innovative action

We know words do not work for everyone, so we're working on telling this story in a more visual way. For those who can do the words, read on...

While there are a wide range of ways we can work with you, and a million things we can work on, we have established methods for tackling issues and delivering innovative solutions.

The innovative action model marries tried and true methodologies for project planning and management along with cutting edge innovative practices. These innovative practices boost the effectiveness of standard project planning and management and lay the ground work for truly inspirational social change. Initially our model involves working with you to get clear on the real issue, convening an innovation injection , then using the ideas that came out of the injection session to develop a response to the issue.

Getting Clear on The Issue

When we start working together, the first thing we'll want to talk to you about is the issue you're working on. We think it's really important to get clear on what the problem or issue is. It might be something like:

• heart disease rates are too high
• young people do not participate in our organisation
• sexually transmitted infection rates are too high
• we do not have a clear direction in our organisation
• people are not using our community centre
• we do not know how to measure our work
• we want to increase the rates of exercise with our people
• too many of our people are not in work or training
• we have high numbers of people who do not show up for appointments.

We could go on and on...

Understanding the Issue

Once we are all clear on the issue, we'll then work with you to get together some key information about that issue so we understand it fully. That might include current service or programme models and statistics, research, and talking to people who experience the issue. This stage could go on forever, so we'll work with you to make sure it's pragmatic! Once we think we have the best information we can get, we'll collate that together in an easy to digest way. This information would be reviewed by key people we would have identified together within or connected to your organisation.

Innovation Injection

Then comes the exciting bit...we would then gather together a group of people for an innovation injection session . This is a critical step in the process and a key part of what innovate change is all about - finding new and more effective ways to deliver solutions to social problems. The best way to do this is to think outside the square, but what if you can't do this or you've already done it and the issue remains? What if there are better ways of doing it and you can't see it because it's simply not in your landscape. It is not unusual to have a planning session with a group of people who work on an issue. The difference here is that we'd also involve people who do not usually work on an issue. The purpose of this is to generate innovative thinking and ideas that would not normally be explored by the usual crew.

For example if we were working on the issue of high sexually transmitted disease rates. The innovation session crew could involve the usual crew, like sexual health doctors and nurses, health promotion people, and sexual health policy people. However, we'd add into that crew people who use sexual health services, people who do not use sexual health services, designers, young people, researchers, and others who think creatively. The aim of the Innovation Injection is to exploit ideas and identify exciting solutions and approaches.

Innovation Injections would be creatively led by an awesome facilitator from the innovate change network.

Ideas Review

By this point we will have loads of interventions you could do to respond to the challenge. Sometimes the real challenge is choosing which intervention will work. Sometimes you may think you've tried all the obvious options, and they have not worked, and you need to identify new solutions. Following the innovation session, we'll work with you and the key people we identified for the ‘understanding the issue’ stage to discuss and analyze all of the ideas that were generated. We have some great tools that will help to prioritize and choose the best response we can.

Planning

When we have identified the best ideas and the interventions to move forward with, we'll develop an implementation plan and evaluation plan with you. This will include clear outcomes and indicators, so everyone is really clear what the issue is, what we're doing about it, and what success will look like.

Get Going

Then it's time to get going - start a pilot of the programme or service. We're happy to keep working with you through this implementation stage. This is often a challenging phase and may involve change for people who work in your organisation or use the services or programmes you provide.

Evaluation

After a pre agreed period, it will be time to take a look at how we're going. Have we achieved what we said we would? Are we on the way to reaching our outcomes? Are we seeing signs of change with the people we work with?