Transcript

0:01 – 0:08

Okay, we’ll get started and then we’ll allow others to join once they’re ready.

0:10 – 1:03

So yeah. Welcome everyone to the Procure An Innovation With Confidence. This is a series of events that we’re going to be doing and webinar series that we’re going to be doing over the next year or so and we’re looking to share some of the material that we do with our Cohort program and also toolkits that we’re using within the Innovation Procurement Empowerment Center. My name’s George Waddell. I’m a service designer here at the Connected Places Catapult and I’ve been supporting the Innovation Procurement Empowerment center through the, the Cohort program that we deliver.

1:04 – 1:47

I’m joined by my colleagues Rickshaw and Nick Talbot and we’ll be going through the the following bits with you today. So the first thing that we’ll be discussing is looking at one. We’ll do a quick introduction of the Innovation Procurement Empowerment center for who aren’t familiar. And then we’ll be exploring the New Procurement act which has just come into place earlier this year. We’ll be introducing some questions to you in the audience as well to better understand your barriers to innovation procurement and how you could potentially use the New Procurement act going forward.

1:48 – 2:14

And then we’ll also be covering with Nick the how to create better problem statements so that they are ready for innovation procurement. And then I’ll go on to wrap up and next steps to introduce the next sessions which will be coming up. So I’m going to pass over to Rikesh now. So Rikesh, over to yourself. Yeah, thanks George.

2:14 – 2:39

And good afternoon everyone. So, yep, I’m Rikesh Shah, so I’m head of the Innovation Procurement Empowerment center. And what I will do today is just, I think let’s make this as interactive as possible. So if you’ve got any questions during any comments, please just, just, just, just raise your hand and just speak up. My background is I’ve been at IPEC now for a couple of years and I’ve been in public service for quite some time for 20 plus years.

2:39 – 3:15

And one big frustration I had is we couldn’t make innovation through procurement work in my previous life as well as we I wanted it to. And a lot of that time was spent in London, particularly at Transport For London where we’re a 12 billion pound business and I found it quite difficult where there’s a fantastic supply chain outside who could add value. But we were quite often over prescribing what we wanted from the market. And as a result, we weren’t getting best value. So as a result, we created a innovation procurement center within TFL and we started to unlock new value.

3:16 – 3:42

And I’ll talk a little bit about that during, during today, but just to set some context here is. The need to do more with less has never been more critical. You know, we’re, we’re. If you’re from a local authority, quite often conversations are taking place that we need to close some services down or which service do we close down? You know, the challenges on health, on health, on adult social care, the housing, the list goes on.

3:42 – 4:07

So the context here is we need to deliver more with less. On the next slide, please, Nick George. And what we saw last year, last week is a massive bump fight for budgets. You know, from transport, defense, health, local. We stopped having enough money to deliver all those outcomes that we want for our citizens.

4:08 – 4:32

And that means that we need to find new ways to create value. And by value, I don’t mean just creating cool innovation. It’s about landing cheaper, better, quicker, greener, safer outcomes for our citizens. So how do we make innovation as part of our business as usual, rather than something that the tech people do or something that the engineering folk do? It needs to be a mindset, it needs to be a way of working.

4:33 – 4:51

And I think we can do that with procurement too. On the next slide, we will see that we. We spend around 400 billion a year on public procurement, and that’s in the public sector. It’s both at local level, regional level and national level. And at a local level, it’s probably about 60 to 70 billion a year.

4:52 – 5:24

So the first message here is, if we put this together, the public sector is an incredible market shaper and you can send signals out to the market, whether they’re startups or large corporates, to say, these are the challenges we’re facing and these are some of the outcomes we want for our region. How can you work with us to address some of these challenges rather than sitting back and saying, could you put a spec out there and hopefully someone will win that? And it’s only quite often the same old players. So on the next slide, please.

5:26 – 5:59

So despite spending £400 billion a year, let’s just think about some of the challenge. And that’s £400 billion, by the way. On public procurement, the overall value of the state is probably about 1.2 trillion a year. So despite it being a lot of money, we’ve got lots of challenges. You know, anything from health and obesity, type 2 diabetes, the climate Emergency road safety, crime, just mentioned adult social care, housing and retrofitting.

5:59 – 6:21

I’m at London Councils here today in London where we’re talking about the challenges around retrofitting in our city in London. So these are challenges that we’re facing and particularly urban world. Those challenges are going to get greater and greater as the population grows. But we’re also of course seeing challenges on the rural side too. So we can’t just carry on with the status quo, we can’t carry on as business as usual.

6:21 – 6:24

We have to work differently. Next slide please.

6:27 – 7:16

So here’s the hypothesis is quite often when it comes to innovation we either try and do everything ourselves and that’s from my experience, which is my tech colleagues might create a team, a tiger team and they go and try and address the challenge or we over prescribe to the market as I mentioned earlier, and we’ll say to the market, I know what the solution is, so please build it this way and you’ll win the business. But quite often from my experience the market is coming back and saying only if you did it differently, only designed the procurement differently, we could have created lots of value for you. But instead what we will do is give you exactly what you want. Because by giving you exactly what you want gives us every possible chance of winning the tender. But let’s think about your role in the middle.

7:16 – 7:51

So imagine you’re the local authority in the middle. You’ve got, you’ve got innovators from startup, from academic spin outs. I’m seeing hundreds and thousands of companies now being created from the academic world. How do we use them, how do we work with them in parallel you’re seeing lots of startups, single person organizations and from my TFL days, you know, we, we ran the open data program and there were people that would have one developer and one business development person competing with Google and Apple Maps. So how do you create the level playing field?

7:51 – 8:43

By bringing startups in. Also venture capitalists, we’ve got lots of VCs now saying where do I invest my money and can I solve some public policy challenges? Or it could be large corporates too who have open innovation teams who are investing some of their R D budgets in some public policy outcomes. So how do we change the narrative with the market Innovation rather than you paying for the innovation and then if it’s successful you buy it and if it’s not successful this, the, the market says that it’s all right, we’ve not lost any money, it’s just shift it and say to the market we want to co develop solutions with you, but that has to be a mutual value. That has to be a mutual value exchange because frankly, the problems that I have in my local authority are the same ones that many of the 317 local authorities have across the UK, but also beyond that across Europe and the world.

8:45 – 9:08

And what we’re seeing is the barriers to entries have come right down because of advances in technology. So whether it’s cloud, whether it’s data, people can now compete with the big tier ones too. So as a result we’re seeing new types of suppliers and also that gives us opportunity to reallocate how we think about procurement spend and smarter contracting. Next slide, please.

9:11 – 9:55

But there are inherent perceptions and myths within organizations and at Transport for London I had about 650 commercial colleagues and they were brilliant, you know, they were brilliant at compliance, they were brilliant at lowest cost tenders and they’re good at administering an excellent process. But when it came to innovation, sometimes I felt uncomfortable and me running the innovation function there saying, I want to experiment in a new way, I want to talk to market in a new way. And sometimes internal perceptions or internal policy meant we were having discussions on can I even talk to the market? Are we only focusing on cost or are we focusing on overall value?

9:58 – 10:44

Also, I can’t take any risks if I’m entering a procurement, let’s put all the risks on the market and play it really safe. I can’t experiment, I can’t do pilots, I have to go straight into r, into scaling. So there are lots of myths and perceptions internally and as many colleagues in the room will know here is, of course you don’t want to get challenged and you don’t want to get sued, but the nature of being commercial means you’ve got to make sure you design the right commercial framework to be able to get best value. And sometimes with procurement colleagues I had a challenge. But when we found the right commercial people, we could do lots and we could add real value and we could be much more entrepreneurial, much more innovative and we could really shape the market in a new way.

10:45 – 10:46

Next slide, please.

