If the last decade has taught us anything, it is that you can’t mandate innovation from the top. National policy makers can do a good deal to create systems in which innovation happens – for example, by encouraging competition and empowering professionals. But when it comes to the difficult art of change on the ground, the man in Whitehall doesn’t always know best.

History is full of good evidence for this statement. Public hospitals and free education were pioneered in cities long before the welfare state nationalised them. Personal budgets for social care were not developed in the corridors of Whitehall, but by a social enterprise working with progressive local authorities. As we’ll see below, the Big Society was a reality in towns and cities across the country long before it became a political slogan.

I was moved to write this piece by James Macintyre’s recent article on public service innovators. Macintyre chose Ken Clarke, Andrew Adonis and Transport for London. It’s a fine selection, but a little too centralist for my tastes. With the new government trumpeting localism as its credo, I think we have to look beyond the capital.

The next big thing probably won’t come from a think tank or a government department, but from a council or hospital trust struggling to cope with cuts. Below, I list a few of the people who might just be working on it.

Hilary Cottam

Cottam comes from the international development world, and was an early proponent of applying participative design thinking to public services. Through projects with councils like Southwark and Swindon, she is exploring new ways of delivering public services by starting with real people, understanding how they can contribute to solving their own problems, and linking them together to help each other.

Southwark Circle, for instance, is a social enterprise and membership organisation that supports older people. It offers reliable helpers who can assist its members with everything from DIY to computer lessons, as well as a full social programme. A token for an hour’s help costs £10. A third of helpers are over 50 and they are encouraged to socialise with the people they support, emphasising the fact that this about being a good neighbour, rather than a commercial transaction. The idea is to support older people to live independently for as long as possible by keeping them fit and active.

Swindon’s Life programme applies some of the same methods. Families in crisis are put in control of solving their own problems – they recruit their team of multi-disciplinary professionals and then work with them to decide what to change and how.

Steve Reed

As leader of Lambeth council, Reed seized the term ‘cooperative council’ in the run-up to the last election. He has since worked with his highly capable cabinet and a wide range of policy experts to flesh the idea out and turn it into a national movement for better Labour local government.

The result has been a series of experiments in helping neighbourhoods to design and commission their own services – the council has worked with local people to set up new street markets, renovate parks and clean up their areas. The Brixton Pound is one of the most emblematic of the new innovations. An alternative currency that can only be spent on the local high street, the B£ is designed to support independent shops in the face of chain-store domination.

While Reed cannot claim to have originated all these innovations himself, his council has created the conditions in which new ways of working have flourished. He deserves his place on this list for innovative leadership.

Dick Atkinson

Atkinson is Chief Executive of the Balsall Heath Forum in Birmingham, a project that is widely seen as providing inspiration for the Big Society. An academic sociologist and 60s activist, Atkinson grasped the potential of community action and mutual support to change neighbourhoods.

Over 20 years Balsall Heath Forum has become a democratic focus for the area, once one of the most troubled in inner-city Birmingham. By bringing residents together, the forum claims to have helped prostitutes off the streets, empowered residents to feel safe and proud of their area, and driven the highest rising house prices in Birmingham.

The forum did this in part through a campaign of direct action – they organised pickets of streets where prostitutes were working, displaying placards saying ‘Kerbcrawlers: we have your number’ and recording license plates for the police. The police were originally against the perceived vigilantism of the protests, but responded by rolling the protestors into a Home Office-backed programme called Streetwatch.

The past decade has reminded us that state spending is at best a partial antidote to poverty. Atkinson’s sometimes controversial work shows us the importance of community organisation, social ties and mutual support for transforming places.

Antanas Mockus

Mockus is the wildcard on my list. His best days are probably behind him, especially after his recent failed attempt on the Colombian presidency. But it is his time as mayor of Bogotá that marks Mockus out as a true innovator.

Faced with few resources in one of the most violent and lawless cities on the planet, Mockus argued that: “The distribution of knowledge is the key contemporary task. Knowledge empowers people. If people know the rules, and are sensitised by art, humour and creativity, they are much more likely to accept change.”

This translated into inspired political initiatives. Mockus wanted to bring respect for human life back to a city that experienced shockingly high levels of homicide and traffic death. So he painted stars on the ground where fatal traffic accidents occurred, held weapons amnesties and invented a ‘vaccine against violence’ campaign in which people drew the faces of those who had hurt them on balloons, then popped the balloons. Some 50,000 people took part. Mockus also asked citizens to pay an extra 10% tax, and 63,000 of them did.

It would be easy to dismiss these initiatives as stunts, except for the fact that they worked. Under Mockus, traffic fatalities dropped by more than half and homicide by nearly three quarters. This is the kind of civic leadership that Britain’s elected service leaders have forgotten how to do. They should rediscover it.