In classrooms, schools, communities, and social enterprises throughout the world, you can find examples of powerful innovative practices – new ways of learning, teaching and assessment that really help students and learners develop the skills, knowledge, values and behaviors for the 21st century. But all too often they remain individual, isolated examples – not spreading to other schools, other districts or other countries. What would really encourage proven innovations to spread more quickly and more effectively?

The traditional answer has been better quality dissemination of information and evidence of impact: glossier websites, flashier pamphlets, more intensive workshops. But with limited effectiveness. Recently, more reliance has been placed on networks and communities of practice: these definitely speed up ‘early adoption’ but there are few examples of system wide spread.

So what would have to change in education systems, in your system, to encourage schools and teachers to adopt and adapt proven innovative practice?

Dear David, I feel the same way too, when there are 5000 schools in a place, 100,000 teachers and 1.5 million students in dire need and ‘few’ get attention at high cost per person. while this ok for a pilot, it has to scale in a cost effective manner. This is so easy by using buid-in sustainable cascade training, low cost models.

The case for “Pro-innovation governance”

This is a fascinating conversation.  I agree that effectively managing innovation is at the heart of transforming learning outcomes.  I have sympathy for both David and Damian’s viewpoints – indeed, I think that they’re complementary.

My suggestion for a place to start underlies both areas: it’s about setting-up “pro-innovation governance”.

Whenever I come across an area, a company or a system where innovation doesn’t seem to happen (whether creation or scaling), I look first to the boring bits: the ‘major forces’ of a system to include budget, audit, recruitment and training.  If you get these right, innovation will flow; if you’d don’t, any number of prize contests or skunk works or networks won’t help you.

Three specific ideas:

1. Carve out ‘venture capital’ within
existing budgets.  Innovation
needs funds.  These can be won from
external sources, but experience suggests that it is important to carve out
resources from existing allocations to ensure the entrenchment of successful
innovations – innovation is either an important investment (i.e. worth reducing spend elsewhere for) or it isn’t.  The question is how
much?  3-4% ‘R&D’ is the accepted
ration for a modern economy but high-technology companies will often spend
20-30% of their budgets on equivalent activities.

2. Make innovation part of the
‘day job’ – Every manager should be charged with the
responsibility to manage a balanced portfolio of innovation from low-risk to
high-risk.  This should be part of
performance reviews and a manager should be punished for too little risk as well as too much.

3. Focus
on outcomes, not improved processes – Henry Ford once said that if he had listened to his customers too
closely, he would have ended up innovating ‘faster horses’ rather than the
automobile.  This story contains in it an
important lesson: to focus on the end goal (faster transport) rather than
improving the immediate process (making horses faster). Be clear about the intended outcome and then entertain any and all solutions that help reach that goal – however outlandish.

Dear David, to be provocative, I would like to contest your view of innovation management and diffusion. I believe it to be slightly idealized as it assumes a constant well-spring of creativity, the desire and capability to diffuse innovative ideas, and the means to manage the scaling-up within a heterogeneous environment. Equally, it ignores the inherent barriers within the system – principally ‘culture’, which Sir Ken Robinson describes as ‘the habits of the institution and the habitat they occupy’

http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/2010/10/14/rsa-animate-changing-education-paradigms/“>http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/2010/10/14/rsa-animate-changing-education-paradigms/

Governments (national and local) have their part to play in that they are frequently radical in rhetoric and conservative in implementation such that there is a ‘fear of freedom’ where the teaching profession is often left ‘seeking permission rather than forgiveness’. Such a risk averse and compliant culture within a traditional education paradigm is not conducive to innovation or its diffusion beyond its immediate environs. Consequently, we do not see the dynamic, adaptive and self-propagating characteristic present in other social mass mobilizations eg. adoption of technology, recycling behaviour, cessation of smoking etc.

Whilst I am a strong advocate of self-organisation and local agency, in some circumstances there is a need for disruptive innovation via punctuated change at a local scale. This is particularly the case where the development state and conditions for innovation are weakly developed or the capacity is low and the context challenging. To break free of the these inertial forces it is sometimes necessary to effect multi-track change, to build the climate and culture for innovation and release the potential of the system to effect scalar changes. Whilst networks and communities of practice have a role to play in sustaining innovation once it has reached a certain carrying capacity, I do not believe they have the power or potential to move to scale the sort of radical reform necessary to challenge the established paradigm – for this you need initial disruptive innovation which ‘shifts’ the power dynamic and culture to a new level.

This  is what we have attempted to do in Knowsley, a small metropolitan local authority in the NW of England, that established an independent Schools’ Commission with a remit to assess the capacity of the existing system to take forward a 21st century education agenda. Its recommendations included a number of principles and propositions on system reform. The UK’s Building Schools for the Future programme, announced in 2004 , provided the opportunity to reshape an education system along the lines outlined by the Independent Schools’ Commission. Knowsley’s proposals to Government were not simply to rebuild existing school buildings , but to effectively rebuild a local education system from scratch, covering Governance, Leadership and Management, Pedagogy, the role of the community, the Every Child Matters agenda and how new learning environments could be configured to support these reforms. To date, I believe it is the only example of an attempt at local system reform in the UK.

