12 months of failure

Our lessons from year one of Bromford Lab

Bromford Lab was one year old on 28th May

We’ve been working pretty much in public and sharing openly

But we wanted to take stock at this important milestone

What’s worked?

What’s not?

And how much does this all cost?

The Lab is founded on four principles

Failure as well as success

Impact - not just creativity

More testing better piloting

Transparency and open innovation

“Our number one objective was to create an environment where failure was not just accepted , but encouraged”

Innovation CoachPaul Taylor

Impact this year: We believe we’ve begun to build a culture that promotes failure

67% of concepts failed to complete the Lab Pipeline

The main reasons were feasibility, new direction being identified or loss of enthusiasm

We received 77 unique ideas in our first 10 months

20 ideas have been successful

14 ideas have been matched to other pieces of work

We’ve learned that it’s not possible to process all ideas immediately

We’ve had to create the organisational capacity to explore certain ideas and we’ve founded squad working

7 ideas are shelved until we can explore them

19 are ongoing

Example: Our work around an “older persons service offer” was sent to the Innovation Graveyard

We realised we were in danger of grouping older people [a segment we couldn't even define] into one homogenous group.

Impact: In total we’ve stopped 31 things that could have transformed into ‘zombie projects’

We believe this is our true value. Preventing pointless or ill-defined projects infecting the organisation.

It’s not all about creativity..

“Innovation and creativity are not the same thing. Innovation is about discovering a problem, seizing an opportunity and making an impact.

No impact = no innovation.”

Lab ManagerVicky Green

Our biggest single impact this year is that we have created a process for the

nurturing of creativity within Bromford.

Working with our Project and Insight teams we have articulated a clear path – from

problem definition – to testing – to piloting – to evaluation.

Every idea has to travel through this to prove its impact.

Not that we can’t have fun

We believe we’ve created the right mix of excitability, evaluation, sexiness and science. All our ideas face rigorous testing

Our number one objective was to create an environment where failure was not just accepted , but encouraged.

Innovation CoachPaul Taylor

“Prove it”

Tom Hartland , Lab Designer, on testing

Our tests have dedicated measures

are typically small scale and low risk

ventures…

they seek to either prove the concept,

test assumptions or evaluate

how successful a solution is

If something was going to fail, tests are our way of finding out quickly and cheaply

Improvement Point: We need to get much faster at testing. We need to test

more , pilot less

We’ve identified problems in the time spent in the Lab pipeline and a difficulty

in getting to test stage

The creation of Bromford Squads means this should be resolved

Once a test is passed it might progress into a pilot.

They typically last longer and require more resources

A pilot needs internal approval and bespoke measures

designed by the Insight team

A pilot always has an end date for evaluation. You can see the current pilots on the Lab Trello

board

“Everything we work on is open to the public. We don’t differentiate between internal and external. We know the power that lies in the network. Increasingly, we must harness that.”

Lab ConnectorAmy Morgan

Success: We launched a new website. We gained 1500 Twitter followers. We’ve been praised for our openness

Failure: We’ve received criticism about our internal communication. We’ve not made enough use of Lab Testers

Transparent on Costs

We spent £187,954

£184,725 of this was on salaries

The rest was running expenses with the most significant spend being £2,448 on tech such as XBOX, 3D printer, Google Glass

Our Targets for Next Year

We need to get better at failing so 75% of our concepts won’t make it through the pipeline

We need to keep a better audit of our impact so we’ll produce a twice a year summary of the products/services that wouldn’t have existed without a Lab

We need better evidence of the impact of our network so we’ll produce a twice a year summary of the innovation sourced from outside Bromford

Our Targets for Next Year

We need to get faster at progressing concepts through our pipeline so 70%

will be completed within 12 weeks

We need to improve internal and external communication – so outcomes of 100% of Lab sessions will be shared.

A separate comms plan will be produced in June

We want to test a Lab Partnership for likeminded organisations. We are

aiming for five partners by March 2016

We’ve had an imperfect start

Here’s to an imperfect future@bromfordlab

www.bromfordlab.com