GeniUS Process description ENGgeniustallinn.haridus.ee/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/1.-GeniUS-mud… · The!GeniUS!!Model! 1! !Tallinn! TheGeniUS!!Model!!! Before!youstart:! 1. Baseline!Your!City!

The GeniUS! Model

The GeniUS! Model 1 Tallinn

The GeniUS! Model

Before you start:

1. Baseline Your City 2. Culture Building and Resources

Running the GeniUS! process:

3. GeniUS! Challenge Area 4. GeniUS! Platform 5. GeniUS! Event: Synergy Surgery


Overview

GeniUS! is a structured model for finding solutions to city-‐wide problems using the principles and processes of “open innovation”. Open Innovation is defined by the breaking down of an organisation’s boundaries to encourage flows of knowledge and ideas in and out of that organisation. Originally having roots in private sector product research & development, open innovation can also be applied to solving public sector / municipal challenges. GeniUS! was born from the idea that those working directly on a complex problem may not have the answer themselves, but that someone else might, and that by opening out the process more people can contribute to the process. GeniUS! was created as an open forum for discussion, ideas, creativity, collaboration and innovation. The approach also ensures the final innovation itself is more relevant and scalable as it has been shaped by users who know how it will work best and how it will fit in their environment. This will also increase the adoption of any new solutions, as they will have been co-‐designed by the city inhabitants. The GeniUS! model comprises five main elements:

1. Define: Problem areas (“challenges”) are defined through a process which seeks to understand the crux of the problem and thoroughly research the background and existing solutions before refining the questions to be answered and engaging key stakeholders and the public. This is an important step to ensure time is not wasted creating a solution which already exists elsewhere.

2. Discover: An online open innovation platform where challenge questions are published (“posted”) to discover what people think, what ideas they have and how these could be brought to life as tangible solutions;

3. Design: A physical open innovation event, specifically created for the GeniUS! process, which enables participants to take the ideas and discussion from the online platform and then rapidly design proposals for solutions;

4. Develop: GeniUS! uses a “pilot and scale” approach to rolling out these new potential solutions, whereby ideas are tested and evaluated on a small scale through the development of pilot projects.

5. Deliver: Successful pilot solutions are then extended to deliver their benefits on a larger scale.


Underpinning these components is the ongoing development of an “innovation ecosystem” which extends across the city and beyond. This ecosystem includes businesses, academics, residents, charities, local authorities, artists and designers, technology specialists, professionals and funders and supports creative thinking and collaboration across geographical and functional boundaries. This in turn facilitates the rapid development and testing of new products, concepts and methods, and creates new relationships and networks. All of this leads to more brains and more ideas working on a problem.


1. Baseline Steps

Current Innovation Activities in the City A good place to begin when initiating a new open innovation system in a city is to do some benchmarking to ascertain current innovation readiness of the city. It’s important to ask the seemingly obvious but important questions such as who else do you work with or have relationships with outside your main organisation? e.g. innovation consultancies, other public bodies, other city groups or networks? Has your organisation and city embarked on any activities to improve or develop:

• Innovation capability or capacity • New ways of working • Specific projects of particular creative or collaborative interest • Physical Innovation or Collaboration Spaces • Technological Innovations

Relationships and Collaborations Think about the connectivity between the key players you have identified and consider:

• What are the main relationships that exist? • Who works with whom; and who doesn’t collaborate? • How effective are these relationships? • Are they inclusive or exclusive?

Resources and Activities What is available to support innovation in your organisation and city? e.g. idea gathering mechanisms, development support, business support, consultancy support, digital connectivity, physical spaces, funding etc.


2. Culture Building and Resources

Having the right type of culture within the city is crucial to success. This culture cannot all be achieved at the beginning, but some key things need to be in place before the process starts. These can be developed further once using the GeniUS! process, and the process it self will reinforce other elements.

Breaking Down Barriers

The GeniUS! method works well on two levels. Through the conversations on the platform and subsequent development events, barriers for businesses to pro-‐actively engage with the council are reduced through online relationships with community and academics. This contributes to the creation of an 'innovation ecosystem' of support for the local authority/organisation to draw on when addressing future challenges. This breaks down the barriers internally between departments, and externally between the business community and the council/organisation. It provides a direct route for the community to pro-‐actively work with the public sector to improve the city and gradually creates a more innovative culture within the council/organisation.

In York, the ‘challenge teams’ are sourced from within the council to work with us to facilitate the development of solutions. Therefore, the in-‐house skills gained can be used within the council for many future challenges.

The Benefits of Open Innovation

The benefits of using an open innovation approach is that this encourages a more collaborative culture. In addition, the many benefits of using open innovation can be promoted to key stakeholders to gain support for the approach. These include: • Overcoming traditional procurement barriers • Better solutions to fit the problem • Ownership (and therefore higher adoption/satisfaction) by communities • Future economic rewards, if ideas which are co-‐developed, take off • Being seen to listen to communities and act on their suggestions • Greater transparency and openness

Finding Solutions

Better solutions can be found to solve the medium to longer term challenges through convening a more heterogeneous (mixed) group of creative thinkers to tackle challenges in a different way, as opposed to the traditional approach of internally developing solutions with a focus group imputing at the end of the process.

