About us
Innovation by smoy, used under CC licence.
A quick guide to what we mean by innovation in the public sector, including definitions, practical help for leaders and people working in the public sector who want to know more about innovation, what to do with their great ideas and how innovation can become an important part of the organisation’s culture.
Who are we?
As the Department for Innovation, BIS will help Departments to develop their capability to deliver open public services, including through access to The Innovation Space, its unique facility for supporting innovation and collaboration.
BIS has set up the Innovation Capability Team to support the UK Government’s drive for innovation by helping government departments to build their capacity to innovate.
In October 2009, the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Gus O’Donnell tasked BIS’s Public Sector Innovation Unit (now the Innovation Capability team) to develop a package of support to help government to innovate. He said:
“Sustaining and improving public services, and tackling the most complex policy problems, will test our professionalism to the full, in a challenging fiscal context. Doing things as we have always done them won’t be good enough. We must find new insights and develop new ways of working.
“In short we need to build on our capacity to innovate, to make innovation central to our work. We must learn from each other about how to build innovation into our organisations. I set BIS the challenge of leading that work on behalf of Government. I’m delighted that they have now developed a package of innovation support.”
Sir Gus O’Donnell
Cabinet Secretary
What we do
The role of BIS’s Innovation Capability team is to:
- provide help and support for people working in the public sector who would like to access tools and techniques to think (and do) differently;
- offer guidance and support to leaders who want to explore innovative approaches and nurture an innovative culture;
- collate, manage and diffuse knowledge about innovation in the public sector;
- create both a physical and virtual space to innovate to encourage collaboration between public sector organisations;
- shine a light on great public sector innovation in practice, including inspired thinking, strong leadership, creating an effective organisation and pioneering procurement.
The package of support launched by BIS in March 2010 now includes:
- The Innovation Space, a unique Whitehall facility to support government innovation and change programmes by providing interactive technology and expert facilitation to enable teams to discover solutions to their own innovation challenges.
- The Innovation Capability Team works with a wide network of innovation support organisations to help public sector organisations to discover new and innovative solutions to public sector challenges. The team sponsors a programme through the Design Council, Public Services by Design, which uses design tools to challenge existing thinking, find new directions and ways to tackle current problems.
- Together with DWP, the team is also developing a low cost, shared government innovation infrastructure. This includes:
- Spark, a showcase platform for the public sector to share its successful innovations and best practices;
- Idea Street, a sophisticated intranet-based ideas management tool that enables public sector participants to contribute ideas, rate and invest in colleagues’ ideas. Live pilots are already running in DWP, MOJ, Met Office and BIS. A further ten live pilots are planned in 2011.
- SBRI Competition Manager, a structured process aimed at driving innovation through the procurement of R&D. It provides innovative solutions to public sector challenges and business opportunities to technology-based businesses.
