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The increasing and future importance of the voluntary and community sector is encapsulated within the phrase "double devolution". This essentially involves central government giving more power to local government and local government giving power to local people, the latter often brought together into some sort of collective or voluntary organisation.
Voluntary organisations are often able to be incredibly innovative in the work that they do because, although funding is often tight, they provide a service to a relatively smaller number of people, have organisational structures that can quickly adapt to new circumstances and are not overly-constrained by the bureaucratic processes that can typify local and central government. Local voluntary organisations often have a much better understanding of local issues, too, which is why the government is keen to see such organisations take on more responsibility for delivering services.
How, though, does the public sector as a whole make the most of the voluntary sector's innovations so that a service in Newcastle, for example, can benefit from innovations in Newquay?
A chapter in a recent Demos book — Unlocking innovation: Why citizens hold the key to public service reform — looks at one crucial element of this question. Geoff Mulgan and Simon Tucker highlight some of the difficulties that arise from wanting to "scale up" a local, innovative scheme to a larger, regional / national scheme or practices. They say rightly that:
[T]ime and again successful local initiatives fail to break into the mainstream.
This happens for a number of reasons such as, for example, that the ideas have not received enough support or backing to grow, or the intransigence of public service managers who might feel threatened by the ideas or cannot see the worth of implementing the idea above the cost of effort or money.
To address some of the difficulties in scaling up, Mulgan and Tucker highlight some useful pointers as to what to do to make scaling up more likely to succeed. The first is to understand exactly what the innovative idea does — to "codify" it so that all of its features are known. Even here, systematically writing down everything included within an innovative service might not be enough since there will be experienced staff whose working knowledge won't be captured by any writing-down processes.
Similarly, it isn't enough simply to take a service and try to replicate it elsewhere or on a bigger scale, because there are often specific circumstances in a particular area that mean something will work in one place but not in another. The suggested metaphor, then is to:
'graft and grow' [a service] not 'cut and paste'.
Overall, Mulgan and Tucker suggest a number of key factors that will enable the scaling up of innovative local ideas to a regional or national service or practice.
The first is culture and leadership, through which leading public sector managers can show that innovation is important and matters. The second is the importance of networks in being able to disseminate ideas and champion them beyond the traditional limitations of an organisation, be it a government department or local authority. The final main point is the commissioning of services, and that commissioners should treat "innovative projects quite differently from the norm". The implication being that only by making things slightly easier for a new idea to take hold (in the same way a developing country might want to protect its infant industries through high tariffs, for example) will help it to grow and develop in the medium- and long-term.
The issue of scaling up is important because the need to learn from innovative and successful voluntary-based practices can help develop good public services all over, and so reduce the lottery that many people face in the services they receive simply because of where they live. I hope that some of the suggestions made here by Geoff Mulgan and Simon Tucker are taken on and disseminated — indeed, scaled up in themselves.
(A larger report on this issue is available from the Young Foundation.)