Other cities have similar challenges to those faced by York. The problem of businesses being able to pro-‐actively engage with the public sector or larger organisations, especially young or small entrepreneurial businesses is something that is apparent in cities all over the world. Businesses can find the traditional procurement process cumbersome when tendering for work and this puts off many


innovative businesses from engaging with the council. The council can be seen as a large faceless organisation, with no clear route to engagement. Everyone loses out with this traditional model; the business doesn't get the chance to provide the best solution and the city doesn't get access to the best solutions. What You Absolutely Need to Make the Project Work

• Endorsement from city leaders • Planning time • Effective communications and marketing • Understanding and communicating risks clearly and managing expectations • Knowing and understanding stakeholders and how to get them on board • An agile and responsive approach that can quickly adapt to take advantage of opportunities • Sufficient resources to support the model and resulting pilot projects


3. GeniUS! Challenge Area

Define

GeniUS! Challenge Definition

A GeniUS! challenge is an open statement or question which focuses on a specific or general aim to improve the quality of life within a city. The challenges should be of prominence or immediate relevance to the city and provide an opportunity for the introduction of creative and innovative solutions that both solve the city’s problems and aid the city’s development and progression.

When constructing a GeniUS! challenge the following should be considered:

• Is the challenge ‘inspiring’ and of importance to one or more groups within the city? Will people engage positively with the question being asked?

• Does the challenge offer the potential for short term AND long term solutions? • A GeniUS! challenge can be used to solve either a specific problem or issue within the city or to

meet a wider aim or objective (e.g. What can be done to increase the car parking capacity for city residents in residential areas; or what can be done to reduce Anti-‐Social Behaviour in the city?)

• A challenge should aim to bring social, economic or environmental benefits to at least one group within the city.

• It is useful to bear in mind challenges that could:

§ Create jobs and grow the economy § Build stronger communities § Protect vulnerable people § Protect the environment

When defining challenge areas the above considerations are important to ensure interest and motivation from both city officials as well as the GeniUS! community of ‘solution providers’.

Forming a Challenge Team Building – Ask for volunteer challenge owners from departments in the council/organisation. Consider their enthusiasm, authority, knowledge and popularity. They need to lead and inspire their team. Ask the challenge owners to approach their own departmental staff for their Challenge Team as well as considering others out-‐with their directorate. This core team will drive the process from inception to pilot. Introduce the Open Innovation Concept and engage and enthuse the Challenge Team -‐ Explain the core aspects of open innovation to the challenge owners and team, and the benefits of using this way to get better ideas and more creative solutions. Process Description – Explain the process, in particular the openness of the concept and the speed of the process from inception to pilot. Define scope and manage expectations.


Enabling – Give the challenge teams the power to propose individual challenges within the main challenge area. Explore the challenges available in terms of suitability.

Research the Challenge

Before posting the challenge on the platform, it is important to gather what is already known within the city about the challenge area. Best practice and emerging ideas from elsewhere should also be identified to inform the discussion and potentially help frame the challenge question.

Meeting the Experts

Once a broad challenge area is chosen, it is important to then meet with the relevant experts, council staff, service users etc. to better understand the issues and the outcomes of previous attempts to solve the problem.

In York for example as part of Challenge 6 – Innovation in Healthcare the Innovate York team had numerous meetings with clinicians in hospitals across Yorkshire and experts from York Teaching Hospital NHS, the Vale of York CCG and City of York Council. The team also sent mail outs to all GP’s in the area.

Things to Keep in Mind

• Where, who, why, what already exists, any solutions out there already? • How will you find out?

Identify and Engage with Stakeholders

Once the challenge question is shaping up, conduct a thorough stakeholder analysis to identify stakeholder and understand their power and influence in relation to the challenge. A clear strategy for engaging with influential stakeholders is essential. Think about:

• Who are the challenge stakeholders? • What’s important to them, how will you get their buy in? • What are the relationships between them? • What do they have to offer the challenge?


4. GeniUS! Platform

Once the research for a challenge is complete it is time to prepare it to go live on the GeniUS! open innovation platform. With the right tools, resources and stakeholder buy-‐in the platform can enable city-‐wide collaboration, allowing anyone who is interested and willing to co-‐develop city solutions in a new way. This includes better responsiveness to city-‐wide needs, provision of the latest solutions through group intelligence, and proactive scoping of better ways to do things with a shared purpose of making the city a better place to live and work.

Discover

How to Frame the Challenge on the Website

Challenges on the platform need to engage people, prompt them to contribute and challenge them. Challenges are normally best expressed as a question, asking how to achieve something, although this is not a rigid rule. A challenge question needs to strike a balance between being focussed enough to give some structure to the discussion, but not so narrow as to remove any room for creativity and innovation.