10:51 – 11:31

So the Innovation Procurement Empowerment center, what is it? It’s funded through the government, it’s funded by Innovate UK and we work within the Connected Places Catapult. So the Connected Places Catapult is the accelerator for the UK government for focusing on transport, the built environment and data and digital. There are a series of other catapults across the uk, but that’s what the connected places one focuses on and within that we have an excellent offering called the Innovation Procurement Empowerment Center. And the focus there is how can we empower local, regional and national public buyers to use procurement more creatively?

11:32 – 12:06

To use procurement by bringing in innovation from the marketplace to create new value. And that value focuses very much on delivering cheaper, better, faster, greener outcomes. And also as well as focusing on the buyer side, we’re also focusing on the supply side, which is how do you best set yourselves up to bring your innovation in from the market to create new value based on that 400 billion a year that we’re spending on public procurement. We also do some commercial work, but primarily our work is through government funded programs. Next slide please.

12:09 – 12:37

So there are lots of barriers that many of you in the room would have heard about when it comes to innovation through procurement. A single one that stands out for me is the fear of failure. So if I go back to my old job and colleagues that I’m working with now is we’re really worried about the media. If I do something and it goes wrong, what will the local press say? What will, in my case, what the Evening Standard would say.

12:38 – 13:02

Will it write an article about I’ve just wasted taxpayers money, I’ve got something wrong? Again, we also worry about the fear of failure from our stakeholders. You know, whether it’s working with other local municipalities or supply side or think tanks or lobby groups. What will they say if I get something wrong? Well, what about the politicians?

13:02 – 13:27

We’ll have to go and talk to the council or the cabinet lead or the mayor and say I’ve got this wrong. And then also more locally, what about my boss? If I try something, I’m not incentivized to try something new, so why don’t I just play it safe? So there’s an inherent structural system problem, which is we worry about for the fear of failure. And I’ll come on to how we can address some of this later.

13:27 – 14:01

Also, second area is we work and it’s linked to the third point around internal alignment. Whenever we’re procuring something or even building something, whether you’re the service owner or you’re the director of innovation or whether you’re the chief procurement officer, it’s never a sole decision. We always buy or build in a group manner. So sometimes we find colleagues that don’t like if it’s not their idea. And there might be some colleagues in your organization, every time you take a new idea, they will say, well, it’s not a good idea.

14:02 – 14:28

And then when you go to the causation it might be because it’s not their idea or the team’s idea, so they feel vulnerable. So how do we drive that? Internal alignment. And another big area is scaling. Quite often we’re really good at the R D and launching it, but then as we start thinking about change, whether it’s change with IT colleagues, change with hr, change with service owner team, it gets harder to scale.

14:28 – 14:46

So in London, we had 10,000 buses. It was quite easy, relatively easy to experimentation with one or two buses, maybe even 20 buses. Suddenly scaling up to 10,000 buses, it became much more difficult. So how do we think about that at the beginning? I think another challenge is we talk about startup innovation.

14:47 – 15:24

So if you are engaging with the startup, the whole paradigm of a startup operating versus a large corporate is very different. Yeah, startups, they want to get things done quickly, they want to talk about what we’re doing next. This afternoon, in my case, just to get into my diary, probably take two weeks and then after getting to everyone else’s diary, and suddenly the startups ringing me every week to say, are we ready to move forward? And I’m just thinking about the size of transport for London and how do we navigate the right people to meet with the startup. So there’s a big change around ways of working speed, what good looks like, etc.

15:24 – 15:57

Etc. Quite often we’re solution led. And I’ve touched on that before, it could be because of risk and the risk of this culture and getting things wrong. So you just say, I know what I want to buy, I’ll buy that. And I think that generally that’s fine if it’s a commodity, but if you’re trying to solve a problem that you’re stuck on, you might have to flip the way you operate that in that space and as a result you need to create that space for experimentation is how do we ensure we create that culture of trying new things, potentially getting them wrong?

15:57 – 16:21

I assure you, if there’s 10 things you’re trying, one of them will work really well. And then how do you make sure you bring the market in? You send that signal as early as possible to say, I want to be the intelligent client, what’s in the marketplace. And then finally, and I say this because procurement, sometimes used as a scapegoat, is we need to make sure we’ve got the right route to market and the right scaling. But there are so many reasons why things can go wrong.

16:21 – 16:29

And I think procurement get a harsh reputation here because I don’t think it is procurement solely that that stops innovation. From scaling. Next slide, please.

16:34 – 16:45

This is a question. Question for the group. So does that. Does that resonate, or do you have. Do you disagree or do you have other challenges when it comes to trying to bring.

16:45 – 17:00

Using procurement to bring in innovation? Let’s open that up. George, over to you maybe. Yeah. If anyone wants to come off mute and wants to share some of their experiences, whether they have any.

17:01 – 17:31

If you have any reflections on one of the points here that Rakesh made, or if there’s anything that you feel is potentially missing here. Yeah, we’re really interested to hear from your perspective as well. So if anyone feels confident enough to come off mute and share their experience, or if everyone’s had a fairly pleasant time through their innovation procurement process.

17:34 – 18:01

Yes. So I think Joanna’s made a comment and I think that’s a fair point, Joanna. I think we’ll come on to the Procurement act in a second and I think you’re right. The level of change that’s been brought in and the level of effort required now, I think that makes innovation even more difficult with any procurement acts. And I think we need to be mindful of that, particularly given the climate of less resources and delivery.

18:01 – 18:16

More procurements. Helena might have a view on this, if Helena is on the call. Oh, yes, definitely. Definitely a view on this. And just going back to what we say about these barriers, quite often they’re saying, but you can’t.

18:16 – 18:39

With procurements, you can’t. The regulations, there are regulations and there is internal policy and things, you know, as innovation evolves, our policies need to evolve. The way we see the market and the way we. We go out to the market, we’ve created certain barriers for good reasons. But then sometimes when I’ve spoken to.

18:40 – 18:45

To. To. To procurement or to. To operational stuff. Why did you ask this question?

18:45 – 19:27

We’ve always asked this question, what are you adding value, why you’ve limited your market, Little things like that. So there’s many things that some people perceive as a procurement regulation and aren’t really. And then now with the new regulations that have come in, there is so much. There is still so much unknown that people are putting the barriers up even more for that fear when it’s, you know, they’re talking more about flexibility and openness and reaching the market and speaking to those SMEs and engaging with them. So, yeah, there’s another question.

19:30 – 19:53

Yeah, a question from Darren there, or a statement there saying, I feel we don’t hear about the innovation practices and often enough to boost confidence. Rather we hear quickly when things go wrong. And this can be. Yeah, downer. So I think, yeah, that really speaks to that fear of failure point that Rakesh was mentioning.

19:53 – 20:00

So I don’t know if, yeah, others on this call have had that. A similar experience. Yeah.

20:03 – 20:13

And what we’ll do, I mean, Olga’s on this call. I’m not sure if she can when the session comes up, but we’ll be talking about the community that we’re building and how we’re sharing case studies.

20:16 – 20:55

And because of that, I was just going to say because of that fear of, Fear of innovate, fear of failure, innovation is kept to an extreme, small scale, so it’s not taken open to the public. It’s very, you know, it possibly doesn’t require the use of a notice, for example, and things like that, because they keep it extremely low value or even zero value. That’s where they, where they try and bring in innovation or, or they just, you know, they’re engaging internally with their partners, their suppliers that they use already. So you’re not hearing about it. But you know, procurement is trying to empower people to do that.

20:56 – 21:19

And those, like you said, those 12 notices, new notices, people that, saying, I’m scared of making that mistake. And we’re here to say that actually that they’re meant to make it easier. You just need to have that little bit of knowledge that you can start, start early. And there’s a lot of things that non procurement people can be doing before, before they decide what they want to buy.

21:23 – 22:07

And we got a couple more and then we’ll move on with the slides. But as Holland, you’ve mentioned here, feels similar to when you talk to IT security teams, to when you want to be creative, the going through the innovation procurement procedure, that being the answer is no. Now what’s the question? And I think that’s something that we’ll maybe touch on later with Nick, when we sort of look at that problem statement to understand if we are actually asking the right questions in the first place to sort of enable innovation. So, yeah, I think that’s a really good point there.

