Phil Bowen
One of the great things about this job- it's not the money or the glamour, believe me- is meeting some really awesome people running some great organisations. Last week, I met with Dan Berelowitz, the chief executive and co-founder of an organisation called the International Centre for Social Franchising to talk about how innovative projects can spread.
It is an issue central to the Centre's mission to help great start up projects in one part of the country to become part of innovative practice elsewhere. It is also a huge issue for Government- what can we learn from a great project in, say, Hampshire and how can that become part of informing practice and maybe ultimately policy across the country?
The key to it, as Daniel laid out, is a five stage process:
Prove: Get some hard evidence of impact;
Design: Think through exactly what you are going to do before you do it;
Systemise: Document everything needed to create, run and maintain a network of replications. .
Pilot: Replication is a learning process- it's still a best guess until it's been put into practice.
Scale: Harness the innovation of a network.
The thing that really came out of our discussion was that when replicating, it really is worth seeking advice. The skills required to make a start up innovation great may not be the same ones you need to replicate and it's ok, indeed very advisable, to seek support and advice. In our work, especially the StreetCraft Scholarship, we are trying to provide that advice and support to innovators to make our criminal justice system better.
My discussion with Dan also makes me think that Government, which often wants to go to scale quickly, would be advised to heed the advice of ICSF's replication tests and take it in measured steps. Moreover, that policy itself, the way it is decided and 'mainstreamed', may be a model that seeks to do too much too quickly. On a number of occasions while I was a civil servant, we were constantly disappointed that efforts to spread the essence of a particular piece of innovative practice everywhere across the country would end up not quite capturing the dynamism of the original.
Lastly, it makes me think that my organisation, which aspires to be an intermediary between Government and frontline practitioners, has a job to improve the way we incubate, support and let innovation grow.