Key tips for framing a challenge:

• Look forward, thinking about future situation you would like to see • Be positive and solution-‐focussed • Use words like ‘share’, ‘work together’, ‘co-‐develop’, ‘co-‐create’ (rather than ‘deliver services’,

‘provide for’, ‘do better’). • Communicate that you are all on the journey together; try to be as inclusive as possible • Be clear, but avoid being patronising. • Provide some boundaries to manage expectations of what can be achieved • Provide practical information on how the challenge process will proceed and key background

information to the challenge area.

Keeping the Conversation Going – Ways to Encourage Participation and Enhance Dialogue

Conversations on the platform work much better when multiple people are contributing. People don’t often want to be the first one to contribute and will be more likely to get involved if they see others doing so first. The challenge team should start off the discussion and line up key stakeholders to contribute.

Publicity – Engaging communications teams from both your own and partner organisations to ensure that your communities are made aware of the project. The existence and the opportunity must be circulated as much as possible. Advertisements in a local magazines, press releases and drumming up interest on social media are helpful in this regard. Targeted emails to key people. Some people may be reluctant to post comments themselves but may want for a comment to still be posted, so one of the GeniUS! team can offer to post on their behalf.

Contributions – Challenge team members should all contribute to the platform and the discussions. Stimulation of conversation and encouragement of comments will keep the discussion lively and


challenge responders enthusiastic. Posting news stories to get people talking and use of videos and pictures is also helpful. Making posts that ask questions of others also prompts participation.

Platform – Rules and etiquette must be available to ‘accept’ at the start of registration, to help encourage a positive discussion.

Accessibility – Given the nature of the process, communications and interactions need to be rapid and dynamic. The best methods for this are electronic which unfortunately precludes a section of the public and so additional work is required to communicate through non-‐digital means with insight then being posted on the platform. Given time, methods can be modified when the overall aims of the process has wider acceptance.

At the end of the 4-‐6 weeks discussion and debate on the platform the challenge areas can be taken into a Synergy Surgery event setting.


5. GeniUS! Event: “Synergy Surgery”

Design

The Concept

The GeniUS! challenges in York also incorporate a completely new style of open innovation/collaborative event, designed to bring the initial ideas from the online forum into a physical working space as a combination of a hackathon and a facilitated workshop. The aim (as with a hackathon) is to work together to create something new by the end of the event. This accelerates the development of the best ideas and quickly moves them to concrete proposals for small scale pilot projects.

The events in York have been branded with the name of “Synergy Surgery”. This was taken from our first collaborative open innovation event that looked at access to healthcare. Following 4-‐6 weeks of discussion of the challenge on the GeniUS! platform, an event is held over one or two days at a venue where the online discussions are developed in a real life setting. Attendees from a variety of backgrounds participate in facilitated group working, to take existing ideas, create and prototype designs for solutions and pitch their ideas to a panel of experts at the end of the event.

The events are high-‐energy and fast-‐paced, with people working hard towards a common goal of developing their initial ideas into a workable, pilotable solution by the end of the event; one that is capable of being pitched to a panel of experts for endorsement and funding.

The Benefits

The cross fertilisation of ideas between different people at the Synergy Surgeries provide for a really interesting mix of conversations to be had and encourages people to come up with much more varied ideas and varied solutions to the problems that they are trying to tackle.

Synergy Surgery Checklist

• Venue with flexible spaces for both presentation, networking and group work • Mix of people from different industries and backgrounds, including service users • Lots of tea/coffee and food! • Creative materials and resources -‐ post-‐it’s, whiteboards, large paper/flipcharts, colour pens etc

as a minimum. • A big timer (to keep people on their toes!) • Inspirational Speakers • Experienced Facilitators • Copies of background information and relevant insight data • Access for participants to review comments from the online phase • Ideally ring-‐fenced funding opportunity for pilots.


Develop and Deliver

Following Synergy Surgery

Once the discussions and pitches are over it’s time to explore the ideas in depth:

• Prepare brief or business case for pilot projects.

• Identify and commit resources

• Run and evaluate pilot projects

• Scale successful pilots

Transferability The GeniUS! approach is now being transferred to other cities. The concept and practice of open innovation and online/offline collaboration processes of this type are well established within the private sector and are now more commonly used. It’s use in local government and at a city level is more embryonic, but the work in York so far has demonstrated the practice to be easily replicable, because our open innovation model is adaptive in nature – it is essentially a series of principles and a method to apply to anything, rather than being something which only applies to a particular topic or service area. Everything we have seen so far suggests that the principles are valid globally, with just some minor configuration of the process detail needed to allow for local customs and circumstance.

Documents

GeniUS Process description ENGgeniustallinn.haridus.ee/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/1.-GeniUS-mud… · The!GeniUS!!Model! 1! !Tallinn! TheGeniUS!!Model!!! Before!youstart:! 1. Baseline!Your!City!