22:08 – 22:35

And then Vincent, you’ve mentioned here that, yeah, not knowing what to do if we get to pay for pilots or trials, especially when the value of the trial is more than a 10k and the team that needs to see the benefits are scared by the, by the procurement regulations. So you don’t have Rikesh or Helena, if you want to sort of touch on that a little bit.

22:38 – 23:16

Yeah, I mean, look, my view on this is we’ve got to be clear on the roadmap as early as possible. And, and that means that if we’re saying we’re providing some seed funding or we’re doing a pilot, what does the second and third stage look like? So we design that from the outset because the risk is that we do some really nice and sometimes if you’re on procurement here probably really frustrates you that service owners or your colleagues, and I was probably one of them in the past, runs an R D program and then comes back to procurement and says I’ve done this, can we scale it now? And you say why don’t you talk to me at the beginning? So I think where we can procurement colleagues should be as, as open as possible.

23:16 – 23:46

I know you’re really busy with the innovation folk and say please stop doing your own R and D locally without telling anyone and then coming up to us and saying can I scale this? Because they should be bringing you in as early as possible and as a result do that first stage through seed funding and then hopefully use a competitive flexible procedure or another procedure which allows you to add money downstream. Otherwise you just get loads of frustrated parties. Helen? Yeah, it’s so you.

23:46 – 24:12

They talk about procurement being those blockers but those blockers have been created by non procurement people saying I know this company, I know this. You know, I’ve seen this being bought. How do we get that? And that they’ve or they, so they’ve either over solutionized or they’ve already found the supplier, they’ve pre found it. And that is where I think that’s one of the biggest areas that from my experience have seen where the procurement have gone.

24:12 – 24:40

This isn’t the right thing. You know, we follow, you know, it doesn’t matter what, whether it’s below threshold, above a threshold. We want to be unbiased, we want to be open to that market. So that’s where I my experience, a lot of those blockers have come from. But yes, by engaging them with them and, and coming back and saying what we have looked at the market and seeing the market and the new process are saying go to the market.

24:40 – 25:17

That is one rule that they are putting in now that you have to do your pre market engagement or justify why you haven’t. So that’s a really big change that is actually very advantageous to, to both sides. And yeah, things, things have become more of a challenge because procurement is challenged. They are, you know, the blame, the finger pointing has been at procurement and that’s that, that, that has been unfortunate but there are so many ways that you can work together and you can consider that scaling in advance as well.

25:22 – 25:27

Cool. Yeah. Move on to the next slide. So I’ll hand back to Rikesh. Thanks.

25:29 – 25:45

And I’ll answer the other question as well in a second, the one on the view of procurement. I’ll come into that in a second. Yep. So going back to the point on case studies, the good news is there are case studies out there and that’s. This is what IOPEC is trying to promote.

25:45 – 26:43

So going back to one of the questions, and last year we ran an end to end program or the team did, focusing on the adverse impact of cooking oil in Westminster. So as we’ve seen Ulez have an impact on transport emissions, we’re now starting to see disproportionate levels of PM2.5 emissions, which has a direct impact on people’s health, adversely impacting citizens in Westminster. And what we started with is the team sat down with Westminster Council and maybe George, you want to jump in here because you did a lot of this. Do you want to just talk through the methodology of just what you did at the beginning And Nick. Yeah, and some of the stuff that we went through with Westminster is some of the stuff that we’ll cover later in the session is first understanding and coming to a problem statement that is suitable for an innovation to address.

26:43 – 28:11

So we know that, we knew at the start, working with Westminster, that Imperial College were also looking at doing research within this space and that their study would take around three years. So we were looking at an intervention that was going to make more of an immediate impact. However, we just didn’t know if there was anything out in the market that would actually address this challenge where we were looking at reducing PM2.5 emissions inside the cooking environment and preventing it from going outside the building as well. So that’s where, yeah, doing the pre market engagement really helped us to understand what was out there in the market already and gave us a sense of what, what kind of trial we would need to either help develop the solution of a technology that was already in the market, or to be at a point where we could be ready to sort of install, scale it straight away. So, yeah, we supported them going through the various different steps of getting the right challenge, doing the pre market engagement, going out to market, doing that contract management and developing a business case that would enable the solution to scale in the future.

28:12 – 28:37

So that’s all the activities that we, we went through with them to help them get to a point where they are now. Yeah, installing These solutions into their properties within the Westminster borough. Pass back to Rikesh to go over some other case studies as well. Thank you. Thank you, George.

28:37 – 29:19

And I think two things in that Westminster one that’s a good lesson. I think the first one is really aligning everyone internally to make sure that if the solution is a good one, they’re up for solving it. Because I think in the past all it takes, as I mentioned earlier, is one or two colleagues not to be up for it and it stops. So right at the beginning when we invested in the program because we provided funding to embed colleagues into Westminster and other agencies, we worked with Bristol, Derry and Newham to empower and upskill skill and. And as part of that condition, it was if a good idea comes through, we really want you to take it through as far as you can.

29:19 – 29:59

So we did sit down with the procurement people, the tech people, the air quality people, even conversations with politicians to make sure there was commitment to take it to the next stage. Answering the question in the chat, what we did end up doing quite early was, oh, good to see you Jeff, just seen you entering there. One of the things that we did was we provided funding or the Westminster provided funding for the testing and the scaling. So we designed the procurement. So it didn’t just stop after the R D. So they provided some seed funding initially to, to take it so far.

29:59 – 30:23

And if you’re successful, we design the procurement that it will allow you to take it further in terms of some of the other case studies. So, London Road Lab, this was about reducing the adverse impact of roadworks in London. We use the innovative partnership procedure. We work very closely with the utilities companies with hundreds of entries coming in at the beginning. The adverse impact of road work costs London about 3 billion a year.

30:23 – 30:46

So it’s pretty significant. And then very early on we changed the whole procurement process. So using IPP, we stopped all of TFL’s, lots of pages of documents that you had to fill out and we wanted to make it easy for a startup or a corporate to fill the documentation out. So we asked them to give us half a page of what the solution is. We asked them a series of yes, no questions like is there a health and safety policy, an equality policy?

30:46 – 31:08

Will you have a Runway in six months time? And that helped us with the shortlisting. So it got rid of the chances, but it allowed us to focus on interesting innovative solutions. We then down selected that to 10, nine and we provided £20,000 worth of seed funding to each of the participants. They wanted access to some of the busiest roads in London, which we gave them.

31:08 – 31:41

So we ended up testing not like for like solutions, but from anything from 3D modeling to physical barriers to detecting water leaks and lots of other solutions. And then at the end of it, we asked them to put business space together after the R and D and if we thought that business case was valid, we ended up procuring. So we ended up procuring two solutions. One was Sam Desk, which scouts social media and looks for keywords, which allows the emergency services or ourselves to respond to it. So if there was a gas leak or a water leak, we can get to it more readily.

31:41 – 32:10

And the second solution was immense, which allows us to do modeling before the road works take place. So we’re putting in lots of data and assessing what’s the right time to do the road works in a particular region in London. So really interesting. It was a contract award, over a million pounds, so a startup was really embedded in and adding value. We’ve also done it with data, so we’ve released lots of data and we created over 700 apps in London and one of them was Go Jaunty.

32:10 – 32:27

I remember the mayor saying, what’s the idea that’s going to come through? We didn’t have a clue. But they were crowdsourcing walking routes from you and I and as a result encouraged more walking in our city. As you’ve seen, Jack’s here from the Commercial innovation Hub. We’re directly involved with that, we’re providing.

32:27 – 32:50

George and Nick have joined a couple of the workshops on design thinking. So again we will do more of that. It’s not just about using procurement, it’s also about land, which you could argue is a procurement, but it’s not just about cash. So we’ve run challenges in the past where we’ve provided land. We’re doing lots of work with the likes of Sunderland and Dorset on the roll of 5G.

