Over the past year, our journey towards bolstering our innovation practice has been both rewarding and insightful. As you might expect, our focus on innovation is not merely about adopting new technologies or data platforms, but about creating a culture that embraces continuous improvement.

In keeping with LOTI’s mission of “equipping boroughs with a 21st-century toolkit so they can become high-performing organisations and improve outcomes for Londoners”, we launched our inaugural series of Innovation Lunch and Learn sessions. To date we’ve held nine hour-long sessions covering a range of topics from behavioural science and service design to open innovation and procurement.

The primary goal of these sessions was to raise awareness about the range of tools and approaches available to boroughs. We sought to equip borough practitioners with the knowledge and tools to manage change effectively, navigate complexity, and ultimately improve the outcomes for our residents. This process was organic, driven by a genuine desire to learn and grow collectively.

Thanks to our carefully curated partners and borough colleagues we’ve shared not only a range of methods, tools and innovative approaches to make change happen but also practical examples from local government and the private sector. You can find out more and access the recordings of all the sessions in the ‘Innovation Lunch and Learn’ playlist on the LOTI YouTube channel.

Why do this now?

The short answer is – to deliver on our strategy and commitment to bring innovation methods closer to our members.

These sessions are a key deliverable of the (Innovation) Methods pillar of the LOTI strategy, which also focuses on People, Data, and Technology.

In addition to this, we also want to shine a light on the great work our boroughs are doing in enhancing the quality of life of their residents, improving ways of working for their staff as well as making financial savings. Our behavioural science sessions from Barking and Dagenham’s Tim Pearce and Richmond and Wandsworth’s Radhika Karwa and Jose Da Silva provided some great examples of using behavioural nudges to prevent people from falling behind with their rent.

We’re equally interested in bringing inspiration and examples from other sectors and to expose our members to different ways of thinking. Our session with Future Foundry’s Jacob Dutton delivered perfectly on this point.

Getting buy-in from and bringing leaders along the innovation journey is vital for making things happen in the first place and for securing funding to scale and sustain successful initiatives. Our sessions with Newham’s Henrietta Curzon, and LOTI’s Director Eddie Copeland, focused on helpful approaches to use when starting conversations about change and innovation with leaders whilst encouraging them to think about outcome focused and user-led services.

What’s worked well?

Participation. It’s been great to have consistent high numbers attend these sessions even in the summer – this is a testament to the relevance of the topics and interest from the community.

Variety of roles. We’ve been pleased that colleagues at different seniority levels and from different service areas have been able to join us. Having service leads hear directly from their peers about the benefits of behavioural science or user-centred approaches in designing services not only makes the jobs of those tasked with ‘change’ easier but we hope it also unlocks new opportunities services for leads to spot and implement ideas that make services better for their staff and service users – even without the involvement of digital / change practitioners.

Informal set up. We think that hosting these sessions over lunch where people can listen in, whilst hopefully enjoying a break from the day-to-day work has made it possible for more people to join as well as take the pressure off from being ‘switched on’ all the time, as it were.

Last, but not least, the support we’ve had from our boroughs colleagues and partners who are always willing and eager to share their knowledge and experience with others.

Looking ahead to growing our innovation practice

This year we’ve taken the opportunity to prototype in small steps this approach of expanding our community’s knowledge on the full stack of the innovation toolkit. We know there’s more to be done if we want this to stick and for these tools to become part of business as usual – or – just how things are done now. Next year, we’ll be building on what we’ve done so far, adding more content, and more experiential sessions.

Sharing and retaining knowledge

Having concluded this first series just this week, we’re planning to return in September with a brand new series and new topics. As I mentioned before, it’s been great to raise awareness of the different tools and approaches we’ve shared so far, but one thing we’re keen to do more on is that of helping our community to put these into ideas into practice.

To this end, we’ll be creating resources and workshop templates to help discussions within council teams who may be at different stages in their innovation journey. Look out for these, in the Resources section of the LOTI website.

Experiential sessions

Having run a number of these sessions this year with the digital and adult social care Leaders, we’ll be thinking about expansion and offering these practical workshop type sessions to the wider community, particularly practitioners within adult social care, housing, digital inclusion and net zero – our main priority areas for the next few years.

These are just some immediate ideas we’ve thought about based on what we’re finding works. We are open to suggestions from our community, so please get in touch if you can get involved in the above or have ideas for other activities or content that you think is useful to practitioners in boroughs.

Thank you to everyone who has been a part of this journey, and we look forward to closer collaboration with our boroughs and partners as we embark on the next phase of growing our innovation practice.