Rewarding Innovation

Innovation in public services has never been more important. Even as the public purse faces greater challenges than ever before, the UK’s need for innovation to meet growing demand for public services with reduced budgets has never been greater.

But experience from previous recessions shows spending cuts in a recession are more likely to wreak havoc on R&D budgets than most other areas of spending. For private sector organizations that can mean lack of investment in the very services, products and ideas that will help them emerge strongly from the recession. And for public sector organizations, innovation is the only way to meet the growing demand for public services which accompanies economic downturn, but at reduced cost.

This week Digital Public won the MCA Management Award as the UK's best management consultancy for innovation.  The MCA (Management Consultancies Association) awards are the industry's most prestigious, so we’re delighted to be recognized as the leading innovator in public services.  And we’d like to congratulate the other two finalists in the innovation category - PA Consulting and Ernst & Young.

The award recognizes that for Digital Public, innovation runs through everything that we do. We were awarded the accolade for our work on Parent Know How for the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF).  Innovation has been at the centre of Parent Know How’s success against the key performance indicators set for it, as well as now in industry recognition terms.

More than 11 million people have been reached by the Parent Know How programme in its first year, proving that innovation can scale quickly. But the really innovative part of the programme has been to combine different channels – online, social media, mobile, print and telephony – not just to maximize reach, but to engage parents in the right mood, mode and context.

So for Digital Public, the MCA award is more than a trophy for the office, it’s a validation of our unique approach and an underlining of the importance of innovation, now more than ever.