32:50 – 33:13

We’re also doing a lot of work with HS2 and Network Rail around how they can use some of the larger contracts to bring in innovation. And frankly, I’m seeing more and more of this stuff taking place across the uk. And going back to the earlier point, we just need to talk about it more and then normalize it and as a result it’ll be accepted and we’ll be less worried about deploying it. Next slide, please.

33:15 – 33:36

But then a lot of this is about making sure we make everything work. So on the left hand side, on average you’ll get hundreds of problem statements, if not thousands from your Colleagues from the market, from your stakeholders. You’ve got to define which is the right one to focus on. So you put the right criteria in place. You’ve got to link it to your business strategy.

33:36 – 34:14

Now you know, if you want to systemize innovation, how does it work with your business planning process? How does it look with a business strategy? How does it work with the chief procurement officer? I mean my chief procurement officer in mind in the past have had good relationships and broadly it’s because how can innovation help the CPO create more value, but also the CPO helping innovation scale the innovation? So how do you get to that sweet spot where you’re not seen as a threat or a burden to each other, but you’re seen as people that can work together and make the organization better by creating the right conditions on a mission focused innovation, it gives you every possible chance of scaling.

34:15 – 34:45

Otherwise what will happen is you’ll just do some really good PR and it and not, not more than that. And that means it’s getting under the hood, getting under the bonnet, really understanding how the internal wiring works in your organization, who the decision makers are and how do you work through things that go wrong? Because I assure you it’s inevitable things will go wrong on an innovation procurement challenge. And if anyone says otherwise, they, they fixed it because it’s a. It requires a lot of tenacity, a lot of navigation where things are going wrong.

34:45 – 34:59

And I think in the case of the Westminster program, we had an election halfway through a local election, halfway through the challenge. And things like that sometimes are unforeseen, sometimes they are foreseen. But how do you navigate that?

35:01 – 35:23

It’s critical to get the pre market engagement right. And I’ll come on to that when we talk about the Procurement Act. But you’ve got to scout far and wide. I found it quite frustrating that when we put procurement call out, it’s the same old people that were respond to the early expression of interest. And what I would want is that I want to diversify that supply chain.

35:23 – 35:42

So how do we do that? How do you reach far wide and create that shop window that we’re open for business? And then how do you create that test bed? Because if you’re bringing something innovative in, you’ve got to test it, you got to try it, you’ve got to build the commercial case, the operational case, the business case, how does it work? What does the ways of working look like post R D?

35:43 – 36:11

Otherwise again you just have a really cool R D and that means you’ve got to Work with your change teams, your transformation teams. I remember I had one procurement which scaled and then from HR said to me, this now requires a org change into a particular area. I wish I would have spoken to them before rather than after the solution came in. So there’s lots of things and ultimately the value is only realized downstream when you have had the impact. Otherwise it’s innovation theater.

36:12 – 36:13

Next slide please.

36:16 – 36:48

That means a team very much focused on three levels of support that we provide. Now it’s at the foundation layer, which is how do we, you know, even just getting the challenge statement right is difficult. And I remember in London we were trying to reduce the adverse impact of air quality pollution. You know, you go out to the market and say, help me address air quality, you’ll get 10, 000 ideas, how do you deal with them? Or if you say to the market, give me any quality sensor that weighs 25 kilos and is green, you’d only end up getting one.

36:49 – 37:20

So how’d you get that balance right? In terms of defining the right challenge, how do you link it to the business case, not just for the R D and for the piloting, but scaling over a five year period? So you know you’re moving into the hypothetical scenario of what if, which is quite difficult given the current climate, where we’re saying if you’ve got ten pounds, spend the ten pounds and not eleven, and how do you align the internal stakeholders, the external stakeholders? But once you’ve done that, what’s your relationship with the market? How do you go out there, be the intelligent client?

37:21 – 37:38

You know, if you talk to people now, they’ll just say, yeah, it’s all about Gen AI. What is about quantum well, what does that mean in the context of the challenge? Have we got enough knowledge, enough expertise to deal with it? Otherwise the market, what they’ll do is just repackage something and sell it to you. So how do we get that balance right?

37:39 – 37:57

And then how do you define your procurement strategy as well as your business change strategy to manage that? And then after all of that’s done, it’s about scaling. How do you scale? Do you move from 1 to 5 to 20 to 50, or do you move from 1 to 50 to a 10,000? And how do you measure success?

37:58 – 38:22

That hypothesis you started with at the beginning, is it still the same? Because when you hand over a particular solution to a service owner, is someone still measuring the innovation bit? And how do you get that total cost of value that’s created or the total value that’s been created over Three, four, five years. Some innovation could work, could take weeks, some innovation could take years. And how do you manage that within your organization?

38:22 – 38:29

And how do you create a systematic portfolio LED approach rather than just doing one off things? Next slide please.

38:41 – 39:00

Yep, and it’s also worth thinking about. I know I’ve only got a few minutes now here, but there will be some technologies that come into your local authority that could be disruptive. And let’s use E bikes as an example. Is there a market failure there? There’s no law stopping an E bike operating in your in your local region.

39:01 – 39:27

So what does it look like from a defensive point of view as technology comes in from the market? So it’s not just about being proactive on where you can procure a shape policy, it’s also about defensive is if something disruptive comes in, what value does it add? Otherwise we’ll just have connected autonomous vehicles wandering around our cities that are empty. So how do we get the right outcomes and design them through policy in our organizations? Next slide please.

39:36 – 40:03

And then really quickly I spend the next three, four minutes on just what else we have. So please visit ipec.orguk we have a series of toolkits. We just launched one today where we interviewed nine senior leaders from across the UK who are big public buyers and asked them about innovation and procurement. A lot of the issues are the same, it’s culture, it’s about having enough time worried about the politicians. So take a look at that.

40:03 – 40:23

But there’s series of other toolkits too. We’ve got a pathway. How do you move from grant funding to pre commercial to commercial or how do you better exploit pre market engagement? What tips can you use apply to make pre market engagement in the innovation space more effective? And then we’ve also got a talking on demystifying procurement and the do’s and don’ts.

40:23 – 40:36

And we’ve done that with a legal colleague from Mills and Reef, so who really know what they’re talking about. And they can also state what’s legal, what’s legislation versus what’s internal policy. Next slide please.

40:46 – 41:21

And then we also have IPEC research. So we’re funding a significant amount of budget to the University of Birmingham and Manchester who are our partners and they’re continuously producing new research pieces that either defines where innovation and procurement should be going or identifies where it’s creating value. And I think again I’d encourage you to take a look at those briefs because they go into real hyper local situations. Anything from retrofitting at a local level to some of the cultural barriers in particular regions and much more. And take your time, we want to get your feedback.

41:21 – 41:54

And more and more we’re trying to bring other universities in, not just in the uk, but across the world, because what I genuinely believe is with IPEC and IPEC research, which is a subset of ipec, is we want it to be a world class competency center where we can have some clear standards, clear ways of working and better engage with how we use innovation through procurement, both locally, regionally and nationally. And also saying to the supply chain, we’re ready for business, you know, we want to innovate with you and hopefully we can do that together. Next slide, please.

42:03 – 42:31

So I haven’t got much time on this, but I’ll spend a minute or so if that’s okay, George. But what we have here is the Procurement act that went live at the end of February this year. And I think there’s some good things about the Act. I think the previous act was pretty good in terms of the regs from 2015, particularly the innovation partnership procedure that we used. I think there’s three or four things here that stand out.

42:31 – 42:56

I think the greater focus on pre market engagement is critical, particularly in the innovation space. I think we should not move into an innovation program unless we’ve done the right level of pre market engagement. I quite like the idea of variant bids where people can come up with different ways to deliver things. I quite like the focus on startups and innovation. But we’ve got to be careful, this doesn’t just become a PR thing.

