Created a Digital Suite of Innovation Tools and Resources for Remote Innovation Sprints for the UK Civil Service
We designed and launched a one-week intrapreneurship innovation sprint for the UK Civil Service to help cohorts of civil servants tackle real organisational challenges by applying entrepreneurial methods.
Background
The UK’s Civil Service, or Her Majesty’s Civil Service, is a permanent secretariat of over 400,000 civil servants who support various departments of Her Majesty’s government in the UK.
Tackling the UK’s high-priority issues within today’s digital age requires creative ideation and agile decision-making in order to come up with more effective solutions.
The UK Civil Service recognised the power of internal entrepreneurial skills (intrapreneurship) as a force to activate change and innovation, and have ‘professionalised’ entrepreneurship as a capability area.
To this end, they have created an intrapreneurship qualification system of multiple levels, to upskill civil servants with the skillset, toolset and mindset to be entrepreneurial in their work.
Brief
The UK Civil Service wanted to run a self-contained intrapreneurship sprint for cohorts of cross-functional civil servants to help them apply entrepreneurial innovation methods previously learned as theory on real and live organisational challenges.
The UK Civil Service wanted it to be a one-week journey that could be delivered remotely and could be easily repeated in the future. They asked us to design the end-to-end sprint methodology and process as well as provide all the required assets, tooling and resources to enable them to deliver this autonomously and repeatedly, at scale.
IMPACT
We built and provided the UK Civil Service with a digital suite of innovation tools, resources, and playbooks — tailored to their needs — and curated around a one-week (5-day) end-to-end Lean Innovation process. We designed this to be re-used and replicated by internal coaches — a complete set of digital tools, learning resources, instructions and guides to help internal innovators frame their thinking, ideate solutions, validate assumptions and present compelling business cases.
We drew on our experience delivering and facilitating innovation journeys; coaching and upskilling internal teams on how to practically apply entrepreneurial techniques; as well as our trove of tools, learning materials, guides and lessons-learnt.
Outcomes
The UK Civil Service received a carefully constructed intrapreneurship innovation sprint ‘in a box’ with everything required to confidently spin-up and run 5-day innovation sprints themselves.
Using our bespoke product, teams managed to interview stakeholders, isolate early adopters, build and iterate solution concepts, and pitch to a panel of judges to secure commitment from senior leadership to take their projects further as part of their departments’ direct priorities.
The UK Civil Service has run three sprints already with our digital product solution, and counting.
