant meeting and in a position to say “we can do that for you, for considerably cheaper – here’s how”. From that I developed a business case to present to my senior managers about how and why we should offer it as a service more widely, and have broadly been left to get on with it.

Interesting post. You, and your readers, might be interested in the 28/09/11 edition of Peter Day’s World of Business on the World Service (available as an MP3) which looked at innovation in businesses. There were arguments for and against the skunkworks concept.

I tend towards the argument that the trick is to support and encourage innovation across the organisation rather than try to drive it from a specialist team. Not that I have a convincing plan for delivering that across local government.

“….does local government need something similar? If it does, should it be a central body, or perhaps something that individual councils should have? Maybe it could be a shared service between groups of councils…”

My thoughts are that individual councils have such diverse needs, empathy and budgets, be they rural or city-based that a central body is not going to effectively or efficiently service its citizens or generate innovation across all local governments.

However locally spawned skunkworks and innovators that operate in a “Hybrid Organisation” (www.microsoft.com/uk/about/hybrid-organisation.mspx) manner can I think be extremely effective in local government and will have the ability to dynamically and quickly cross pollinate across those councils that see the value.

Because councils are primarily not in competition with each other, the concept of “Hybrid Organisations” where physical and organisational boundaries no longer inhibit and the concept of councils moving towards “Open Business Models” as explained in the great book “Business Model Generation” are becoming more and more valid and compelling for local government.

As Henry Chesbrough (Exec Director @ Centre for Open Innovation, UC Berkeley) once said:
“..Open Innovation is fundamentally about operating ina world of abundant knowledge, where not all the smart people work for you, so you better go find them, and build upon what they can do.”

We all need to ask ourselves:
- Is what I am doing contributing to the delivery of our organisational outcomes? Remove waste.
- Who can help me deliver these organisational outcomes? Collaborate.
- What can I contribute that will help others deliver their organisational outcomes? Transparency.

So I definitely think we need “local” skunkworks focussed on organisational and citizen led outcomes, facilitated by the concepts of open business models and hybrid organisations working across council and public/private boundaries delivering clear “business value”.

For some this is obvious, and for others it’s a major shift in mind-set, but it needs to happen.

Ant Clay
21apps

Maybe really it’s what LGID ought to be doing…

Simpl I think is a marketplace for linking ideas to participating organisations so could be a sort of distributed skunkworks I guess!

Is this something that fits in with http://www.simpl.co ?