42:57 – 43:32

You know, we need to see case studies and see how people are bringing in diverse diversity into the supply chain. Not just diversity of thought, but diversity of ideas, products thinking all the way from challenge definition to how you actually scale some solutions. It’s quite good that people can enter an open Can I enter a framework at any time, rather than just at the beginning? But there is a challenge between the role of frameworks and innovation, because the inherent nature of frameworks will mean, you know, what type of thing sits within the framework, whereas innovation sometimes means you don’t know what you’re buying.

43:34 – 44:15

I think building the ipp, the competitive flexible procedure, is a good procedure which will allow us to experiment and iterate and scale. But we need the right skills, the right evidence, the right confidence from legal experts. So how you use it and how you don’t use it, otherwise what will happen is a bit like the IPP will sit in the corner or on the shelf and it’s not used as much. But what it does encourage us to think about, particularly the cfp is being problem led. But even defining the right problem, as you’ve seen with the exercise with Nick, is an effort and it requires lots of open thinking rather than close thinking from colleagues across the business unit, an organization.

44:15 – 44:32

And sometimes we have it, sometimes we don’t. I think we need to more around data. I think the data frankly coming out of the portals just not good enough. We want to know how much we spend on innovation in the public sector. We want to know what’s gone wrong, what’s gone right, how much value it’s created.

44:33 – 44:52

And as a result we’re certainly lobbying a bit harder in this space. The focus are moving away from cost. The meat versus mat is good. We now need to make sure that the, the meat, the met element is actually, sorry, the meat elements happening. No, sorry, the other one, the elements happening.

44:52 – 45:10

The most advantageous thing that. And then finally social value. We’ve got more definition on this, which is really good. Innovation could sit in here, skill sits in here, the environment sits in here. But again, I think we need to spend more time on defining and helping the market to say, what do we mean by social value?

45:10 – 45:37

Rather than saying, if you do something on social value, we’ll score you 10%. Next slide, please. And whilst Nick’s bringing the next slide up, I think probably I’ve got time for this, but we could do this later, maybe. Nick George. But what I would say is the Procurement act, as Helena mentioned earlier, has created a lot of effort, additional effort for procurement colleagues.

45:38 – 46:02

So if you’re in the procurement team, I get it. You know, you’ve got the old act, you’re still thinking about how you’ve got contracts from there. You think about the new act, you think about new notices, you’ve got to publish pipelines earlier, there’s lots to be done. So I get, get it. It’s difficult and I think going back to one of the earlier points that someone made, procurement has to be a strategic tool in an organization and not a delivery partner.

46:02 – 46:34

So I would really encourage you to CPOs and others to say procurement has a role to play here of transforming the way your local authority operates. And I think from my experience in the past, sometimes it’s seen as a delivery partner. And so we just focus on cost, which is last time the contract cost a million, so can we get it for 950,000? And I’m oversimplifying this, but there’s a massive opportunity here for procurement colleagues and commercial colleagues to say how do we drive public private partnerships and create better cities and value in our. In our regions?

46:35 – 47:29

We’ll probably come back to this question later on any other slides we can. Yeah, we can. I’m happy for people to respond to this now if anyone wants to come off mute and share their thoughts either on this question here on how you might use the New Procurement act or the other one in terms of what barriers do you foresee with the New Procurement act and yeah, feel free to sort of mention in the chat or if you’re happy coming off mute and sharing your thoughts, we’ll be really interested here and happy to have some discussion over this. So if anyone wants to share their thoughts in the chat in the meantime, maybe I can. I’ll call on Rikesh or Helena to sort of give their thoughts on these questions.

47:31 – 48:00

What barriers do you foresee and yeah, what advantages sort of reflecting on that the positive of this. What sort of positives or how might you sort of look at using the New Procurement act in the. In the future? Governor Hiller so whenever we people used to approach us about procurements and hopefully they didn’t ask us about the supplier or something, they’d say I want to buy this. And we’d say have you got a spec?

48:00 – 48:46

And we. Because it was in our culture. So that culture of over specifying is something that we have an issue and that just doesn’t work with innovation. When someone says I want to innovate, you know, it doesn’t matter where you know what way you go, whether it’s below threshold, above what process you use, CFP or not over specifying and that close closed procurement, you almost doesn’t work with innovation. So that open procurement approach and hopefully the new regulations are helping because they’re helping with that iterations before you had to have everything up front and you know, done.

48:46 – 49:02

You’ve written your specification. No, you can’t change it. Someone’s clarified something. Well we, we’ve written it in stone now that is changing. So I do think that but that confidence to make those changes and it could be an issue again.

49:02 – 49:38

So again we’re just going back to. It’s actually not the regs, it’s the culture that we’ve unfortunately that we’ve brought on quite rightly specifying. You know, it’s very great when you have that really specific thing to buy, when you’re buying stationery, when you’re buying an item that you know it’s in the market, you can do that. But when you really want to, you’re it’s procurement is a tool for still searching that market. You know, pre market engagement encourages you to look into it and grow your specification, but it doesn’t mean close your specification.

49:39 – 49:48

So that’s one thing that I’m. Yeah, I think the new act is going to help with, but that’s something that we have to learn to change our ways as well.

49:51 – 50:18

Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Eleanor. And yeah, Joanne, you’ve put a good question here or. Yeah, statement here around the new act and all the notices around transparency have caused nervousness around pre market engagement. So a reluctancy to get people involved early in engagement for fear of doing wrong.

50:19 – 50:27

Yeah, be good to sort of. Yeah, expand on that a little bit more. Where. Yeah. Where do you feel that that fear is coming from?

50:29 – 50:43

And yeah. Is that something that you’ve experienced recently? Kind of, yeah. Curious to sort of learn more if you can expand on that, Joanne, but also be good to get your thoughts on that recursion. Helena as well.

50:44 – 51:18

So. So I think I’ll wait for Joan to typ type something back, but I think she’s right, you know, we’re going through change. So let’s get this context right is there’s lots of pressure to deliver. There’s been lots of uncertainty from central government on budgets that are going to be issued and now we’ve just got that people are now starting to line up their budgets for this year and next year and the procurement team will be under incredible pressure to say, just keep rolling this stuff out now, just a conveyor belt. And now they’ve been also told to say with a new Procurement act, you’ve got to publish it, you’ve got to use a new platform and there’s lots of other things.

51:18 – 51:53

So I think there’ll be a period here over the next quarter, if not longer, of just getting used to the change. But what I’m hoping is as we start working on our pipeline of the future, so whether it’s thinking about pipeline in 26, 27, 28, we start creating enough time for pre market engagement and testing and experimenting. So I don’t think we’re there yet for good reasons, but I’m hoping over the next six months to 12 months, we start thinking about the pipeline and do some experimentation and think about how we work with the market differently. So I think that would be my view. Helena.

51:54 – 52:16

Yes. When I spoke to a lot of my procurement colleagues from the past and current, they were like, have you, have you published your pipeline? The pipeline is generally for something of it, of it’s a high value pipeline firstly. So it is preparing the market etc. It’s something that we should have been doing anyway but we weren’t publishing it.

52:16 – 52:29

It doesn’t mean you can’t do it and by the time you. It doesn’t mean you publish it once and that’s it and we close that book for that six months. It’s not. It’s not like your accounts or something that you do every. Every so often.

52:29 – 52:44

You can do that, you can. You can add etc it’s. But it actually could help you this nervousness. Like I said technically there are 12 new notices. It’s possibly people didn’t know what notices they had to do.

52:45 – 53:06

A lot of these notices are automated on the platforms as well and they should be changing. I think the biggest one is the pre market engagement but that is actually extremely beneficial to both your procurement. It justifies it if you only get one supplier. We did our pre market engagement. This is the one supplier.

53:07 – 53:22

Perhaps they’re the only one that can do this innovation or deliver this to what to it or are you over specifying etc so. And they could. And yeah pre market engagement will tell you that. So there are lots of advantages. But I wouldn’t be so scared.

53:22 – 53:28

We’ve always had to do at least that notice to go out to tender. It’s that one before.

