What can an innovation consultancy and a children’s charity learn from each other in 5 weeks?

About six months ago, Action for Children’s Head of Innovation, Gita Luz, put out a simple ask on LinkedIn just to see what would happen. She asked whether any company or organisation was interested in hosting a team of innovators from the non-profit sector to share ideas on how we can build a better world and spark meaningful change together.

Why a residency? Really, it was an experiment — we know that the future of social care relies on breaking industry silos and new ways of thinking, and a residency was only one of the ways we could test this.

A few days later, Capgemini’s Applied Innovation Exchange (AIE) got in touch with us to discuss the possibility of setting up a 5 week residency in their offices.

Throughout June, the AIE and Action for Children’s Innovation Team learned a great deal from one another. We agreed that we should share our experience as widely as possible to help others collaborate, and hopefully inspire some new connections between unlikely partners.

What exactly did we do in those 5 weeks?

If you want more detail on what we did week- to- week from Capgemini’s perspective, check out their detailed post. But essentially, what this looked like for us was:

• Workshops in each others’ spaces during different stages in our respective projects— our collaboration started with a two-hour workshop that came out of a one-day design sprint on charity supporters facilitated by Innovation Manager Sherry Ho, and Capgemini joined us for our Christmas campaign workshop led by Innovation Manager, Laura Botsford.
• Attended each others events to learn more about one another’s work — we got to attend the Department for International Trade’s Entrepreneur Games and Innovation Manager Ellen Smyth was a panel judge in the Code Your Future hackathon. We also put on a showcase about the Future of Social Care which a few members of the AIE came along to.
• Shared different tools/guides/tech that we used — It was really useful to pool the assets and resources we had (books, guides, etc.) when discussing our separate and joint projects.
• Built workplace routines together — Each week, we held joint Monday morning meetings to plan our workloads and discuss capacities for the week, and Friday playbacks to reflect on how the residency was progressing.
• Opened up our communication channels which included a joint Trello board for planning the 5 weeks, and a shared Slack channel that we still use.
• Socialised! We kicked off the residency with an after-work social, and at many points it truly felt like we were part of the same team.
• Shared insights and perspectives through Lunch & Learns (like the one that our UX Lead Kate Stulberg, presented on user research in service design) and held 1:1s to share best practices in UX, using emerging tech, stakeholder management, and more.
• Introduced each other to people in our networks — whether it was volunteers, corporate partners, or entrepreneurs working on similar problems.

Here’s a roundup of what we learned:

First and foremost, just ask.

Put something out there — you never know what’ll come of asking for something that seems out of the ordinary. It doesn’t just have to be by the designated ‘innovation’ or partnerships person in your organization — anyone can play a role in breaking down industry silos (and that’s where the really interesting stuff happens anyways.)

We’re more alike than we are different.

Teams trying to ‘innovate’ whether in public, private, or non-profit sectors work quite similarly to one another and hold many of the same values about user-centricity and the importance of creating meaningful change through product or service design. There’s also a lot of crossover between our objectives and areas of focus: for example, we realized that we were both looking at the future of retail, building immersive experiences, and other trends.

We need to move beyond the view that only charities can benefit from their partnerships and collaboration with for-profits.

Charities have a lot to offer that goes beyond opening up CSR initiatives — we have a bank of knowledge, tools, resources, and perspective in our arsenals. Innovation is usually something we have to do on a shoestring budget, and it brings about creative problem solving approaches.

We also have a lot of daily ethical considerations in our work that are front of mind for any non-profit, especially those working with vulnerable groups. Carving out space to consider the ethical implications of everything you design is becoming non-negotiable — and we can help to shed some light on that.

Collaboration takes time and effort.

It takes effort to collaborate in a meaningful way. It was key to have someone on each side leading on the residency, and chunks of time had to be carved out for that. Even then, one of the things we consistently longed for was more time to build something together from scratch.

And finally, this might be the most important one: lots of people and organizations want to play a role in building a better world.

We were overwhelmed by the amount of support and opportunities offered to us by different arms of Capgemini outside the AIE. There was a lot of excitement and energy around us working together, and we got to meet tonnes of people working in the for-profit sector looking to leverage their position to help build a more sustainable and equitable world.

Some ‘best practices’ of a joint residency:

This won’t be relevant to everyone, but the same general principles (integration, testing it out, spending time together) will apply.

Test it out first

We happened to work well together because our teams were a similar size and shared lots of similarities in how we worked. We first held a short workshop to develop some audience insight research in the AIE offices before agreeing to to a possible residency to make sure the fit was right.

Create a charter of your joint objectives, ways of working, and agreements

We did this before we started the 5 weeks, and it was incredibly useful as a reference point as we decided what we should work on. Even better, it was great to return to and see how much we’ve done together at the end of the residency.

Have dedicated people on each side liaise with each other

This was my role on our team, and Mikey Atkins’ (Innovation Consultant) at the AIE. This helped structure how we communicate and ensured that there were people coordinating dates, jobs to be done, and keeping our shared objectives front of mind.

Integrate as much as possible

As much as you can, try to physically be in each others’ spaces — sometimes it’s just casual conversations that make you realize you’re both working on the same thing. You’ll get to know how the other team works on a first-hand basis and collaboration and sharing knowledge will be a lot more organic.

Open up communication channels

Make sure the way that you plan and communicate is natural to how both teams already work — for us, this meant creating a dedicated Trello board, and shared channel on Slack which both teams already used regularly — so it didn’t feel like an extra ‘thing’ we both had to check.

Meet regularly

Things like Monday meetings and Friday playbacks helped us align on our weekly objectives and reflect on what we’ve done and learned throughout our time working together. It also made it feel like we were part of one team a few days of the week, and made collaborating much more seamless.

Document, document, document

It’s incredibly satisfying to look back at things you’ve accomplished together and the photos of all the events and workshops you attended — huge shoutout to David Doherty who captured all the photos and video you’ll see below. It’s also really helpful to have a record of what you’ve learned and done together to share with others.

Make sure formalities are in order

Get any necessary NDA’s/ waivers signed at the very beginning, and clear things like building passes with plenty of notice.

So, what does our future look like?

Though we don’t have daily access to Capgemini’s physical space anymore, our partnership isn’t really at an end.

On June 28th, Capgemini held a Customer Engagement Away Day — a dedicated block of time for their employees to look at some of the biggest problems facing different charities.

We got a chance to put forward a brief for an idea that asked how we can create online services that help and support parents. From that, the team came up with something called “Dad Buds” — a monthly membership for dads to access fellow fathers, events or content — and we won! We’re getting support from Capgemini to build and test this idea.

We’re also getting the AIE’s support on building a feature for our annual Secret Santa campaign — all of us are incredibly excited, so watch this space!

Also, we still have a shared Slack channel where we share interesting articles and resources, ask each other questions, and keep both teams in the loop. We all discovered this feature at the beginning of our residency and we highly recommend it.

If you want to learn more about our work, check out our Medium. To collaborate with us, please drop us a line at innovationteam@actionforchildren.org.uk

To learn more about the AIE, go here or get in touch with them directly.