Hi Richard,

I completely agree with your view that setting up ‘Pro-innovation governance’ is a pre-requisite and that the three core elements are necessary for successful innovation management and diffusion. However, in our educational context my experience would suggest that they are not sufficient. I return to my assertion that institutional culture and structure are significant barriers. Schools frequently seem intent on seeking to move to scale via school-to-school networks before fully innervating and innovating their own institutions by building a consistent culture of innovation as part of the ‘day job’. I believe this is one of the reasons that we continue to see more in-school variance in performance than between school performance.

Let me illustrate with an example, albeit slightly anecdotal;

For the past few years at the start of the academic year I have met to welcome our newly qualified teachers, about 100 in number across primary, secondary and special schools. Undoubtedly, they are amongst some of the most talented, enthusiastic and creative practitioners in the system and are certainly better trained now than when I entered the professions over 25 years ago. Annually, they inject a major quality boost into our schools and shift practice at a micro-level. However, at the end of the welcome session, after I have exhorted them to make a real difference to the lives of our children, I urge them to swap emails, keep in touch and to form self-organised real or virtual networks and communities of practice and that I will await their email and suggestions as I would be willing to find some resource and pump prime their ideas. You would have thought that such ‘permission’ would yield a flood of enquiries and a flurry of interactions and communication ‘out there’. The reality is I’ve received one email from a music teacher who I readily encouraged and supported in her desire to set up a peer support group. I cite this anecdote not to justify a generic characteristic malaise in the stock of beginning teachers but to illustrate the entraining and conditioning nature of educational institutions, and in fairness the burden of just ‘getting started’ in a new job.

Others have stated that there is a Law of Innovation in organisations whereby the degree of innovation is inversely related to its perceived performance. I would extent this to include, the degree of organisational complexity and its length of establishment/maturity. Your comment about the degree of investment in ‘R&D’ or ‘D&R’ which in an educational context is a more appropriate process focused more on practitioner level action research, is pertinent. If you see innovation as the ‘practical implementation of good ideas’ then it is this emphasis and lack of routine business processes to encourage and legitimise it, moving it into whole-school practice that provides one of the major fault lines in the diffusion of innovation in educational institutions. Additional barriers exist in the line-management structure, which particularly in secondary schools can be very pyramidal. If we were talking about a hospital attached to University medical school and were considering a new surgical technique that produced better, quicker, cheaper, safer results with longer term benefits to the patient, it would move through the system like wild-fire, but not in a school.

There are however, educational contexts where we do witness such rapid migration and diffusion of innovation, for instance in ‘schooling at the extremes’. The work of Sugata Mitra being a prime example with his ‘Hole in the Wall’ project in India. He started to install computers into brick walls in public places in hundreds of villages and slums in India, Cambodia and Africa. The media called this the “hole-in-the-wall” project.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/oct/18/sugata-mitra-slumdog-teach-self

The computers were designed to be used by 6 to15-year-old children, free of charge and free of any supervision. In the first five years of the experiment, he showed that groups of children can teach themselves to use a computer and the internet, irrespective of who or where they are; irrespective of what language they speak and of whether they go to school or not.

Perhaps the question we need to return to is whether the current paradigm of institutional education provision can ever be a sufficient as well as necessary fertile environment to foster such ‘open innovation’ given its bounded environment and durably resistant culture?

Ought we to go with the ‘grain of learning’ as the driver for innovation rather than schools as institutional barriers and would this require a more de-schooling approach?

Perhaps to your surprise Damian, I find myself in almost total agreement with your response to my initial statement and questions. For there to be significant improvement in learning outcomes for students, there will, as you say, need to be “initial disruptive innovation which ‘shifts’ the power dynamic and culture to a new level”. And this can only really be nurtured at the local level – and Knowsley has been exemplary in this, deploying disciplined methods and approaches to support students and practitioners in developing powerful innovative practices. And because of this need for disciplined approaches – not “letting a hundred flowers bloom” – I’m sceptical of Richard’s claim that “innovation should be part of the day job for every manager”: around the world, in education and in other sectors, innovative organizations set up zones, incubators, labs and hubs to create a protected and disciplined space for radical and disruptive innovation (see, for example, New York City’s iZone or the Stupski work on Next Generation Learning, as well as the continuing path-breaking work in Knowsley)

The focus in my initial statement was on how does proven innovation spread from one area to another: diffusion. And here, I think, you (Richard and Damian) and I are pretty much in agreement. We know from research and experience in many sectors and many countries that it is the system conditions and dynamics – or as Richard puts it “the boring bits: the ‘major forces’ of a system to include budget, audit [assessment frameworks], recruitment and training” (and I’d add the ‘shape’ of the sector – ease of entry and exit) which significantly determine the rate and effectiveness of diffusion. As Damian says, not networks on their own and ‘WLAR’, I fear, that on their own, the evidence is that “cascade training, low cost models” don’t do it either.

Footnote: unfortunately though, Damian, it is not the case that  “If we were talking about a hospital attached to University medical school and were considering a new surgical technique that produced better, quicker, cheaper, safer results with longer term benefits to the patient, it would move through the system like wild-fire. Indeed, I’m currently working with colleagues in the National Health Service  in the UK to try to understand and develop the system conditions and dynamics that would encourage such innovations to spread “like wild-fire”.