Building an Innovation Portfolio to Accelerate a Youth Employment Recovery:
Early Preoccupations
Author’s note:
After a few years of supporting federal ministries and philanthropic institutions to a) increase their in-house experimentation capabilities¹, and b) help them create stronger supports for civil society-led research and development (R&D)², I’ve landed in one of the Government of Canada’s largest youth employment programs. The mandate of my team is to improve our program’s understanding of its impact and explore ways to increase it.
This work was important pre-COVID, but has taken on a new level of urgency.
To realize our mandate, we’re trying our best to draw on key lessons from past roles, gather advice from brilliant people across the social R&D and public innovation world, and stay on top of what adaptations are emerging across the youth employment sector. One of the biggest sources of inspiration to date was a workshop hosted by SITRA, the Finnish public innovation foundation, on Innovation Portfolio Design and Sensemaking in early 2020 (the image above is sourced from one of the slides used to kick-off the meeting).
Taking a ‘Portfolio Approach’ has been an important operating principle for us this last year, so I thought I’d share some of the journey to date and where we’re going next.
We know that we’re not alone in the effort to help public institutions build beyond the curve, so our team will be sharing more actively what we’re exploring and learning in the hope that it accelerates the work of others — or inspires folks to get in touch if their work could compliment ours!
Youth Employment Recovery: the long road ahead?
Youth employment is a pressing societal challenge, and one that continues to grow. Both globally and in Canada, young people disproportionately face persistently high unemployment rates. In Canada, at its worst, the youth unemployment rate has reached as much as double that of the general population. That picture looks even worse for BIPOC youth, youth with disabilities, and other young people who face systemic barriers to advancing in the labour market. And of course, with its unprecedented effects on the world of work, COVID-19 has exacerbated these inequalities.
This isn’t the first time that the youth employment system has experienced a shock. The 2008 financial crisis, while different in nature from COVID’s public health, economic, and social justice reverberations, hit youth employment so hard that it took ten years to recover.
So the question that has been a preoccupation for my team over the last year has been how might we contribute to a faster recovery of the youth employment sector compared to the 2008 crisis?
Crafting an Innovation Portfolio: pre-COVID and today
Most traditional funding programs were not set-up to accelerate the recovery of a sector. Luckily there are examples and evidence that we can use for inspiration³, and almost all of them have a common orientation: they take a portfolio approach to respond to the scale of the challenge, as well as its emergent nature.
A ‘Portfolio Approach’ recognizes that complex challenges cannot be solved through a handful of disconnected, individual solutions. Rather, it encourages a set of ambitious objectives that are pursued via a collection of interconnected initiatives by a network of stakeholders.
This approach enables a range of actors to explore the various facets of a problem — and the nature of possible solutions — from different angles and perspectives. It also creates an enabling environment such that the quality and quantity of these initiatives is maximized so that together they reach their potential; this enabling environment is often created via levers like policy, public sector capacity, R&D infrastructure and other shared tools and instruments for the sector.
A portfolio is not static, but evolves as the nature of the problem and the understanding of opportunities to address the problem evolve. Ultimately, the end result is a more coherent mobilization of resources across a wide range of actors to go after a worthy mission.
Portfolio Pre-COVID:
Shifting the management of our collection of R&D, innovation, and measurement initiatives towards a portfolio orientation was the general approach that we moved towards after I started in this role four months prior to the March 2020 lockdown. At that time, the goal of this shift was to curate a set of initiatives in a way that would allow them to be more than the sum of their parts, and would allow us to be more systematic in going after continuous improvements to the program.
Here are some examples of the work that was already in play when I joined the team:
- Aligning funding recipient reporting and the measurement framework for the program with a meta-synthesis of available literature. This new measurement framework allows us to better evaluate whether youth are making progress along a continuum toward employment.
- Developing a pilot program aimed at better connecting hardest-to-reach youth to youth employment supports.
- Curating a working-group of cross-sector actors to share lessons learned regarding various youth employment R&D and knowledge mobilization initiatives.
When we started making the shift towards a portfolio approach, we opted to curate these initiatives across three primary levels of focus:
- at the service-user level (e.g. the pilot program being scoped): where our objective was to increase our understanding of who we are striving to serve, how to help them get the most out of gov funded services, and getting clarity on how a human-centred experience would look and feel;
- at the institutional level (e.g the new measurement framework): where our objective was to increase our own capacity for R&D, to understand our impact, to do the things we’ve always done better and make better investments;
- at the systems level (e.g. the cross-sector working group): where our objective was to create the conditions that support the emergence of breakthrough innovations that address systemic challenges in the sector.
While all of our initiatives were strong on their own, when we began considering them as part of a portfolio, gaps and opportunities became clear.
This new perspective helped us make some critical adjustments.
