A talk for Sheffield Hallam University on the way in which social innovations struggle to succeed and how innovations are resisted and corrupted.

1. Success Equals Failure
innovation in public services
Dr Simon Duffy ￭ The Centre for Welfare Reform ￭
Sheffield Hallam University ￭ 21st February 2012

2. The Centre for Welfare Reform
• voluntary fellowship of over 70
innovators
• belief in human equality, and the value
of diversity
• welfare state is good, it’s just designed
wrong
• independent of political parties,
government and big business

3. Key points
• personalisation offers an interesting
example of recent innovation
• resistance to innovation in public
services is extremely high
• successful innovation is not totally
impossible
• the role of the researcher and academic
is vital, but problematic

4. Personalisation...
1972 first Centre for Independent Living
1980s first Direct Payments
1996 Direct Payments Act
2003 In Control
2007 “Putting People First”
2013 100% of adult social care - with a budget

5. part of a bigger picture

7. What is the innovation?
1.Self-directed support
2.Resource Allocation System (RAS)
3.Support planning
4.Tapered control
5.Outcome-focused review
6.Personalised support
7.Community brokerage
8.Individual budget - just one element

8. IB = IF + ‘budget-first’

10. Jonathan’s health needs are complex.In the 3 years before
leaving school Jonathan spent 150 days in hospital - responding
to problems with breathing. In the 3 years since leaving hospital
he has spent only 2 nights in hospital - for elective dental
treatments.
Jonathan’s family have overseen the development of a
personalised package of support for Jonathan with flexibility,
employment and learning - but not learning in college - but
learning on the job. Over the last 3 years, Jonathan has acquired
two City & Guilds Qualifications and is now learning new
independent living skills. Over the last 3 years, the individual
budget system has enabled Jonathan and his family to make
significant efficiencies in the costs of his care and support and
save the NHS:
•Over £100,000 in hospital stays
•Over £300,000 in residential care costs
•Over £100,000 of funding contributed by the LSC

11. wonderful woman called Katrina. She's got three
disabled sons. The oldest is Jonathan, a charming,
warm hearted young man of 19. He can't walk or
talk clearly, or feed himself alone. He's had a
breathing tube in his neck since he was a toddler.
Under a scheme the new Liberal Democrat council
in Sheffield is extending, Jonathan's just got his
own individual budget and care plan.
Now he's doing work with a local charity, attending
a music group, has his own personal assistant - a
child whose potential seemed so limited. Finally as
a young man, engaged in life in a way he and his
mother never thought possible. Katrina told me
with the biggest smile I've ever seen, she said:
We've gone from having nothing to having
everything. I wish every child's needs would be
taken this seriously. (Nick Clegg, 17 September

12. Diffusion of Innovations
Diffusion of Innovations Curve - Everett Rogers
(amended by Duffy)

13. 1. Out at the margins
• Long-standing issue for advocates of
Individualised Funding - how to define budget?
• Early work in Southwark, Glasgow and North
Lanarkshire failed to get traction.
• In Control happened at the right time and the
right place.
• In Control was designed to maximise possibility
of increased take-up.
• A Trojan Horse strategy to transform a broken
system - adult social care - from the inside...

14. NOTE: goal was
citizenship

15. success factors
• experience and 10+ years intellectual property
• branding, values and communication
• social justice - empowerment, without
privatisation
• luck - retiring senior managers
• luck - Ladyman visit to Wigan
• luck - Life Chances of Disabled People
• luck - VPST’s problems, CEO opportunity

16. 2. Policy wars
• In Control was highly controversial and
challenged on: data, cost, ethics, legality,
feasibility, policy...
• Split between official Individual Budget Pilot
Programme and In Control’s second phase and
total transformation programmes.
• War ended in 2007 - Putting People First
changed the language to ‘Personal Budgets’ and
defined future policy.

17. NOTE: use of DH goals

18. success factors
• membership programme - over 100+ LAs
• problem-solving and open source approach
• temporary dependence of DH on In Control
• difficulties inherent to the IBPP
• luck - Ivan Lewis
• luck - Charlie Leadbeater
• luck - lack of money

19. 3. Implementation
• Shift to a centrally driven, funded (£0.5 billion)
and defined government policy - paradoxically
focusing on ‘making local government do it’
• In Control’s outsider role becomes even more
problematic.
• No focus on underlying problems of law and
rights
• Haste to institutionalise first wave innovations

20. running out of luck...
• government money funds the competition -
inside and outside government
• Ivan Lewis’ departure and collapse of the
‘social care funding debate’
• DH needing to assert its ‘leadership’
• Desire to make it an implementation issue -
despite inherent flaws in legal framework
• In Control had made it all seem ‘too easy’
• In Control (and me) seen as ‘too challenging’

21. 4. Success/Failure
• Nominal success by 2013 high likely.
• Value of success will be reduced by the
inefficiency of the delivery and by the poor
definition of the goal.
• Not a transformation; but nevertheless a
positive shift in perspective and a step forward.

22. Failure brings...
• Opportunity to revisit the health-social care
divide
• Chance to build wider alliances and new public
understanding of the issues
• Build better supports for social innovators and
critics of the current system
• Think deeper, think longer - do better next
time

23. Resistance to Innovation

24. Diffusion driven by
1.Belief...
2.Status...
3.Usefulness...
4.Necessity...
motivation evolves with success,
and success is not inevitable

25. Systems Resist Innovation
1.Keep innovators at the margins
2.Question evidence of success
3.Make innovation adapt to current norms
4.Water-down or make innovation optional
this is not irrational, it reflects:
differences in rationale and
differences in belief

26. Innovation harder when:
• Copyright has no value
• Innovation has no commercial value
• Permission, not forgiveness, is required
• Innovation threatens politically powerful
economic interests
• Mass testing, rather than incremental
experimentation is necessary
• Key values or assumptions are threatened
i.e. social innovation is
very hard indeed

27. Social innovators often
experience success as
failure
• a new level of threat to incumbent
• innovators also threaten allies
• radical shift in the ‘game’
• innovators have different motives
both are imposters...

28. Innovators often
experience research as
1. Wedded to particular accounts of social value
2. Highly ideological, with fixed paradigms
3. Expensive, impossible to access
4. Conservative, defends the status quo
5. Subservient to government interests
part of the resistance?

29. Research integrity is often
threatened by:
1. Endless piloting
2. Confused policy objectives
3. Weakening the definition of the innovation
4. Poor implementation
5. Confused research methodologies
6. Too expensive, too slow, no feedback
7. Wrong questions asked

31. Questions for researchers
• Do we know the purpose that the innovation is
trying to achieve?
• Do we understand how an innovation really
works and are we able to ‘take it apart’?
• Can we find methodologies that enable us to
explore why an innovation works?
• How can we shorten the cycle of improvement
and development?
• Is government the best guarantor of research
integrity?
• Does ideology get in the way of truth?

32. Innovators
need
leaders

33. Concluding points
• personalisation - multi-layered
innovation in innovation?
• expect resistance
• work strategically for diffusion
• collaborate with researchers - as equals

34. For more information go to
www.centreforwelfarereform.org
These slides are © Simon Duffy 2012 ￭ Publisher is The
Centre for Welfare Reform ￭ Slides can be distributed subject
to conditions set out at www.centreforwelfarereform.org ￭