SBRI as a catalyst for human centred innovation
How the SBRI programme could be a key tool in testing the model toward stimulating a human centred industrial strategy
By Rowan Conway, Jeff Masters and Jake Thorold.
Follow Rowan and Jake on Twitter @RowanEConway and @thorold_jake .
This article is an extract from the RSA report From Design Thinking to Systems Change: How to Invest in Innovation for Social Impact
Where are the hackers who will experiment with the think like a system, act like an entrepreneur methodology? As a market-creating method, the Small Business Research Initiative, a pre-commercial procurement programme, could be a key tool in testing the model toward stimulating a human centred industrial strategy. As a demand-led policy, SBRI aims to address one of the main challenges for early stage technologies — finding that crucial first customer. The challenge for SBRI is not just to generate solutions to public problems; it is to generate solutions that have impact at a sufficient scale.
For public agencies, there can be two distinct reasons for running an SBRI competition: First, to secure a process improvement — improving the internal performance of a government department or public service they have responsibility for; or second, to meet a broader policy objective — like reducing carbon consumption, for example, by changing market offerings or the behaviours of consumers. SBRI is a programme that does well at producing new innovative technologies, yet these new products sometimes struggle to affect the intended market and achieve the desired impact. This makes it an ideal case study for considering how a different approach could be more successful. The SBRI process is illustrated in Figure 8.
In its current guise the programme has been running since 2009, following a major overhaul of the previous iteration begun in 2001. More than 70 public agencies have used it, and currently about £75m a year is spent through the SBRI. There have been notable success stories, perhaps the most celebrated being PolyPhotonix development of a non-invasive treatment for degenerative sight-threatening conditions caused by age and diabetes — with a device that looks like a sleep mask. It is estimated this will save the NHS around £1bn a year for treatment of diabetic retinopathy and other eye conditions.
Within this research project we engaged with a number of SBRI commissioners and competition participants. We encountered examples of ideas that produced results in one context, but which did not find a wider market. In one case a process solution made a 26 percent saving of nurse time on a paediatric ward, but could not achieve wider success because it could not find a way around regulatory obstacles. This is an example of where a user-centred design leads to an appropriate solution in one context, but too much complexity prevents it from diffusing to a wider market.
Our research here is not systematic so should be considered as observational rather than definitive. We sought to question how to optimise the SBRI model, enabling innovators to think systemically and understand ‘barriers to change’.
Problems aren’t the same as markets
Through stakeholder interviews and a roundtable with SBRI commissioners and entrepreneurs, we found a range of issues arising from SBRI, but a core finding was that despite the fact that it consistently produces high calibre, design-led innovations, some solutions had problems getting to a wider market or having an impact beyond their SBRI commission. A conclusion we draw from this is that problems are not the same as markets. Competition commissioners are often not the same as the end buyers of the solution and the social challenges or the public service problems that stimulated the brief in the first place do not necessarily equate to clear market opportunities. As one commissioner stated: “The problem is at the back end — how do we get the ideas into the market-place?”
SBRI competitions create ‘competition demand’ for solutions to public problems. But providing the elusive first customer does not provide a guarantee that there will be a second or third customer. Competition demand is not the same as market demand. In one case studied, the (public sector) market demand was extremely low and largely met through the competition, even though the public value of the innovation was very significant. In other cases, where the competition is to address a policy problem, challenges might remain in translating a real social or environmental problem into actual market demand.
“We’ve just received an order for a batch of 100…That will flood the UK market”. -SBRI competition winner
Think like a system for SBRI
There is an opportunity to deploy systems thinking to optimise the SBRI process. Firstly, at the front end there is the need to define a map of the long term market and/or estimate the societal impact. Adding this to the SBRI commissioning process would expose the technological, institutional or other complementarities that might be required to make it successful, the veto points or players who could block it, or other obstacles along the route.
By observing SBRI through a systemic lens, we see the potential of system thinking to the selection of challenges. Much of the unfulfilled potential that our research identified stems from the fact that competition commissioners do not routinely undertake a rigorous systems analysis before they decide on the problem to convert into an SBRI challenge. To counteract this we advocate for the creation of a ‘missing first diamond’ — a think like a system phase for competition commissioners.
This is important for three reasons: First, how a problem is defined affects the range of possible solutions that might be considered. The framing of the competition might imply the direction of the solution, perhaps excluding better alternatives. When a problem is considered using a range of methodologies and from multiple perspectives — including user perspectives — this can open up new ways of understanding the problem and new approaches to solutions.
Second, understanding the type of problem (for example, technical or adaptive; simple, complicated or complex) may help to determine whether it is the kind of problem that is suited to the kinds of solutions SBRI competitions are good at developing. And, if it is, is a combination of solutions needed, requiring more than one competition? Alternatively, is the problem of the type that a bigger ‘mission’ is needed to address it, involving multiple SBRI competitions in combination with other problem solving innovation processes too? Would institutional, regulatory or other changes also be needed to address this type of problem, or other problems needed to be solved simultaneously?
Thinking like a system here will include problem analysis (for who? By who/with how? How? As part of what?); understanding stakeholders and power (including who makes decisions, controls resources — including those that can be leveraged, holds blocking cards or might not want the competition to succeed?); considering problems that overlap; and, crucially, thinking hard about why this problem has not been solved already.
Planning for impact
While the entrepreneurial hacks will emerge through the process, the SBRI commissioner could also set the vision for the long term impact of the commission, thus setting direction for the acting like an entrepreneur part of the process. Early scans for market opportunities that are ripe for exploitation, as well as the hacks of the system that will be needed to allow for wider adoption of the innovation, will give a sense of the commercial support and market making that the commissioner may need to undertake to go beyond competition demand to wider market uptake and impact, as illustrated in Figure 10, below:
Through our interviews with commissioners it was revealed that the designers providing solutions to SBRI challenges often have little commercial experience or had not expended enough or even any thought on how to progress their innovation to be market ready. Innovate UK and commissioners should therefore provide commercial support to competition participants in the phase 2 period and beyond. Given that the impact of an SBRI innovation is often entirely dependent on successfully impacting markets this support shouldn’t be considered as an added extra; it should be a core aspect of the SBRI programme.
One feature of this support should be to prepare designers to be willing to reiterate their product as they look to scale. It may be the case that barriers to scaling can be worked through by making adjustments — perhaps only minor — to the innovation. Entrepreneurs recognise that creating the successful product or service will require trying, failing, making changes and then trying again, often multiple times. Designers for SBRI competitions should be prepared and supported to do exactly the same. The necessity of this process provides the reason to introduce a phase three to the SBRI process — as already happens in SBRI Healthcare competitions — across the full suite of SBRI competitions.
Read our final conclusions form the article series: Final Design Thinking to Systems Change: How to Invest in Innovation for Social Impact.
For full references and bibliography please visit the RSA website to download the report.
