innovation

this painful and expensive lesson caused businesses and policy makers to recognize three main lessons: 1) human beings have many irrational tendencies, fallibilities, and quirks; 2) we often have bad intuitions and a limited understanding of our irrational tendencies and; 3) if we want to create effective policies we shouldn’t rely on our intuitions for finding recommendations nor on the assumption that people behave rationally; instead, we should ground our recommendations in how people actually behave.
After a few years spent watching in awe as business productivity improved, government policymakers followed suit by implementing experiments with the Education-Forward Initiative (formerly No Child Left Behind). These experiments showed that basing teachers’ salaries on student performances had minor short-term benefits and caused substantial long-term damage on teacher and student motivation; that creating interest in education was more important than grades; and that shifting the curriculum focus from calculus to statistics and probability had a wonderful impact on students.
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- Between 2019 and 2025, experimental policy, which became a more established field, examined the simplification of the income tax (with huge social and tax benefits) and studied incentives that encouraged people to get routine medical exams (with tremendous long-term benefits).
- But given our realization of how little we truly understand ourselves and the systems we design, combined with an appreciation for the benefits of detailed experimental investigations and empiricism, we are trying to solve this important issue by setting up multiple different experimental programs. In some of these the levels of co-pay are low, in some medium and in some high. In some of these programs the focus is in specialists, while in others the focus on the family doctor, and some focus on treating patients while other focus on preventative care and education.

12 Oct 09

Innovation: The psychology of Google Wave - tech - 09 October 2009 - New Scientist

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"We need to ask what opportunity Wave allows people to express themselves and to understand what other people mean when they contribute a message to a conversation,"
The creators of Wave pitch it as "what email would look like if it were invented today"
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- The cultural norms that will shape Wave's future are yet to be established. But informed crystal-ball gazing is possible, based on what we know about how people use existing technology.
- Two of the features of Wave that are likely to alter how people communicate are related to time: it allows users to see others typing live, even if they later delete that text; and a "replay" function plays back the complex tangle of interactions that produced a wave.
- "It invokes face-to-face communication and encourages people to use conversational strategies,"
- "More elaborate messages are still possible, but when the other person is online you will be drawn to a more informal style." The pace and style of communicating with Wave will be more varied than with email.
- "Watching a Wave replay could help people to imagine what was in the minds of others," says Watts.
- That may also help reduce the misunderstandings that can blight email communication, says Herring: when people don't pick up that a comment is meant as a joke, for instance. "You have a multiplicity of channels to repair the conversation."

07 Oct 09

The Myth of Crowdsourcing - Forbes.com

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crowdsourcing innovation

05 Oct 09

A new public services: Voices from the frontline | Society | guardian.co.uk

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services research innovation ethnography

30 Sep 09

daisyuk » background

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Innovation = Imagination + Integration

“If you don’t have highly creative people in positions of real authority, you won’t get innovation,”

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“If you don’t have highly creative people in positions of real authority, you won’t get innovation,”
Their main argument? That creative people “typically imagine a whole picture and see every innovation as a part that has to fit that whole. They are less concerned with perfecting any one component than with creating a brand statement that enhances the entire customer experience.”

27 Sep 09

Financial innovation and the poor: A place in society | The Economist

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economics finance development innovation

the crisis should have given fresh impetus to “social finance”, a movement based on the belief that financial innovation can be used directly to help society’s neediest people.
SoCap09, a conference dedicated to building “social capital markets”. The event was abuzz with novel ideas such as a “social stock exchange” and “sustainable hedge funds”.
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- This is, in effect, a commitment to create a new asset class—impact investing—yielding a financial return alongside a social or environmental benefit.
- The rising interest in social finance is the product of several trends. First, the financial industry and its clients spy a way of making money and doing good at the same time. Many impact investments are in emerging economies, which are expected to grow faster than developed ones. They may be uncorrelated with other assets and thus offer diversification and reduced risk. Impact investments such as the Calvert Community Investment Note (a bond) have performed relatively well during the recent crisis, fuelling demand for them. Bankers also detect a chance to give their image a badly needed polish. Philanthropy plays a part too—especially, it seems, for super-rich investors.
- Second, more people want to do well by doing good. Specialised intermediaries have sprung up, including several “social investment banks”, such as Total Impact Advisors
- Third, there is a growing demand for private capital and skills to be tapped to supply the basics of life and to get small businesses going. Government spending and philanthropy are not enough. Fourth, governments are providing encouragement.
- Social investing is not new. People have been practising it for years. Perhaps the commonest form has been to apply an ethical screen to a portfolio
- The other main forms of social investment have been “community development” (especially low-cost housing), microfinance (loans and other financial services for the poor) and “clean” technology.
- What is new is the interest of mainstream financial institutions and investors. Microfinance has been a particular inspiration to the GIIN set, because what was once a charitable activity has become, in some instances, a highly profitable business.
- A growing number of investors are trying to repeat the microfinanciers’ success, but in equity rather than loans. One example is IGNIA
- A more innovative idea, perhaps, is the “social impact bond”, the brainchild of Social Finance. The idea is to attract private capital into solving a deep-rooted problem that is soaking up public money. Take, for example, reoffending by released prisoners, which costs the British government millions of pounds a year. A social-impact bond could raise money to pay for the expansion of organisations with the expertise to reduce reoffending rates. The more money the organisations save the government, the higher the return the bond would pay investors. This goes beyond a standard public-private partnership, which is expected to provide the same service as the state, but more cheaply. The social-impact bond would reward better social outcomes and not merely cut costs.
- Social Finance thinks that the social-impact bond could be tried out in several public services. Besides being used to tackle reoffending, it could reduce the need for children to be put in residential care, or improve community-based health care, easing the strain on hospitals. The key is to measure performance clearly, so that contracts can be enforced. “With government budgets increasingly tight, this could be a major innovation,” says Sir Ronald Cohen
- Similar ideas are getting attention around the world. Notably, several efforts are under way to replicate an international finance facility for immunisation known as the GAVI bond.
- One idea is to provide a guarantee to charter schools issuing bonds, helping other investors overcome what may be excessive risk aversion. Or the foundation might provide insurance against the non-payment of aid promised by a donor, so that a government will know that, one way or another, the money will come. It is also looking for innovative ways to encourage private-equity and venture-capital investments in, say, infrastructure projects in countries where it is making grants.

