Innovation isn’t confined to startups. Take DWP Digital’s Innovation Lab, for example. Few of us would automatically namecheck a massive organisation such as the Department for Work and Pensions – which has approximately 96,000 employees serving 20 million citizens – as an example of agile, creative thinking. But its Innovation Lab brings visionary, innovative, experimental thinking to all its services, to make them better for all their users – which is all of us. From claiming a pension to finding a job, most of us will be in that 20 million at some point in our lives.
“For me, the Innovation Lab is a unique and safe space where we can explore and test different ideas and concepts,” says product lead Maxine Paintain. “It’s about creativity, networks and ecosystems. It’s about solving problems – reframing them, breaking them down and connecting them to new and different solutions that we discover through our proof of concepts and experiments. And it’s about leveraging the wider innovation ecosystem that exists across government, industry and academia to speed up transformation and change. We’re pushing the boundaries to accelerate the potential of new ideas.”
So how does the Innovation Lab work? A project usually starts with a problem that’s drawn directly from the experiences of those 20 million users. “It’s an inherent risk in any big organisation that you start thinking about a problem in terms of your own structures,” says Simon King, head of user centred design. “Our approach means that we empathise with the citizen. We build our solutions and ways of working around that empathy, bringing citizens in, to co-design solutions.”
For example, perhaps you’re taking on caring responsibilities for the first time but don’t know about the support and benefits available. If you have access to the right information, you’re less likely to give up work or suffer physical and mental stress – but it can be hard to find. Once a problem like this is identified, the team starts with a blank piece of paper as it looks for solutions. Then it moves fast. Using deep user research, the latest tech and all the expertise it can draw from across government and user groups, the team creates a problem-solving prototype in just six to eight weeks.
Tech is a big part of what the Innovation Lab does, of course. Scanning the horizon for new tech and thinking about how it could be used is a big part of principle innovation lead Shruti Kohli’s role. For example, becoming more data-driven is one of DWP Digital’s strategic objectives – but sharing sensitive data so it can be analysed comes with big challenges. She is currently examining the possibilities of synthetic data – which doesn’t reveal the identity of an individual, giving huge potential for analysing and learning while maintaining confidentiality.
There are no guarantees in this kind of work, she points out – and that’s a good thing. “The Innovation Lab is an uncertain kind of environment. You’re trying to do something differently, that nobody else has done, and you’re doing it in a six-to-eight-week window. It needs to be short and crisp because otherwise you lose the momentum and the creativity. It’s also important to have a space where you do not have to be 100% right all the time. The lab is an experimental space, a place where if you run a trial and fail, you can simply use the best bits and take it further.” But while new tech is key, it’s always the servant of the problem, never the master. “We bring in the latest tech, but we’re not a tech playground,” says King. “The point of us isn’t the tech, it’s how we can use tech differently to do something different for the user at the end point.”
It’s a place with great potential for the right people. “We want people who can do something creative, who don’t like to do the same thing all the time,” says Kohli. “Collaboration and communication with team members and stakeholders are the key to working in this agile way.”
King says he’s proud that the Innovation Lab is made up of a diverse range of people with different ages, backgrounds, ethnicities, and lived experiences. “We need that diversity, so we’re representative of the people we are solving the problem for. But diverse viewpoints also have a wonderful alchemy when it comes to innovation.”
The lab looks for skills: holistic service design, data science, innovation expertise and development. But empathy is also key, says Paintain. “If you’re interested in people, in innovation and in making things better, and you have digital and data professional skill sets blended with innovation expertise, we have great opportunities for you. But you also need the desire to improve things and make things better, coupled with understanding and being aware of challenges and pain points for the citizens that we serve.”
The UK is changing fast and the DWP is changing with it. It has ambitious and transformative plans to improve services and the Innovation Lab will play an important role in that future. “We solve really big problems that really matter,” says King. “We want people who want to do something important with their skill sets. And I can’t think of anything more important than the services we provide to so many people in the UK.”
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