The Open Innovation Team approach is innovative in a number of ways:

-We are the first Whitehall team dedicated to deepening collaboration between officials and academics

-We have been set-up at no extra cost to central government by securing sponsorship from universities, the first time such a model has been tried out in the UK Civil Service

-We work closely in partnership with our university sponsors to develop our approach to deepening collaboration

-We have significantly increased our team’s capability and capacity, again at no additional cost to the central government, by setting up a new PhD placements program that is bringing 50+ PhD students per year into Whitehall on placements of 3-6 months.

-Rather than approaching our work with a fixed idea of how we can achieve success, we are treating our two-year pilot as an opportunity to experiment and learn more about how we can effectively deepen collaboration between officials and academics. For example, we are testing out different partnership models with departments and setting up new kinds of institutional arrangements (e.g. our Digital Government Partnership) that seek to embed collaboration and reduce the transaction costs associated with it.

At the same time, we are figuring out how relationships with individual academics can be structured to benefit both parties (e.g. by adopting a more flexible approach to working with senior academics) and testing out different engagement tools to understand more about what works in different settings.

The Open Innovation Team is now one year into its pilot phase. Given the success of the pilot so far, we expect to agree a second round of sponsorship funding to continue and scale-up the initiative after the pilot ends. The creation of the Open Innovation Team is an example of ‘grassroots intrapreneurship’. Chris Webber, the official who set-up and runs the team, joined the Civil Service in 2012 and quickly became frustrated at the relatively limited engagement between officials and academics. He began to do something about it in 2014 by setting up a seminar series that invites world-leading thinkers to HM Treasury to explain their work. However, he remained frustrated at the limited scope for deeper collaboration on research and policy development so, working with a small group of volunteers, he began to develop ideas for how this could be addressed.

After coming up with a proposal in summer 2015 he pitched it to the Cabinet Secretary, who encouraged him to develop the idea further. He then spent about a year refining the idea with universities and colleagues around Whitehall, before finally agreeing on a sponsorship package and moving from Treasury to Cabinet Office to begin working on the initiative fulltime in August 2016. The solution Chris proposed was to have a team in the center of government dedicated to helping officials generate analysis and ideas for priority projects by deepening collaboration with academics and other outside experts. Whilst senior officials agreed that it was a good idea, finding funding for it was the key blocker. Chris recognized that universities could be a potential source of funding so engaged research-intensive universities and ended up agreeing on a sponsorship deal with a small number of them after six months of negotiation.

Creating the team at no cost to central government has been a key achievement and also demonstrated that innovative and entrepreneurial approaches to solving problems can win investment from unconventional sources. The proposal for piloting this new team was accepted by the Minister for the Cabinet Office and the Cabinet Secretary in summer 2016. The team began work in August 2016, with enough sponsorship funding to cover the cost of four officials. After six months, we realized that we would need to increase capacity and settled on the strategy of arranging for a stream of PhD students to work with us on placements of 3-6 months... This is a mutually beneficial arrangement enabling early career researchers to better understand the world of policy while also improving our capability (e.g. on emerging technology) and increasing our capacity.

We have been progressing rapidly over the past 18 months, working across a wide variety of policy areas including mental health, industrial strategy, childcare reform, digital government, young people and education. We’ve been experimenting with different ways of collaborating and are learning as we go in terms of what conditions are needed for success and how to increase the impact of our work. We’ve arranged various kinds of events, embedded staff with departments for priority projects and invited experienced academics to work with us as “Policy Fellows”. We are working with a team of open innovation experts from the University of Lancaster to evaluate our work and provide us with advice on how we can increase our impact, we are working to increase awareness of our work and approach across Whitehall in effort to inspire others to adopt similar approaches.

Our team would not exist without intensive collaboration and partnering. The project would not be happening without the support of our non-government partners. Our university partners provide not only financial sponsorship, but they also give us insights from academia and access to valuable networks. Research Councils’ involvement also provides useful networks. Partners have been important in helping us identify the best academics for our work.

Partnering with teams and departments around Whitehall has also been essential. For example, in our Digital Government Partnership, we are collaborating with all relevant departments to ensure that we are aware of their needs and adapting our plan accordingly. More generally, being part of the Future Policy Network - a group of innovation teams reporting to the Cabinet Secretary - has also been useful because it provides a steady stream of commissions and a way of making relevant connections across the civil service.

