Live discussion: what can encourage local government to innovate?
Author: Steven Howell, in the Guardian |
Localis’ Steven Howell took part in a Guardian Local Leaders live discussion on innovation in councils.
Click here to read the whole discussion and the original article.
Click here for the expert round up.
Some of the key questions considered included:
What other ways can councils encourage staff to come up with new ideas?
Do staff need more training, and if so what sort?
Would strong leadership, such as having a mayor, make a city council more innovative?
What role does technology play?
Can sharing ideas across councils, and even across borders, help?
Expert panel:
- Samantha Cornick is change manager working in the shift innovation space at Surrey county council.
- Eshaan Akbar is a policy officer at Merton council.
- Elke Loeffler is chief executive of Governance International.
- Pauline Shakespeare is design leadership programme service manager at the Design Council.
- Steven Howell is senior policy and communications officer at Localis.
- Andrew Larner is chief executive of the Improvement and Efficiency Social Enterprise, dedicated to helping public bodies deliver improved services as lower cost.
- Lana Fisher is marketing and communications manager for the Social Care Systems Review at Leeds city council and winner of the Local Government Challenge 2013.
- Ajay Khandelwal works on the policy team at Lambeth council developing new commissioning approaches.
- Tim Cheetham is project lead for the Local Government Association’s improvement board.
- Dave Briggs is director at online innovation agency Kind of Digital. He advises government on how to make the best use of social technology to engage with communities and citizens.
Steven Howell stated that to encourage innovation on the frontline:
Local authorities must give staff the freedom to fail, and also dispense with a blame culture.
A lot of good knowledge is coming out of the community budgets work: I know that Cheshire West and Essex county council in particular have been travelling up and down the country helping areas that have an interest in community budgets. The West London Alliance will be an interesting test of the approach, including London boroughs like Barnet and Harrow.