Any modern economy needs new ideas to thrive, whether it’s better ways of doing business, new products and services or better technologies. And it needs to exploit those ideas so they work commercially. In short, economies need innovation - never more so than when they’re striving to come out of recession.
But how do we create a climate for innovation? Watch this short video which asks how do we make it more likely to happen? Does it become more likely when there’s a network of universities to generate knowledge, organisations to package it for business and financial incentives to reward investment in ideas? And how far could and should government go in creating an environment – an innovation eco-system, in the words of the Work Foundation’s Will Hutton – that fosters new ideas and helps businesses bring them to market in a persuasive, desirable form?
The Redesigning Business Summit, which we staged with The Economist, looked at, among other things, how to make innovation happen through collaboration and experimentation. In this short film, speakers and delegates sum up the view from the conference floor.
Design Council Chief Executive David Kester argued it was possible to create the right conditions for innovation, inside or outside a business, by creating a neutral space where different areas of expertise, some of which sometimes compete, could come together to try out new ideas at low cost and low risk, and where there was ‘permission to fail’.
The Design Council had done it with the NHS, helping it side-step barriers like risk-averseness and bureaucracy to come up with a ground-breaking answer to an urgent and deep-seated issue – Healthcare Associated infections like MRSA and C.difficile.
‘We brought all the specialists from different disciplines together and manufactured a process so they could meet the right people at the right times.’ The result was to move away from the prevailing thinking, which was geared to deep–cleaning the existing hospital environment, and look instead at how to make that environment easy to clean and keep clean with products and equipment that actively changed thinking and behaviour on the ward.