Cabinet Office volunteers helped come up with the initial idea for the project and senior officials from Cabinet Office and No10 provided advice before we submitted it to the Cabinet Secretary. Officials from various departments provided input as the idea was being finalized. Senior figures in universities were involved early on too, especially in advising what the sponsorship deal should involve and on different ways of collaborating with academics.

Officials and academics have continued to provide advice. For example, our academic partners sit on a board that meets every three months. Their input has been extremely valuable, allowing us to adapt our approach as we learn more about how to collaborate most effectively with academics. For example, it has led us to invest considerable time in institution building to minimize the transaction costs associated with setting up projects and increasing their impact (e.g, Digital Government Partnership and Economic Policy Network).

In addition to the achievements listed above, we have engaged with over 100 academics in scoping conversations, organised eight visits to universities for Whitehall officials, facilitated four policy conferences, set up a Digital Government Partnership, created a PhD placements programme, started work to set up an Economic Policy Network and provided policy support across a range of priority projects including mental health, childcare reform, industrial strategy, accelerating digital innovation, housing and cyber security.

The impacts we have observed include:

-More openness to involving academics in the policymaking process

-More evidence-led decision making (e.g. on childcare)

-Civil servants collaborating with academics in new ways to carry out applied research and design policies

-Engagements between policymakers and academics continuing and becoming more ambitious after our involvement has ended

-PhD students and experienced academics getting a better understanding of the policy making process

Over the next year, we will look to build on our promising start by setting up more research and policy collaborations that meet the needs of departments, strengthening the institutional arrangements we have begun to set up to embed our approach and raising the profile of our work inside and outside Whitehall.

One of our most frustrating challenges is that it has been harder than expected to set-up really good opportunities for academic input. One reason is that experienced academics often have teaching and research commitments that they cannot be released from. Our response to this has been to introduce an approach where we work much more flexible with experienced academics, in a way that suits both their needs and ours. Another challenge has been agreeing on projects with Whitehall teams. Departments have been harder to engage than expected.

We have improved this by setting up partnership arrangements to help inform our work and securing the buy-in of senior officials. Another problem is that in our enthusiasm to experiment and find good projects, we have sometimes taken on more work than we should. To help manage this, we’ve increased resource through the PhD program and become more selective about which projects we take on and more assertive about ending those that aren’t delivering.

We have benefited from a variety of positive environmental factors that have made it easier for us to succeed. Being housed in the Cabinet Office has been an important factor - making it easier for us to set up quickly with nonpolicy support in the shape of legal service, desk space and equipment. Having a supportive “Policy Profession” was also helpful early on because it provided access to a group of senior officials who wanted to support what we are doing. Leadership has been important in that the head of our team has been able to communicate his vision persuasively and win sponsorship despite not being a senior civil servant. The complement to this has been the willingness of senior officials to engage with his idea and greenlight its piloting.

This could include replicability of the problem (i.e., widespread public challenges), as well as replicability of the solution (i.e., the ease at which the solution can be adopted by others) There is potential to reap significant benefits from deepening collaboration with academics across all areas of public policy. This kind of model, therefore, could be replicated across government with or without university financial sponsorship. In Whitehall we are already fielding requests from colleagues who are seeking to replicate this approach in their specific area. Outside Whitehall we believe there is potential to set up a similar initiative focussed on local authorities or non-departmental public bodies. We are already facilitating aspects of our model for others e.g. setting up PhD placement schemes in the Department for Communities and Local Government, Department of Health and the Treasury. There is even potential for this to be applied at the international level, e.g. universities could come together to co-fund projects for the UN that deepen collaboration around a particular policy challenge.

With the right support, academics can become heavily involved in policy-making and add significantly more value than they are normally allowed to. Under the right circumstances and with the right partners, a sponsorship model can be a useful way of setting up and testing the value of a new policy team. Setting-up good quality research and policy projects for academics to get involved in is difficult and time-consuming. Establishing tailored partnership arrangements that minimize transaction costs and increase the impact of projects is a sensible response to this.