Innovation: The better mousetrap

Transform’s Digital Maturity Index (DMI), a measure of digital channel development, has been running for 2 years now and during that time we’ve interviewed more than 50 digital leaders from both public and private sector organisations; capturing data for almost 5,000 questions in the process. The summary output from last year’s programme can be found here.

Work is now underway on the DMI 2012 and interviews have already taken place with business leaders responsible for digital development in media, public sector, health, B2B and telecoms companies.

The public sector is undergoing a dramatic shift towards digital engagement and the newly created Government Digital Service (GDS) team within the Cabinet Office is tasked with transforming government digital services, so we asked Mark O’Neill, Head of Innovation at Government Digital Service to share his thoughts on what innovation really means.

And if you’re interested in taking part in this year’s programme drop us an email.

Innovation: the better mousetrap

Innovation is easy. It’s just the combination of an idea and execution of that idea. Easy.

In the digital space innovation has given us the BLINK tag, web pages that auto play audio on loading and it’s given us Comic Sans.

And that’s the problem; innovation isn’t always a neutral good. For me a better definition is "something that improves on the current world".

These improvements can be small - as simple as using images to guide people through a process rather than reams and reams of text - or they can be huge shifts, like the way I can now access all the digital services and information I need through a device I can hold in my hand.

For some people, innovation implies the latter: disruptive change that replaces the old world with a new, forgive the word, paradigm. And indeed history is littered with the businesses that sometimes had the disruptive idea and sought to delay or prevent execution in order to preserve an established business model.

They all failed. Sooner or later the better mousetrap catches us all.

It doesn’t matter if that disruption is technological such as digital cameras; or in business processes like the assembly line or an approach like TQM. The improvements, the benefits, the speed of the new, all drive that fundamental shift.

But innovation can also be small and incremental, a little change that drives an improvement, like a sign on a door that simply says "Pull".

So what does innovation mean in the digital space?

We see and hear a lot about the disruptive end of the innovation space - businesses like Amazon, Google etc - businesses which have completely transformed how we shop, how we think about information and how we work.

Even in the public sector we can learn from disruptive innovation. G-Cloud has the aim for 50% of all new ICT systems and services to be cloud based within 3 years. Personally, I expect the trajectory to be even faster than that.

But I also find myself musing on the small scale innovation opportunities in the digital space. Something as simple as tweeting when we are running a procurement, building feedback mechanisms into our online services so people can actually tell us about the frequently mandatory services we run, providing frontline staff with the ability to share knowledge and experience through digital channels, even just starting with the basic question "What do our users actually want to do?"

Perhaps the most powerful driver of innovation is for us to start each day asking "How can I make this digital service better?" and to make that part of our normal work approach.

I’m writing a list of the digital services and channels I am responsible for on a whiteboard and above them I’m writing "How do I make these better?".

If we all do the same then innovation - both disruptive and incremental - will become part of our normal discourse.

Just so long as we don't run out of whiteboards ...

Mark O’Neill, Head of Innovation, Government Digital Services, Cabinet Office