Why should you develop a Digital Innovation Culture? Like!’s work to develop digital innovation cultures provides a framework to enable the development of local skills and organisational capacity development. This provides a robust skill-based foundation for efforts to lead and implement changes in how cities and municipalities work and deliver services.
The desire to use digital technologies to deliver public services has resulted in some practical barriers and skills gaps in organisations that can directly affect the design, delivery, and take-up of innovative offerings from local governments.
By concentrating on the skills needed for internal organisational change and development – and thus enabling the development of a local digital innovation culture – cities ensure that they have the internal skills to develop solutions that learn from the needs of citizens, and which use a multi-helix approach (local government, universities, SMEs and citizens) to identify, develop and share the organisational skills necessary to deliver exciting, efficient, useful and innovative services.
A three part approach to enabling innovation cultures in organisations
The cities that developed a digital innovation culture as part of the Like! project combined three different approaches to innovation and capacity development:
- Developing Innovation and Skills – looks at how organisations are working together to prepare their staff and citizens for new digital services – for example using Digicoaches and summer classes to improve digital skills.
- New Forms of Engagement – looks at ways in which digital innovation can help municipalities reach out to different parts of the community. A great example is how Angus Council in Scotland have used a range of techniques to enable the community to choose where public money is spent through a process called Participatory Budgeting.
- Inclusive Services – looks at ways cities can ensure that different parts of the community are not left behind by new advances in digital technology – we show for example how partners have worked together to provide services for older people and people with learning disabilities.
There are strong links between these Developing Smarter Services themes and those in the other LIKE! work packages on ‘Digital DNA’ and ‘Creating Digital DNA for Cities and Neighbourhoods’.