#4 Supporting entrepreneurs in your organisation

What is it?
Getting more from your staff, by supporting creative or entrepreneurial individuals within an organisation and giving them the space to explore innovative new ideas. Entrepreneurs are not just people who set up organisations, they can also be people who work within institutions, such as local government, who have a particular talent for generating new ideas and driving them forward.

How can this method be used?
Supporting entrepreneurs in your authority could include:

1.    Space to Think - time away from the day job is a valued and essential commodity for innovators. This could include allocating a certain percentage of a worker's time to new projects they are developing themselves or projects outside of the organisation they have an interest in [see, #6].

2.    Teaching and Tutoring - support entrepreneurs with new tools and methods to develop new ideas. This can be done internally through mentoring programmes, or by bringing in external expertise. For example, support for managers in Croydon.

3.    External Links - sharing information externally can help to gain an insight into what models and methods of innovation yield good results and how these can be transferred towards your own organisation. Learning from the mistakes of others can help to avoid costly pitfalls. Networks for individual entrepreneurs exist across England, but there are few for local government workers to date.

Where has it been used?
1.    Google encourages employees to spend 20 per cent of their time working on projects that are not core business, believing that this helps innovation flourish. It also places value on listening to ideas generated internally and supporting employees to see them through the design process. Read more here.

2.    The London Collaborative supports London’s public sector to work together in order to improve its capacity to meet future challenges facing the capital. The Collaborative facilitates face-to-face meetings between the city’s public sector leaders where they can share best practice, learn about what’s happening in other boroughs and consider future challenges.