How can public sector take up of SME innovation be increased?
Release Date: 01/21/2019
Public services are ahead of business when it comes to service design
talking local government
Professor Clive Grinyer, head of service design at the Royal College of Art talks about collaborations with Cabinet Office, Ministry of Justice and local authorities
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Councils need to beware of fraud as they distribute £30bn to SMEs says Cifas
talking local government
The organisation behind the national Fighting Fraud and Corruption Locally Strategy sets out threats and counter measures
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Covid-19 turns waste collection upside down prompting innovative response
talking local government
Businesses made idle by closure of commercial premises are being enabled to support hard-pressed domestic collections
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World Wide Waste 3/3: our digital consumption is out of control
talking local government
This third programme based on Gerry McGovern's new book looks at the damage done by the digital mindset (more, cheap, now, throwaway, ‘free’)
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Coronavirus impact on care sector follows years of low status and neglect
talking local government
Karolina Gerlich of the Care Workers Charity describes current pressures on care workers but their roots lie in years of failure to resolve the sector’s status and funding.
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World Wide Waste 2/3: business is squandering digital’s green potential
talking local government
The second programme based on Gerry McGovern's new book looks at corporate IT and digital practices that accelerate environmental damage
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World Wide Waste 1/3: doing stuff online is good for the environment - right?
talking local government
Gerry McGovern is a globally-recognised web usability expert whose new book sets out the devastation wrought by our over-consumption of all things digital.
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Online self-assessment for local authority social care support in prospect by Autumn
talking local government
Councils could soon have access to an online tool for residents to self-assess their social care needs without face-to-face intervention from an officer.
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Undergrad to digital care entrepreneur: how a grandfather’s diagnosis inspired development of home monitoring hub
talking local government
At around the time Alex Nash was looking for a final year project for his engineering degree at Loughborough University, his grandfather was diagnosed with Dementia. ‘The technology available to him was old, and analogue, and didn’t provide any reassurance to the family that he was OK’ says Alex, nearly five years on. With his degree completed and a fledgling product under his belt, Alex got funding from Innovate UK and matched this with funds from angel investors. Alcuris is now poised to start delivering Memo to local authority customers. As he explains in this programme, the product...
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The ‘tech’ of data sharing is easy: getting agreement between different parties in the system is the hard bit
talking local government
Helena Zaum describes work by Microsoft and other partners to support Manchester City Council’s vision of tech-enabled care within an integrated system
info_outlineCLGdotTV will be talking with Beth regularly in 2019, and with some of the SMEs she mentors, to better understand the difficulties innovators face in getting their good ideas taken up by public sector organisations.
In this introductory conversation, Beth suggests there is general acceptance in the NHS and elsewhere the public sector that harnessing innovation from SMEs is ‘a good thing’.
But making this a reality is a different matter. Traditionally, public sector organisations have not been geared up to buy ‘innovation’ and increasingly formalised procurement processes are pushing them to be over-prescriptive in their specifications.
Innovation schemes and associated funding need to foster and enable collaboration and partnerships with SMEs, since sustainable innovation will only come from deep understanding of challenges that need to be overcome.
Expecting SMEs to work from outside complex public sector organisations and come up with fully finished, readily procurable products and services is not realistic. Within the NHS, initiatives being developed by Academic Health Science Networks are helping, while in the local authority sector, the Department of Communities’ Local Digital Fund is enabling SMEs to work alongside councils on a range of exploratory ‘discovery ‘ projects