This article is part of a special series on growth – where will it come from and what can be done to stimulate it?
Paul Miller is CEO of School of Everything, a website that helps people to engage with educational opportunities. He is co-founder of Social Innovation Camp and Bethnal Green Ventures.
We face some tough problems: climate change, youth offending, an ageing population and economic upheaval, to name but a few. However, solutions are coming from unexpected sources, with small startups taking it upon themselves to address these problems as challenges. Startups are striving to create new products and services that change the way whole markets operate, creating a cascading chain of innovation that will lead to both economic and social growth.
It is a challenge in itself to believe that growth can come from organisations in their infancy – or which don’t even exist yet – but the government must get behind the people putting technology to work to solve social problems. This is where the next wave of innovation will come from.
Take, for example, the Khan Academy, which is turning the idea of the classroom on its head by offering compelling videos teaching everything from algebra to art history. Children take their lessons when they would be doing homework and then come into school for one-to-one tutoring from their teacher. In schools where it has been embraced, attainment has rocketed. It’s now used by 3.5 million people a month.
Meanwhile, MyPolice offers a direct feedback system on police officers. You might think that only people with a gripe would use it, but it turns out not. The majority of feedback is positive and constructive. A pilot with Tayside police has shown that for a relatively tiny cost the police force can achieve real engagement with citizens, improving the service and saving money to boot.
The Good Gym takes a completely different approach to encouraging charitable activity and is tackling isolation among older people. Rather than running in a gym, members agree to run to visit an older person once a week. The project is now spreading beyond Tower Hamlets, where it began, and the FT calls it ‘one of the world’s most innovative ageing projects’.
All of these startups are solving problems that we might assume the public or charitable sectors should tackle. In fact, the ideas came from people who had first-hand experience of the problem and then experimented until they found something that worked. Only then did they collaborate with larger institutions in order to scale up their ideas.
In many ways, the most significant developments in this field over the past few years haven’t been technological -– the fundamental technologies that are being used are now decades old – but are instead organisational. Many startups now use a set of management techniques that have come to be known as the ‘lean startup’: setting out with a clear understanding of the problem and then learning by building a ‘minimum viable product’ before iterating until they have something that people really want. Only when an approach works and has paying customers does the startup look to grow. This overcomes the most common cause of failure among startups: ‘premature scaling’, when too much money is injected into startups that have yet to find the model that works.
What is noticeable is how far this is from current models of tendering and procurement in the public sector. Unless things change, the public sector is going to find it hard to work with the most innovative of startups and miss out on the potentially game-changing efficiencies that their way of solving problems might offer. It doesn’t require new legislation or even massive amounts of funding, but a collaborative approach and enthusiasm for working with new people, who understand the problems and have a unique attitude and aptitude for solving them.
For more on startups, read The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries
