I have worked with many organisations which both love innovation and hate innovation at the same time. I’ve often wondered if the only innovation that organisations are really interested in, is innovation that enables them to make cuts and save money under the pretence of improving healthcare treatment and social care care and support.
When I started working for Skills for Care, one of my colleagues Marie Lovell, said to me, “One person’s innovation is, wow never done that before. Is somebody else’s, yes let’s give it a go and see if it helps. Is a confused – well we’ve always done it like that, why is that innovative? Is somebody’s, we tried that once and it didn’t work and we’re not going to do it again. Is you’ve gotta be joking, everything works really well here and why would we upset the apple cart by doing that.” I think that everything Marie said and more still holds true today.
When I started as head of workforce innovation, I had a large budget that had been invested for a number of years in a small group of projects. Each project was getting between £200,000 and £300,000 a year to demonstrate new types of working in action. My difficulty with this was that I just couldn’t see how investing large amounts of money in a small number of projects over a number of years was actually creating ways of innovating that could be scaled up or used by other organisations. I even wondered if some of what those projects were doing was innovative at all. I made myself extremely unpopular by deciding that we needed to use the money differently to support and explore workforce innovation in adult social care.
Instead of giving vast amounts of money to a small number of projects, we set up something called the new types of worker fund and instead we would give a project no more than £10,000 to £15,000. We had hundreds of applications for all sorts of amazing innovative and creative projects. In the end I can’t remember exactly how many we funded, all I can say is that it was a lot.
Some of the projects flew, some of them ended up going in a completely different direction and some were unsuccessful. But in each case we were able to share a plethora of knowledge about what did and didn’t work in the context of workforce innovation. Also because of the small amount of money we’d invested in each project, the projects became more sustainable because people weren’t worrying about how they could afford to keep funding them. They were instead concentrating on the innovation that they’d created. The projects were much more scalable because when people read about what we’d been doing and how little money each project had received and what success they had, people went back to their own organisations feeling that this was something they could implement themselves, because it didn’t require a lot of cash. It just required determination, motivation and the willingness to give it a go.
20 years on I can still list projects all over the country that were small scale funded innovation projects that have become embedded in the main stream. And most people would probably think, “well why would you do it any other way?”
So the next time somebody offers you 1 million pounds to run a particular project around innovation, try putting £990,000 of it in a savings account and see if you can run the project for £10,000. If you can, you’ve got another 990 innovation projects you can fund and you’ve also demonstrated to others what can be achieved with very little.
Jim Thomas
August 2025
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