For example, we didn’t have much activity at the service-user level, so we aggressively scoped in ethnographic research as a key input to guide the design of the new pilot program⁴. Not only will the ethnographic research be important for the pilot program’s development, but it will likely inform further enhancements to the program’s measurement framework, and can be useful to others who are building shared infrastructure for the sector.
This initial portfolio model with three levels of attention was a good place to start, but seemed inadequate once COVID turned the world upside down.
COVID recovery portfolio:
Our focus has now expanded from driving continuous improvements towards also contributing to a larger mission: supporting the youth employment sector to adapt to the emergent labour market dynamics and inequalities amplified by the COVID pandemic.
Practically, this has meant that we’ve begun to adjust the curation of our portfolio to bring in elements from Mission Oriented Innovation, Three Horizons, Berkanainst Two Loop frameworks, and other frameworks⁵. These frameworks and models have been specifically designed to help actors think about the kinds of activities and investments that are needed to support significant transitions within a social change context.
To support this shift in portfolio orientation, we’re exploring some new areas of work such as the development of shared infrastructure to help boost the efficiency, effectiveness, and resilience of the youth employment during the COVID recovery.
For example, what if there was a dynamic data taxonomy for youth service provision that could facilitate the navigation of services and provide insights about how the youth services ecosystem is responding (or not responding) to evolving youth needs? This is just one example among many possible infrastructure investments that could better position the sector to be responsive to the challenges that youth will face in the years to come.
What’s up next/opportunities for collaboration
We haven’t figured out exactly where new bets should be placed, but we’re entering a period of discovery and looking for more thought partners to explore some of the following questions with us:
- How might we build out the program’s measurement framework to include investments beyond those at the institutional level — for example, investments made at the systems/sectoral infrastructure level?
- How can we build out our in-house capacity for impact measurement and sensemaking? What sources of data (thick and big) can we bring together to draw out new insights about how the sector is or isn’t working for youth?
- How might we create scalable capacity building opportunities for youth employment service organizations, enabling them to reach the right youth more easily and offer even better services?
- How can we develop, implement, iterate and scale new programs and services in a ‘delivery driven’ way⁶?
We’re hopeful that this collection of work equips our program to make more strategic contributions towards the emergence of a more viable future for youth post-COVID, so get in touch if you or your organization are exploring similar questions or have a unique perspective to share.
Otherwise, we’ll do our best to share what we’re learning and to work out loud.
Stay safe,
Jason
Footnotes:
- Some lessons on creating the conditions for dynamic and experimental programs in government: https://states-of-change.org/stories/embedding-experimentation-in-government-lessons-from-canada
- Evidence on funding social mission R&D, and reflection on the conditions needed to mainstream R&D work across Canada’s social impact sector: https://medium.com/@Jason_PE/catalyzing-a-social-r-d-ecosystem-b8e13319d920
- Starting with transition models that are highly relevant for public institutions and ending with models highly relevant for civil society organizations: Developmental State, Mission Oriented Innovation, Social R&D Ecosystems, Deep Demonstrations, Berkanainst Two Loop, Three Horizons Framework, Strong Field Framework, Field Catalysts, Collective Impact, etc. I am incredibly grateful to past conversations with Todd Khozein (Second Muse), Mariana Mazzucato and Rowan Conway (Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose), Giulio Quaggiotto (UNDP), Gina Bell (Chora Foundation), Tom Mitchell (Climate KIC), Vinod Rajasekaran (Future of Good), Cassie Robinson (The National Lottery Community Fund) and a host of others that have pointed me to these frameworks and helped build my vocabulary. And a special thanks to Mikael Seppälä (formerly of SITRA) who brought people and resources together for a workshop on innovation portfolio design and sensemaking in early 2020. Recap of the workshop here: https://www.sitra.fi/en/blogs/lab-log-12-innovation-portfolio-sensemaking-and-management-workshop/.
- Ethnographic research to inform policy, program or service design seems like an obvious step, but it’s often skipped in public institutions given the pain experienced trying to move through approvals and/or the pain experienced trying to delay instrument selection, or given a general under-appreciation of the value of ‘thick’ data.
- Next blog post will break down our COVID portfolio in detail (i.e. what we’re actively trialing and trying to learn, and where we’re bringing in insights from other organizations’ portfolios), but the teaser is that it builds off of a thought experiment that we ran during the first wave of the pandemic to wrap our heads around how public institutions should think & act across the phases of a crisis. Here’s a Q&A that I did with States of Change to break the thought experiment down: https://medium.com/states-of-change/helping-public-institutions-look-beyond-the-curve-a68ff2c808e9.
- “Delivery Driven” à la Jennifer Pahlka: https://codeforamerica.org/news/delivery-driven-
