Mind the (innovation) gap

This week, as well as hosting a really fascinating Lincolnshire Voluntary Engagement Team (LVET) members meeting focusing our attention on support (or lack of) for dads – thanks Fathercraft UK CPSL Mind and the Centre for Innovation in Fatherhood and Family Research University of Lincoln - I have been out meeting with a couple of the organisations that were awarded grant funding from the Health, Social Care and Wellbeing Research Fund set up this year through the ICS Research Engagement Network (REN) development programme, managed, in Lincolnshire, by Lincolnshire Voluntary Engagement Team (LVET) and Lincolnshire Community Foundation on behalf of the Research Engagement Network programme partners.

What struck me in the members meeting as well as the visits was that many of us in VCFSE organisations are really good at spotting ‘gaps’ in provision and finding people who are lost or need support but don’t know where to go. Somewhat intuitively we then seek ways to support or work with people to fill those gaps. We call on networks, we seek out answers and we try things out. This is the ‘innovation space’ that we often occupy but don’t recognise as such. We just ‘do’. VCFSE organisations are, I think, getting better at research and evaluation, using free tools like Impactasaurus to prove our impact and to show that what we do does make a difference. And we are getting better at working with universities on research programmes that help develop our understanding of why things make a difference but I wonder if, perhaps, we need to pay more attention to innovation.

So, this week I have begun reading a little about ‘the innovation space’ - about product innovation, process innovation, paradigm innovation and position innovation. Early days in my reading but it strikes me that VCFSE organisations are great at product innovation (filling market gaps) and position innovation (taking something that works for one group of people and trying it/ adapting it for use with a different group of people) and that we try, and try, and try to force paradigm innovation (trying to shift mental models and large scale behaviour change) and that we are considerably less good at (bothered about?) process innovation - though perhaps the whole personalisation agenda in health and social care is actually about process innovation.

And so my ridiculously fidgety mind starts to turn, just as we begin to embed ‘research’ into the culture of VCFSE organisations, towards innovation as the next thing to embrace. We do it, we just don’t recognise it, or call it innovation – we call it community development or something similar. Perhaps we are missing a trick and missing out on programmes of support that offer financial backing to organisations and groups that are looking to research and develop a process, product or service, test innovative ideas and/or collaborate with other organisations.

#Innovation