Toying with new ideas
The Courier Mail, December 11, 2006
Article by Frans Nauta, Speaker, Eidos Institute Breakfast Series

WHO wouldn't like to have a government that's as innovative and well managed as companies such as Nokia, 3M or LEGO?

There is a lot of discussion 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 we can learn a lot from innovation models from some excellent companies around 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 equipped 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.

Business, over the past 50 years, has developed professional tools to nourish these new inspired ideas, make a tough assessment to select the best ideas, test those ideas in proof-of-concepts and 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 gives the assignment to different, multi-disciplinary teams.

The teams are in creative competition with each other – not only fun but a perfect way to prevent "group-think" and lobbying from special interest groups.

Anyone who has worked in or around government knows that policy development is easily caught up in "group-think" and often frustrated by lobbying from interest groups.

Wouldn't it be great if a minister or a cabinet would get three possible solutions instead of one?

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 who 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.

Within 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, he came up with the small yellow sticky notes found in most businesses and homes.

Now let's apply that example to the public sector.

A good start would be to see new policies as experiments, to explicitly state in discussions with parliament and the media that innovation inherently involves risk, to pre-define the risks involved and to create a feedback process which evaluates the results and promises "aggressive learning" if the experiment fails.

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've designed your model, you can order the LEGO pieces with the click of a mouse and get it sent to your home.

But, the company didn't stop there.

Other LEGO fans can order those self-made models and the 10 most popular models are available at a retail level with designers receiving a percentage of revenue.

Now how about the government giving a tool like this to its citizens?

We could start with a city website where people can create or post their idea for their neighbourhood and let visitors select the top 10.

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 select the best solution.

The principle behind this is "crowd-sourcing". It's the internet's equivalent of the classical call in a theatre: "Is there a doctor in the house?" when someone is unwell.

The richer the network a government can tap into, the bigger the chance it will find someone with an elegant, smart, simple solution.

Public servants love to work for the public good but many are frustrated about the organisations they work in, especially the inability to innovate and pick up new ideas.

I often find it's the most creative, entrepreneurial and inspiring people that leave the administration.

They often end up in consultancy jobs or think tanks, still working on public issues. That's partly good, because we don't lose their minds.

But it's a shame too because we really need very good people inside government to solve stuff.

We can redesign our public sector organisations so they are open for innovation and know how to embrace inspired ideas of new possibilities.

Learning from methods that work in business is a great starting point.

Frans Nauta (www.nauta.org) is a professor of innovation at HAN University in The Netherlands. He has worked with the Dutch Prime Minister and major companies on innovation. He will speak on public sector innovation at the Eidos Breakfast seminar in Brisbane tomorrow