Watch our interview with David Albury.
David Albury
Diversity is incredibly important. Where we get innovation is the result of people from different backgrounds, different perspectives, different experiences coming together, so one of the striking things is if you go to really innovative organisations you see this different sort of combination there that people, when they’re interviewing and when they’re selecting people for posts, aren’t looking for people like themselves, however tempting that might be, but actually trying to find those people who have a very different slant, a very different mindset. It’s in that creative tension that we can give birth to some of the really radical innovations that we need in healthcare.
Well, I think the most important thing to say is to start when we’re thinking about the innovation, not after the innovation has been produced, because one of the key things, it’s about the way in which we can involve users, potential adopters in the innovation process itself, so when we are thinking about developing a new innovation, we say not just who is the innovator, but who are the people, who are the organisations that are likely to be early adopters of that innovation, and who are the patients and the carers and the public who will be involved? And by bringing them together and creating a co-design process enables us to have the foundations of something that is more scalable.
But for it to really scale, we have to also think about not just the individuals in the room, but how do we create, how do we connect together user and professional networks and organisation, that if you like can be a coalition for the scaling and spreading of innovation? And how do we create a community of potential adopters? What often in our work in the innovation unit we call a community of engagement, but if you like are surrounding the innovator and giving feedback and critical friendship to the innovator in the process, and this allows us to overcome that sort of sense of a not invented here.
You’ll all be familiar with the case where people say well, that’s a really interesting innovation. That might work in Metro Melbourne, but it won’t work in some rural community, and they’re sort of right. So we have to be able to bring the potential adopters into the innovation process early on to think about how we can genuinely make that innovation more scalable. So I think that sense about potential adopters, about user networks is critically important as well as being able to think about the sorts of tools and resources that will support people in being able to implement the innovation as it develops, and that’s a really critical pathway. It isn’t enough just to give them evidence and information about the innovation itself, but to really think about how the implementation and adoption of it can be really well supported.
So this is a really interesting question, it seems to me, because often we think of the places that will be best at innovation, the sites that will be best for innovation, will be those places that have a strong track record of performance, that have real capability in change management.
Strangely what we have found over the years in our work is that it’s not so much the existing track record. Indeed, existing high performance are often those most resistant to innovation. It’s often taking those organisations or those individuals who are in settings that aren’t performing quite so well who have high aspiration, high ambition, that is really important. And second, it’s not so much their existing capacity for change that’s critical, but their willingness to learn about what’s involved in great and sustained innovation that’s really important. So we’ve moved over the years from selecting organisations that are high performers with a track record of change to selecting high aspiration, high ambition organisations and individuals with a willingness to learn and collaborate with others in the innovation process, and I think that’s a sort of, that’s a really important shift that’s taking place, not just in the work that I and colleagues in the innovation unit do, but in other innovation agencies around the world in learning what makes the best selection of sites for innovation.