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Insights from MindLab

On 10 December 2009, the Centre for Social Innovation hosted Christian Bason, Director of MindLab (Denmark) for a day of workshops and seminars with over 120 forward-thinking senior public and private sector managers. Themes emerging included:

• Innovation as a means to “get more of what we want” – the quadruple bottom line of productivity, service, results and democracy;
• Focus on citizens and users as the starting point for service transformation
• Outcome-focused collaboration – across agencies and sectors – as critical.

Click here to read “Changing the Game” our CEO’s introduction to the MindLab sessions.

The Centre hosted two events:

1. Exploring Public Sector Innovation:
    A Practical Introduction

• In this half-day workshop, over 60 public sector managers explored key issues around public sector innovation, and learnt new techniques by working in groups through 8 real cases where fresh thinking is required.
  Participant feedback: I started with a problem about engaging with and persuading other government agencies to be involved in implementing some work we are doing to raise workplace productivity. After going down a winding and interesting path, I ended up with a proposal to bundle up the lessons and pass them to trusted private sector partners to implement. This solution seemed so obvious afterwards. I will definitely use the MindLab technique when confronted with a complex problem again, and encourage others to do so as well.
• Christian’s presentation to the group is here and the templates used to work through the innovation process are here with the ideas matrix here. The short film on MindLab shown by Christian is here.

2. Accelerating Public Sector Innovation:
    The MindLab Story

• In the fourth CEO Leadership Forum for 2009, Christian shared MindLab’s history, vision, achievements and challenges with 25 public and private sector CEOs and senior executives. For the Danish Ministries of Economic & Business Affairs, Taxation, and Employment, MindLab has clearly been a key driver in achieving significantly improved service outcomes at considerably less cost and, going forward, MindLab is starting to play a key role in the development of new public-private innovation partnerships. CEO’s used these insights to discuss the challenges NZ faces in driving innovation, but also to highlight organisations and leaders, such as Geraint Martin at Counties-Manukau District Health Board, which are showing the way forward.
  Participant feedback: Leaders have a triple role in driving innovation in their organisations: the protector, the advocate, and the “doubting Thomas”. It can sometimes be schizophrenic, but people need to know that their leaders will create space for them to innovate, champion and support their innovations to sustain and scale, but also ask the hard questions to ensure that their work is driving value.

Christian also presented to over 60 managers at a State Sector Futures Forum seminar at MoRST, and discussed MindLab’s work on the Nine to Noon programme. See also the Dominion Post coverage.

We are very grateful for the support of our event partners:

Ministry of Social Development

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