Innovation Exchange

On Tuesday, Innovation Exchange was delighted to co-host an event with the Association of Charitable Funders at King’s Place. Conversation focused on how charitable foundations support innovation and the role of innovation brokers like Innovation Exchange. The event was expertly chaired by Julia Unwin, who quite literally wrote the book on the subject.

Here are my slides from the event:

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Last night I attended the launch of Freshwell at the House of Commons. Freshwell is the name that East London Food Access, one of our Next Practice Projects, is using to take its knowledge of food co-operatives across the UK, helping communities to build them for themselves. We are excited about this project and it was great to be at the launch.

As I said last night, I think that the timing is perfect for Freshwell. There is much political excitement about the role of co-operatives and more generally about the potential of ‘citizen power’ and ‘mass localism‘. And food co-ops seem to speak to every element of the Government’s food strategy. But at the same time, helping ideas like this to take root in new communities is a big challenge – so if you can help, or you would like more information, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

New Philanthropy Capital’s new report, Trial and Error, looks at the most innovative work that is currently taking place on the issue of youth offending. It has named the charity Dance United as one of the most the innovative schemes dealing with youth offending in the country.

Dance United are based in Bradford, an area with the country’s highest re-offending rates for young people. It runs a 12-week intensive dance programme for young offenders and young people at risk of offending. A study by Manchester University found that half of the students who engaged with the programme didn’t re-offend, and of those who did re-offend, the frequency and severity of their offending was reduced. Dance United’s approach has been so successful that it is opening an east London academy later this year. Check out the report to find out more about their work.

Dance United participated in the Exchange’s Next Practice Programme and received a significant amount of funding specifically to monitor it’s fantastic work with young offenders. It’s great to see the results now being showcased in this report. Huge congrats to the Dance United team – this recognition is well deserved – keep it going.

FutureGov is working with Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government to research the “now wave” and the “next wave” of public service delivery around the world. They need your help.

They are are keen to crowdsource ideas of best practice from around the world for a session in mid-March with leaders from the UK, Australia, Canada, USA and New Zealand. The session will look at how the web is being used to transform public services. Key themes include personalisation, co-production and efficiencies. Let them know your top three best practices taking place now and practices that could be the future of public service delivery here.

For more information, check out this blog.

My colleagues at Innovation Exchange were understanding of my desire to be out of the office last Wednesday due to baking.  It’s an excuse I’d enjoy using more often (I do love wearing my apron) but on this occasion ideas were in the oven. I was with the folks who run the Urban Ideas Bakery, a British Council initiative to help generate creative ideas for improving the quality of life in European cities.

The Bakery brings together local decision-makers, community leaders and creatives with international experts in social innovation to ‘bake’ ideas for improving cities. The model was tested recently in Kaunas, Lithuania, and is due to be run again in Pecs, Hungary, in early March. In between sessions, the Bakery team assembled in London for a lock-down at The Innovation Centre in Central St Martins with a bunch of people keen to help them strengthen their approach.

I was delighted to meet the bakers and catch up with Ted Matthews – one of the programme’s leaders - who first described the Bakery to me whilst pounding the streets of Lisbon following Social Innovation Exchange last year. As he walked me through each step of his ideation process and I shared ours (a lengthy description of Festivals of Ideas from intelligence gathering to follow-up support), we confirmed our status as prize geeks. We also circled the castle 5 times and attended church, all without interrupting the patient recitation of our methodologies.

Some of the questions facing the Urban Bakers remind me of deliberations at Innovation Exchange as we refined our Festivals of Ideas format – how open is too open when it comes to open space? How do you create a structure that opens possibilities and encourages creativity and freedom, but also supports people to come together around an idea, choose priorities and agree action?

The bakers are learning how to do this well in the very particular context of Eastern European urban centres, where the very act of bringing different groups together to solve problems is radical. It was great to hear that participants in Kaunas felt the Bakery had helped them to create an agenda – where there was previously not one – for social innovation.  We wish them the best of luck in Pecs and beyond.