Radical Efficiency

The Innovation Challenge

With an increase in the public debt and deficit, and a public spending squeeze planned, the public sector faces a major challenge. At the next election all major parties will be forced to promise better public services for less money. This presents UK public services with an enormous innovation challenge: how to deliver more with less?

Our Approach

The Innovation Unit will conduct a literature review to provide 10 evidenced examples of innovation in public services and social innovations from around the world that have delivered significantly better outcomes for significantly lower costs.

Our work will:

• Provide an overview of the current economic climate and how this impacts on the public sector
• Identify the dimensions of innovation that are likely to lead to significant cost savings and improved outcomes
• Contribute to the development of criteria through which we will short-list 10 case studies
• Gather case studies from the UK and around the world of innovations that improve outcomes and lower costs.

Alongside the examples generated by the literature review, we will utilise our wide-ranging international network of innovators, policy makers, and academics to generate a long list of potential case studies. In addition, we will arrange a series of workshops that will aim to contribute to our research by bringing together key players and stakeholders to discuss our findings.

We will analyse these examples to generate a set of principles for policy makers on how to ensure that innovation in public services produces not just better services but lower costs as well.

Project contacts

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