53:30 – 53:59

There’s no rules about timings like we used to. The timings were so strict and so so much more restricted to it to an extent. I think we. Whereas before and so we also had to get all our documents very ready allowing us to tote. To take more steps on doing that PQQ or sorry selection questionnaire and think about it more and go back and make those changes can be much more beneficial.

53:59 – 54:14

So I don’t. I wouldn’t be scared of the notices. It’s just making you very aware of them. But we’ve always had them changes to contracts and etc. And it will help you with your future processes as well.

54:14 – 54:45

And having that all open to the market and them understanding what you’re doing, you know rather than challenging what you’re doing all the time. And I think two quick points on that. I think one is if you’re running an innovation program actually doing the pre market engagement helps you in lots of different ways. Also helps you from a compliance point of view because if you end up running a program where you brought someone in but actually the thing was already on the off the shelf it avoids a little bit of challenge. So in the past when we Run the ipp.

54:46 – 55:24

We spent a lot of time in doing the pre market engagement just to make sure there’s nothing off the shelf. I think the second point I would make, and it is around culture and just building on what we said before is I’m really encouraged that central government here have created this commercial innovation hub. And also what they’re saying is how do we use the expertise that’s already there? And I think that that signal that we’re getting from central government around we need to be more creative, we need to be more entrepreneurial, we need to use the act to its full force is really good. But that does mean we need to make sure we’ve got the right skills and the right culture to address this.

55:24 – 55:27

And that’s where I’m hoping IPEC in particular help you.

55:33 – 56:01

Thank you both. If anyone else has any other thoughts on these two questions in terms of. Yeah, how might you use the new Procurement act or what barriers you foresee. Yeah, please feel free to put them in the chat. We’re really, yeah interested to hear your thoughts and yeah, love to get.

56:02 – 56:18

We’ll be. Yeah, moving into the next section now. So looking at. Yeah creating problem statements ready for innovation procurement. So as mentioned before by Rikesh, it’s really about making sure that we are asking the right question in the first place.

56:19 – 57:17

Making sure that we have the right question that warrants the answer of some form of innovation that will hopefully deliver the intended impact that we’re looking to address. So I was going to sort of introduce you here to a quick example here where we worked with a local council in one of our previous projects who were looking to address the issue of cold, damp housing conditions came in understand properties.

57:21 – 57:24

I think we’ve got slight issue with George’s sound.

57:26 – 58:20

Yeah, apologies, my Internet seems to have dropped. I’ll to avoid this. I’ll try. I’ll quickly move over my section that’s not working too well. But just to say that, yeah the council that we work with had a very solution focused approach and we looked at, yeah a more systematic approach that helped them better understand where the root causes were and where the appropriate points were that they could help address the main challenge and maintain problem that they were looking at addressing.

58:21 – 59:06

So I’m going to pass on to. And then that interventions to the main challenge that there is looking at addressing. I’m going to nick hopefully my Internet stuff variable here. Some of that we’re able to hear me next. Yeah, I think we’re having a few problems George, both with your audio and the slides.

59:06 – 59:08

So maybe a little bit slow to. To move across.

59:12 – 59:46

Do you want to hop over to the next slide? I think we’re still on the cold and damp slide, maybe just for everyone’s benefit. That cold and damp challenge scoping example is a really great example of taking that systemic approach. As George mentioned, we actually did, I believe, a session in the on demand section of the IPEC website. So there’s also a link where you can hear about that kind of case study in much longer detail and without audio problems.

59:46 – 59:57

So yeah, we maybe come back and touch upon it again. Otherwise it’s on the on demand section of the site. But. Hello everyone, thanks very much for coming along. A little bit about myself.

59:57 – 60:31

I’m Nick Talbot, service design lead at Connected Places Catapult. For pretty much over 10 years now, I’ve worked inside and along with local government in the uk, typically in the innovation space. I worked in adult social care during COVID I’ve worked for London boroughs on the housing crisis, I worked on child protection. I’ve also done work in terms of procurement, commissioning and social value. So hopefully, kind of drawing upon all of that experience, plus the past three years I’ve been working on the IPEC program.

60:32 – 60:57

Hopefully I can kind of bring a few key insights across. Today, the topic of this section is challenge scoping. So that’s the process involving the problems that you face and how you translate those so that they can be addressed. So in essence it’s about really truly understanding a problem before you try to resolve it. So George kind of said the council previously mentioned was solutionizing a bit, jumping to a solution.

60:57 – 61:31

And that’s very risky, especially in terms of kind of innovation or larger contract sizes. So if we can understand it a bit better before we resolve it, we are that intelligent buyer, as Rakesh mentioned earlier. And then it’s also crucial to frame it in a way that encourages buy in innovation and impact. So this isn’t just stating a problem and letting it hang there. We need to make sure that we go one step further to use visuals or stats or language to make sure that there’s some kind of positive, attractive aspect to the framing.

61:32 – 61:33

Next slide, please.

61:39 – 62:20

So what we try to do on the next two slides is this slide is the text version, if some people find it a bit easier to kind of read through. But challenge scoping is the name given to the process of first we identify a big, messy, complex problem, we untangle it a bit. As we learn more about it and define it, we try to break it down into smaller challenges. Then we select which bits we want to address, specifically those that are relevant for councils and relevant for a procurement approach. Then we share these in helpful ways to inspire action, not just with innovative SMEs, but also with maybe larger players in the private market or our public sector partners.

62:20 – 62:43

And then we, as well as residents and the local community, and then we refine and repeat these steps throughout the process based on feedback and trials. So it’s important to remember that challenge scoping isn’t just something you rush through at the beginning and then forget about. It’s important to kind of check back in with it along the way. Next slide. And this is the kind of visualization of that.

62:43 – 63:08

So we have that big, knotty problem at the top there. A grand challenge just means a really big problem, typically a problem that no one actor or one procurement could maybe address. And that’s why we take these big, grand challenges and we break them down into sub challenges. It’s really important. Those challenges frame positively, as we said, and it’s also important that we make sure that they’re suitable for councils or procurement.

63:10 – 63:11

Next slide, please.

63:13 – 64:00

So the thing about challenge scoping is we, when we kind of talk through the methods and the outputs and, and what we’re trying to achieve from it, I think a lot of it makes common sense and people have probably been involved in these activities as local government colleagues quite a bit. The bit that gets a bit challenging when it’s challenge scoping, or difficult when it’s challenge scoping, I should say, is finding the right balance, because it’s always difficult. Maybe you spend too much time thinking about the problem and that eats into it, kind of creates a bit of lack of momentum and it eats into to the time you have to try and address it. Alternatively, you might rush through thinking about the problem and that’s when you might make mistakes of procuring the wrong thing. And that means the innovation was kind of doomed to fail from the start.

64:01 – 64:44

Likewise, something needs to be ambitious enough that it can motivate people to maybe break the mold a little bit when it comes to innovation. There are moments throughout the procurement process where innovative activities might need some slight tweaks or differences from the copy paste of historical contracts and things like that. So it’s really good to have people on board that there is a bit of ambition and people believe there is that value and impact at the end of the road. But at the same time, it needs to be achievable. It needs to be something that not only kind of one person or A group of people can understand and feel inspired to kind of engage with, but probably multiple actors throughout your council and multiple actors in the market as well.

64:45 – 65:17

And things need to be well researched and presented. We love evidence, we love stats. Coming back to the point that Joanne made, actually about pre market engagement and transparency, fairness, all of the kind of procurement qualities that need to be met there. Well, if you do a good quality challenge scoping process and you come up with these materials, not just challenge statements, but also illustrations and also the evidence and so stats. Well, actually, you’ve created a really sound kind of package of information that you can share with the market.