Telecoms: The power of mobile money | The Economist

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trends economics development finance mobility phone innovation

an extra ten phones per 100 people in a typical developing country boosts GDP growth by 0.8 percentage points, according to the World Bank.
With such phones now so commonplace, a new opportunity beckons: mobile money, which allows cash to travel as quickly as a text message.
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- By far the most successful example of mobile money is M-PESA, launched in 2007 by Safaricom of Kenya. It now has nearly 7m users—not bad for a country of 38m people, 18.3m of whom have mobile phones. M-PESA first became popular as a way for young, male urban migrants to send money back to their families in the countryside. It is now used to pay for everything from school fees (no need to queue up at the bank every month to hand over a wad of bills) to taxis (drivers like it because they are carrying around less cash). Similar schemes are popular in the Philippines and South Africa.
- The incomes of Kenyan households using M-PESA have increased by 5-30% since they started mobile banking, according to a recent study.
- Mobile banking is safer than storing wealth in the form of cattle (which can become diseased and die), gold (which can be stolen), in neighbourhood savings schemes (which may be fraudulent) or by stuffing banknotes into a mattress. In the Maldives many people lost their savings in the tsunami of 2004; it hopes to introduce universal mobile banking next year.
- why is mobile money not more widespread? Its progress has been impeded by banks, which fear that mobile operators will eat their lunch, and by regulators, who worry that mobile-money schemes will be abused by fraudsters and money-launderers. In many countries mobile money has been blocked because operators do not have banking licences and their networks of corner-shop retailers do not meet the strict criteria for formal bank branches. And some mobile-money schemes that have been launched, such as one in Tanzania, failed to catch on. As recently as a year ago people wondered whether M-PESA’s success was a fluke.
- Some banks, meanwhile, have come to see mobile money not as a threat but as an opportunity, and are teaming up with operators. And phone companies have studied Kenya closely to learn how to establish and market a successful mobile-money scheme. MTN, Africa’s biggest operator, has launched a mobile-money service in Uganda in conjunction with Standard Bank; it appears to be doing well. MTN is fine-tuning its service in Uganda before rolling it out across Africa.
- Instead of lobbying against mobile money, banks should see it as an exciting chance to exploit telecoms firms’ vast retail networks and powerful brands to reach new customers. Tie-ups between banks and operators will help reassure regulators.

21 Sep 09

Kent police attribute massive reduction in crime to neighbourhood teams | Politics | The Guardian

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society crime interesting innovation services design

Officers in Kent are attributing a virtuous set of crime-fighting and performance figures to the creation of neighbourhood task teams, units specifically tasked to deal with antisocial behaviour, vandalism, petty offending and nuisance issues flagged up by the public.
Eighty-four officers across the county work solely on these priorities, deployed separately to the beat officers who conduct routine patrols and those colleagues who deal with major offences and emergencies. They are ringfenced and cannot be redeployed to other duties save for under exceptional circumstances.
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- "The thing about these dedicated units is that they to deal with these things. They can tackle that in a sustained way while the other response officers deal with the other calls. It was a new concept. We didn't know whether it would work . But we have been totally convinced by the results."
- When the MoD were ordered to make big cuts, they employed a company and principles of lean management and that is what we have been doing. Staff look at various administrative processes and say where there is waste.
- We choose officers for these teams who are willing and flexible. Often they have to change hours and shifts at short notice. But what they have is a great deal of job satisfaction because the community really appreciates what they are doing. Because these are quality of life issues, you have a far bigger positive impact on the local community."
- The concentration on low-level offending borrows heavily from the "broken windows" theory, which was first articulated the 1980s by the criminologist George L Kelling. "Consider a building with a few broken windows," he wrote.
  "If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside."
- Problem areas identified become the focus for follow-up work by partners such as the council and can lead to a variety of longer term solutions being tried. Housing estates may get new facilities; individuals identified as habitual troublemakers may receive support from social agencies.

Rumi Shivaz Innovation Blog: Public Sector Innovation & Service Design

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18 Sep 09

InnoCentive: A market for ideas | The Economist

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innovation markets

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daisyuk » background

Innovation = Imagination + Integration

Financial innovation and the poor: A place in society | The Economist

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Kent police attribute massive reduction in crime to neighbourhood teams | Politics | The Guardian

Rumi Shivaz Innovation Blog: Public Sector Innovation & Service Design

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