One Big Thing is the annual cross-government initiative designed to get the civil service focused on priority areas. In 2024, it was designed to pinpoint how innovation can be used to improve processes and service delivery in a more modern civil service, with the tagline “one big thing starts with one small change”.
To build on the momentum of One Big Thing, the Accelerated Capability Environment (ACE) used its significant expertise and experience in leveraging innovation for impact to explore how people working in the Home Office could become more familiar with useful tools and techniques to innovate and be empowered to use them.
The aim is to improve service delivery, which is good for the public, as well as increase efficiency, delivering better value for money.
Enhancing innovation
Many people in the Home Office are already innovating but can face a range of blockers including lack of confidence or difficulty in connecting with the right people and teams to support their ideas.
Given this, ACE designed three workstreams to assess existing innovation maturity and readiness, identify areas for development and produce tangible tools and techniques to empower individuals to drive innovation.
The first was an innovation readiness assessment. This involved collecting qualitative and quantitative data through surveys, interviews and workshops to assess the current state of innovation in the Home Office. This trial validated the assessment process for future use to help benchmark innovation readiness and monitor improvements.
With the initial data, this workstream delivered a report that assessed the current readiness to innovate, highlighting the biggest challenges and opportunities to drive systemic innovation maturity, and importantly informed the other workstreams, which looked at developing and improving innovation practices.
Bringing innovation to life
The second was an innovation toolkit, with a focus on creating tools and techniques that anyone can adopt to drive innovation. These new tools can be applied to different stages of the innovation lifecycle, from developing problem statements through to designing innovation projects and capturing lessons learnt.
Then, aligned with the innovation toolkit, the third workstream devised a route planner to guide people and teams through the stages of innovation. An interactive PowerPoint with active macros, this offers multiple routes for next steps that can be used for everything from small trials to scaling up something that has already been through initial testing.
Additionally, in conjunction with the innovation toolbox, it offers clear guidance to ensure innovation projects address any issues and blockers to successfully make progress.
At the conclusion of the commission, a show and tell with senior stakeholders was well received “Excellent showcase session! It’s really strong how you’ve tied it in so neatly with the Home Office Research, Development and Innovation Strategy … I think it will make it feel a lot more real for people, which is ultimately what we want.”