65:17 – 65:58

And because it’s one package that you’re sharing, again, that’s a really great way of being transparent and fair to the whole market because they’re being let in on those insights and the kind of direction that you’re thinking about, but again, not spending more time than necessary. So the best way of figuring out if you’re done yet in terms of the framing and the illustrations and the stats and everything like that, is test it with your colleagues, test it with residents, test it with the market, very kind of early and say, is there information missing? Do you need to know anything else? That means that you’re always going to be doing the kind of essential amount of work required. Next slide, please.

66:03 – 66:27

Yep. And so a few of these, as I said, a lot of challenge scoping is common sense, but we like to really reiterate these aspects. So good challenge is typically developed with the help of those causing it and affected by it. So you really need those people with skin in the game involved. It’s written in plain English, so whenever you use text, try to avoid technical language kind of wherever possible.

66:28 – 66:56

There will be time later in the process to bring up that technical language. But right now we need clarity and understanding amongst a range of stakeholders presented in a variety of ways. I’ve kind of emphasized this already. It’s not just about words and an A4 word document, it’s also about bringing imagery, whether it’s imagery of the problem or imagery of the vision that you’re heading towards, and examples, stats, all of those kinds of things as well. Share it in a variety of ways.

66:57 – 67:31

So again, not just nay for document, but share it through social media, have calls where you engage people, potentially online, do in person sessions as well, and then make sure that it’s aligned with organizational targets. So I think sometimes in councils, if it’s not aligned with those organizational targets, if it’s not kind of in tune with the strategy what can often happen is it loses momentum as senior approval is required or as there are kind of budget or scope changes along the way. Next slide.

67:35 – 68:30

So this slide might seem a little bit wordy, but the reason we kind of do it is if anyone has any experience with challenge scoping, then I’d say that this is probably the slide to screenshot, because this is going to be your checklist or your barometer to try and figure out if you’re doing challenge scoping effectively. So there’s a risk of spending too much time on research and being too narrow. There’s alternatively a risk of spending too little time on research and being too vague, not including enough or the right people. I think someone mentioned the IT security folks in their council. I haven’t had specific kind of experience of that particular stakeholder, but what I can say is that in a couple of calls, when we’ve spoken with some of the procurement professionals, the procurement professionals have said, oh, it’s quite frustrating that we weren’t brought on earlier in the process.

68:31 – 69:39

And when we spoke to the service teams of the same councils, they said, oh, we just assumed that procurement was really busy and they didn’t want to be involved at this early stage. So that’s actually a classic case of where actually people who aren’t brought in earlier can sometimes be blockers later on, when actually, if you bring them on at the right time, then they can contribute at the time where the information that they need can be gathered and presented in a way they understand and it can save a lot of time and hassle later, not being clear on desired impact and priorities. I would argue that in this kind of open innovation model, if everyone remembers back to the slide Rikesh shared with the logos and just how many different players across the public and private markets there are that you could collaborate with. I would argue that one of the absolutely key roles that a council plays in this innovation aspect is owning the desired impact and priorities. If you don’t own and fully understand what kind of impact we’re going towards, it’s really hard for the market to make decisions because that’s.

69:40 – 70:11

They’re not in touch as closely with residents, they’re not in touch as closely with the kind of elected officials, they’re not in touch as closely with the strategies in the public sector. So it’s really the council’s job to own, understand and communicate clearly what impact and what priorities exist. Not understanding the problems are independent. So this was the point George made about the systemic approach. So sometimes you might try and solve a problem, but that just kicks the can down the road or it might actually make another problem worse.

70:12 – 70:34

So that’s why that systemic approach is useful. Likewise not understanding knock on effects of actions. So yeah, another case of something being independent is you can’t solve it before you solve something else. So that’s another example of interdependent addressing symptoms, not causes. So again, a good quality challenge scoping will help you get back to the cause.

70:34 – 71:06

And solving causes is typically more effective in the long run, trying to solve challenges which don’t make sense for the authority to address. There are just some problems which are better solved or addressed by private markets. So it’s really key to be clear on when are you not best placed to try and address something at all. And maybe you need to think about other levers you can pull. So maybe you want to start doing more campaigning and that kind of awareness piece to encourage others to kind of enter an innovation space.

71:07 – 71:52

Not responding to feedback or iterating throughout the procurement journey. This is a classic one which is if you do a good challenge scoping at the beginning, but something comes up when you engage the market, or something comes up at the contract stage, or something comes up at the trial stage, don’t just blunder on, think about how that change or that new information affects maybe a possible reframing of the challenge and then finally not inspiring or failing to bring a challenge to life for innovators. So again, if it’s too static, if it’s too negative, when you framed that challenge, you’re not really going to encourage the market or any other stakeholders, internally or externally, to buy into doing something about it. So really key there is positive framing. Next slide.

71:57 – 72:29

When do you do it? We recently had a colleague leave the company, a nice part of the IPEC program team. And in his words, he said all the time, baby. And I, I still love that because, yeah, when do you do challenge scoping? You want to do it all the way throughout the program, initially to make sure you’ve identified a real problem, maybe a little bit later on to make sure everyone affected has been brought in, as we said, to avoid them being blockers or caught out later on.

72:29 – 72:45

Then we want innovators and suppliers to be able to respond effectively and be keen to respond. And then finally when you’re later on in the trial stage, you want to make sure that the challenge scoping is leading to solutions that have the desired impact. Next slide.

72:51 – 73:02

What? Just before we go on to why do we do challenge scoping? Next couple of slides. If we could just go back to the pitfalls slide. Actually, just an open question again to the group.

73:02 – 73:19

Feel free to chuck something in chat. We’ll come off of mute and share. But do these common pitfalls. Does anyone experience these pitfalls already before, or are there any pitfalls that we’ve missed here that you think, yeah, that’s common, or you’ve encountered it a few times?

73:25 – 74:02

I think I can maybe sort of share some of my reflections whilst we wait for folk in the chat to respond. But I think, yeah, one of the big ones is that finding the resource and time to do the challenge research. I think there’s. Yeah, I think you’ll touch on it a little bit later, but there’s a variety of different ways that you can go about uncovering and gathering the right evidence to sort of support a good challenge statement. And, yeah, it’s.

74:02 – 74:29

Yeah. How long is a piece of string? You can do multiple different interviews with people who are impacted by their specific challenge. You can do a variety of different desk research and I think it’s been able to structure it in a way that allows you to get to a point where you feel comfortable and confident enough to feel like you have a point where you’re like, yes, I think I’m asking the right question.

74:31 – 74:47

Which feels scary because when do you know when you are asking the right question? So I think that’s one of my common pitfalls or uncertainties when coming into the. The challenge scoping process.

74:50 – 75:09

Yeah, thanks, George. I don’t think we’re getting anything through in the chat, so maybe we’ll carry on. But if anyone has any kind of thoughts about pitfalls they’ve already experienced, or if they want to add to this list, then feel free to put it in the chat anyway. Yeah, George, let’s carry on. Maybe click forward a couple.

75:13 – 75:57

So this slide is just a little bit of a reiteration of why we do challenge scoping from a kind of a problem or a benefit perspective. So avoid implementing the wrong solution. This is particularly relevant when it comes to innovation, because what we’ve seen happen in the past is a poor challenge scoping meant that whichever innovative SMEs or partners were selected to trial were kind of doomed to fail from the beginning because they weren’t really addressing the real problem at hand. So actually, good challenge scoping, de risks, spend and innovation. Of course, if there are naysayers in the kind of innovation aspects of your council as well, you don’t want the innovation to be set up to fail at trial stage.

75:57 – 76:22

You want to give it the best possible chance. A systemic understanding helps. As we talked about, those interdependent and knock on effects of different challenges and different actions you might take. Technology or new emerging solutions alone are unlikely to resolve complex challenges. So you need to pull on different levers, whether it’s procurement or campaigns or other approaches.

76:24 – 77:14

Understanding what the local authority’s place is in addressing a challenge often overlooked. So council is either overstepping the mark when the private sector potentially has a better chance of addressing it, or maybe not realizing when it should be owning a problem that the market is struggling to provide a solution for. So, yeah, challenge scoping, that full spectrum of related challenges and really helps us understand them and then engaging relevant stakeholders. So the reason that good challenge scoping is helpful for engaging stakeholders is because if you don’t know something, it’s a good indication that you haven’t involved the right stakeholders yet. So, yeah, that kind of challenge scoping process is really good for piecing together who the right people are, both on the causing and the potentially solving side.

