Innovation isn’t confined to startups. Take DWP Digital’s Innovation Lab, for example. Few of us would automatically namecheck a massive organisation such as the Department for Work and Pensions – which has approximately 96,000 employees serving 20 million citizens – as an example of agile, creative thinking. But its Innovation Lab brings visionary, innovative, experimental thinking to all its services, to make them better for all their users – which is all of us. From claiming a pension to finding a job, most of us will be in that 20 million at some point in our lives.
“For me, the Innovation Lab is a unique and safe space where we can explore and test different ideas and concepts,” says product lead Maxine Paintain. “It’s about creativity, networks and ecosystems. It’s about solving problems – reframing them, breaking them down and connecting them to new and different solutions that we discover through our proof of concepts and experiments. And it’s about leveraging the wider innovation ecosystem that exists across government, industry and academia to speed up transformation and change. We’re pushing the boundaries to accelerate the potential of new ideas.”
