Innovation: it makes us tick

Every company or consultancy you could work with claims to be innovative, right? And even the process of entering for an innovation award implies a certain amount of hubris, so while we were drafting our entry for the 2010 MCA Management Awards, we questioned ourselves long and hard over whether what we had to say came up to scratch.

But having talked it through with our clients, and reviewed how what we do for them differs from other consultancies, we realised we had something worth talking about. And the judges agreed – awarding us ‘Most Innovative Firm’ for 2010.

So what are the ingredients for Digital Public’s innovation? Firstly, we think it’s really important to draw on a wide diversity of views, expertise and experience. We don’t insist that people who work for us have a traditional management consultancy background - we recruit our people for their breadth of experience, which ranges from putting satellites into orbit to working with young drug users and offenders. Our aim is to combine the rigour of a consultancy with the creativity of an agency, and from the beginning, we’ve found the only way to do that is to build a diverse and creative team.

Secondly, we live life in continual ‘Beta’. In the old consulting paradigm, strategies were set in stone and built to last for five years or more. We believe those days are over. We invest in the creation and rapid development of ideas, and the ability of our staff to bring them to fruition. We ‘crowd source’ ideas by holding frequent ideas labs and open innovation sessions that include external input to generate service concepts that help solve client problems.

Many of these ideas go into our ‘digital sandbox’ – a virtual toolkit of applications and services that allows us to demonstrate to clients how services can be deployed in real world settings. As more ideas are tested, the range of applications and information in the sandbox grows, making the development of future concepts faster and cheaper.

But we recognise that just as important as having ideas, and a process to test them, is the delivery discipline to see them through to completion. Clients trust in our ability to build teams with the right balance of creative, planning and delivery skill, and to manage risk along the way.

It’s a recipe that’s achieving great results – whether they’re massive cost savings in service delivery at NHS Direct through online self service tools, or better policy outcomes at the DCSF, where our digital pilots programme is making the Department’s data accessible to developers, and gaining better public feedback on policy before it’s implemented.

If you’re interested in finding out more, get in touch.