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Open Innovations is winding down and will no longer be commencing new work from May 2026.

The Power of Local

Announcement: We will be attending the LGA Conference and Exhibition, 1-3 July in Liverpool, to discuss our work. Watch this space... #LGAConf25

Introduction

Open Innovations is working with the Local Government Association in a #radicallyopen way to demonstrate the power of local government.

We want to find examples of where our great Local Government institutions have delivered better outcomes than centralised approaches.

We'd like you to share your examples of where local delivery has been successful, where centralised approaches have failed, and also where centralised approaches have worked best. Please fill out the feedback form linked below.

Headlines

  • Responses

    57

  • Top region

    North East

  • Top theme

    Community

Blogs

Responses

Views

Paul's initial views

Initial findings

This piece of work is an experiment. We have used open innovation approaches to help The Local Government Association collect data from people working in Local Government about the interlinked subjects of Devolution, Innovation and Organisational Efficiency.

Our current perspective is that we should not focus too soon into making specific recommendations. Instead, we should look at what the next most effective step would be to make progress, whilst continuing to collect and update the data and keeping our #RadicallyOpen approach. We want to create data assets and insight that anyone can access, use and share.

The three themes that we suggest should be reviewed and considered are:

  • Responses & pent-Up demand
  • Don't Standardise (Yet!!)
  • What to work on next

The work we have completed strongly indicates that there is a role for the LGA to support practitioners across local government in delivery of linked and similar projects. These projects have common challenges, but unique place based characteristics.

The next phase of this work should explore (in the form of experiments or probes) how the LGA can provide support to practitioners in their delivery, how to create common assets and infrastructure, and build measurable innovation capital for local devolved delivery.

Responses and pent-up demand

The responses we received exceeded expectations in terms of numbers, their scope and their regional distribution.

We also received a significant amount of enquiries from individuals and organisations who, for one reason or another, did not fill in the survey. This indicates that there is pent-up demand for convening, collating and sharing this information and data.

The comments are relevant:

  • "We hardly ever get asked for this data, and when we do, we never see the results"
  • "Is it really just filling in the form?"
  • "I'm sorry, but I just don't have time to do this" mentioned by someone who wrote three emails to tell us this in three different ways

This indicates that the next phase of work should explore how the LGA can play a role in effectively convening, collating and sharing information and data.

The lack of standardisation but focus on problems

This may be a surprise, but none of our responses suggested that more standardisation from the centre was important. Indeed, there was significant acknowledgement that allowing difference between places was a strength. They almost all focused on well-defined problems.

This is not to say that standardisation in terms of data and reporting is not important, but that it should be applied at the correct time on a project and communicated and controlled in a way that streamlines all aspects of delivering work, not just the central reporting phase of the work.

The responses indicate that the organisations and people do know what needs to happen, and that they understand the challenges and have clear thoughts on how to manage these.

It indicates to us that the next phase should not focus on building or implementing standard approaches or methods but rather seek to embrace the differences across our places and where common problems are present allow parties to coalesce around them, which leads to the next theme: what should we work on.

Work themes

5 main themes

  • Community engagement and co-creation: projects like the Islington Climate Panel and Foster Care Support in Birmingham emphasize the value of lived experience and participatory approaches in achieving better outcomes.
  • Early intervention and prevention: multiple projects focus on preventing issues like homelessness, social isolation, or youth disengagement before they escalate (e.g. Greater Manchester Better Outcomes Partnership, Social Navigators).
  • Partnership and collaboration: successful projects often involve cross-sector partnerships (e.g. councils, NHS, voluntary sector) or regional collaborations (e.g. Connected Innovation in Norfolk/Suffolk). Collaboration leverages diverse expertise and resources, as seen in Thriving Places - Climate Smart Cities Bristol and the Afghan Resettlement program.
  • Innovation and local adaption: projects like Local Gov Drupal and the Breeze app showcase locally developed solutions that are cost-effective and tailored to specific needs.
  • Challenges of scaling and sustainability: repeated mentions of funding shortfalls, delays, and the difficulty of scaling locally successful projects

The next phase of work should look at how to prioritise these themes.

Tom's initial views

1. Permission to share

We were surprised by the number of people who responded, and especially by the number of people who responded to say that they couldn't respond. Clearly, there is a great appetite within local government to share experiences and examples of great work. But there is obviously an institutionally-acquired reluctance to do so.

This is unsurprising. It is not the role of elected councillors to hold and share opinions, and council officers are rightly wary of stepping into this territory. It is understandable that officers would err on the side of being overly cautious about expressing their opinion. Getting this balance right, so that officers feel free sharing examples of great work so that others can learn and join in, is a role that the LGA as a non-partisan organisation could play.

2. Work before standards

We were surprised that we didn't get any requests for more centrally-defined standards. Our view has long been and remains that central standards are good, but a claimed lack of a central standard should almost never be an excuse to not get something done. Our respondents agreed. Central standards often already exist and where they don't exist are best defined from the bottom up by people working on problems, not imagining working on problems. Where central standards would add value and don't already exist, the LGA could play a role in collecting the experience and make-shift standards developed locally to solve problems and suggesting central standards that cover future work in these areas.

3. Conserving the complexity budget.

Our respondents were most commonly proudest of their work where they had done better work, faster and more efficiently, by increasing the amount of community engagement, through co-creation, and by fostering collaboration across organisations and departments. Complexity above a certain level almost always makes work harder, slower, and more costly. A strength of local government is that by considering only local contexts for work and avoiding a national one-size-fits-all approach, the complexity budget of a project could be saved for engagement with communities and councillors.

Map

Note that we have mapped unique locations e.g. there is only one pin for "Lambeth" even though we had 5 responses from there.

Additional Resources

A collaboration between

  • Local Government Association
  • Open Innovations