77:15 – 77:30

And as I said, people left out early on can often be blockers later on. That’s a classic one we see time and time again. Next slide. So, as George mentioned, we will run through a few of the methods. I won’t go through them in detail.

77:30 – 78:04

We’re definitely going to share these slides with you all, so feel free to have a little look through those as well, but just to quickly run through some of the methods at each kind of stage. So on the next slide we’ll see that the challenge research stage is, as you expect, desk research, expert and user research. Note, it also has stakeholder mapping. That’s an absolutely essential kind of activity within challenge scoping. We also add a tech scan or horizon scan, because we’re thinking about innovation here.

78:05 – 79:04

Maybe if you were less interested in innovation you might miss those, but those are two quite key areas and often councils feel a little bit hesitant to do that just because there might not be the expertise in house. But those are two activities that you can kind of reach out to collaborators, whether it’s across your organization or council or whether it’s to the market, a little bit to help them, to help get them, to help you understand what technology is coming up or currently in the market, and then brainstorming, so mapping out the challenges and again trying to think about those kind of connections or what are the missing pieces of information you might have. Next slide. When it comes to challenge definition, which means kind of putting something into, into a statement, a one liner Some visuals, the key stat, the key examples or case studies behind it. Then here you want to do those kind of.

79:04 – 79:35

The reason we say a group synthesis session is because it needs to make sense to a wide range of different stakeholders. Synthesis, obviously, meaning the word of like taking all of their different perspectives and trying to create one kind of, as I said before, set of materials and the systems mapping is really useful. So you’ve gathered all of that information, now you can kind of plot it out systematically understand where those interdependencies knock on effects are. So some of the outputs could be a challenge report. And how might we.

79:35 – 79:56

Statements, visuals, case studies, examples, as I said before. Next slide, challenge selection. So this is where you want to start evaluating. So as we said, you want to pick a challenge that’s specific, relevant for procurement. You want to pick a challenge that’s relevant for your council to address.

79:57 – 80:52

You want to make sure that you think that there’s a reasonable chance that the market might be able to address your challenge here and now, rather than in five years time or whatever it might be. So again, more focus on that tech scan, horizon scan and group workshops. And then finally we have challenge refinement. So this is when you’re just, you’ve, you’ve kind of gone around your internal stakeholders, maybe you’ve engaged external stakeholders a little bit, you’re ready to kind of, kind of go to the market and really ask, right, what could you do that would address this challenge? That’s when you want to do that final bit of polishing to make sure that everybody’s happy to go external and then it makes sense to, to the innovators in the market and then test the wording and representation, gather feedback, improve it, all those kind of refinement activities.

80:53 – 81:22

Next slide. So again, we just have that visual reminder. Hopefully it helps everyone remember what the process of challenge scoping is. You’re going from something bigger and messier and you’re really trying to break it down and that’s what makes it more manageable, that’s what helps you understand the right people to involve and that’s what makes it kind of more attractive to the market, to especially smaller innovators to be able to really have a decent impact on a meaningful challenge.

81:25 – 81:52

Perfect. Yeah, thank you very much, Nick. And yeah, a quick question to the, to the group just to sort of say, yeah, what, what challenge statements have you put out to the market before? And reflecting on that, are there any things that you would look to have done differently when you were putting out those challenge statements?

81:54 – 82:43

Reflecting on some of the. The points that Nick has made. So, yeah, if anyone wants to share their thoughts or even previous challenge statements that they’ve put out in the past in the chat, I’d be really interested to see what people have done, how they’ve sort of framed. Might be that, yeah, you might need to just jot it down from memory, but I’m really curious to sort of see what you’ve done before or any sort of lessons learned that you might have gathered from doing this process before and how you might have done it potentially differently. Looking into the future, or if anyone has any general questions for Nick around the challenge scoping process.

82:45 – 83:20

Yeah, I just wanted to add one last thing, which is, for a few years now, Scottish councils have had to kind of release kind of information in advance of procurements they’re going to make. And Scottish councils have chosen to provide the bare minimum information to the market. And I know that’s a particular kind of situation, but I was kind of thinking that all the challenge scoping work that you might do as a council doesn’t just have to go towards procurement. So obviously that might be why you start it. You start doing it because.

83:20 – 84:08

Because you think you want to work towards a procurement and it’s a really valuable part of the procurement process. But even if you get to the point of thinking, oh, the market’s not quite there yet, or we’re not sure if procurement is the right approach, those materials can still be released. And coming back to Rikesh’s open innovation approach, you might have a unique position for gathering that information and putting it out to the market. Maybe the market’s not quite there yet, but it’s kind of a signal to the market that, hey, this is where we’re looking for answers and we have this kind of problem and just kind of providing that information to that innovation ecosystem and sometimes you’ll be surprised with what you get coming back. So, yeah, challenge scoping is a really valuable approach for councils in general as well as the procurement process.

84:14 – 84:14

Jack?

84:22 – 84:46

Yep. So Jack was sharing how the DVSA will be procuring a new approach to the theory and hazard perception test. Specific challenges are the fraud and security aspects of delivering tests and making sure you get reliable, truthful responses. Cheating similarly. And, yeah, content.

84:46 – 85:15

So we might have flying vehicles that people are driving around within a few years. So how does the content adapt to that kind of thing? Yep, that’s a great example, Jack. Does anyone else have challenges that they’ve been. They’ve previously shared or they’re currently working through Nick, I’ve intentionally put one on which is quite solution centric because sometimes we go to the market looking for a solution.

85:15 – 85:45

So I’ve tried to be a bit mischievous here is give us an app because quite often the answer to everything in life is an app. Have you seen scenarios like that where the challenge statement is quite targeted to a particular technology? Yes. And I think it comes back to what we said before about when councils may be solutionized, meaning jumping to a solution. And what I would say as well is trying to give examples of how challenge scoping earlier in the procurement process can have knock on effects later in the process.

85:46 – 86:34

So Helena here on the call with us is an expert and qualified in procurement and expert with kind of the contract stage and the going to market, the tendering stage, all these kind of things. And what we see is if we preach for an outcome based approach rather than over speccing and things like that, if we haven’t done a good challenge scoping earlier on and we have, you know, if we’ve fallen into the trap of solutionizing at the challenge stage, it’s going to be really hard to then be outcomes focused at the, the tender and contract stage. So yeah, it’s just another great example of how trying to avoid solutionizing earlier in the process makes it much easier to be still outcomes focused later in the procurement process.

86:37 – 87:04

Helena, anything to add there? Yeah, so we talk about the solution and what we’re specifying, but also the contract and the terms. There are ways of making it flexible and in our recent procurement with Westminster they really valued the flexibility we added within the contract. Quite often we, we fixate on what we’ve done previously. This is generally, this is what we have in our terms and conditions.

87:04 – 87:53

But you can put different types of flexibility within volumes times because you are innovating, you aren’t sure how the implementation will go. The you know what barriers will come in there. Is there a contingency but you can be flexible that there is a contingency, for example, and how you use that contingency or how they will utilize the contingency. So be open to receiving those variations. And again with those variation bids which Rakesh was speaking about, we’ve been quite scared to do that before because we wanted that like for like we wanted that compare comparison but inviting that can give you that help you with that flexibility etc.

87:54 – 88:28

And see how you can grow it and gives you more opportunity to scale it or to fail fast maybe. And I have a very quick example with tfl when we did do a challenge where something didn’t work, but actually they saw so much value with that SME that they asked them to work on something alternative with it. And by doing that they’ve actually grown in their national. It’s a company called City Swift you can look into. So there is so much value in testing, piloting and having that flexibility.

88:33 – 89:37

Okay, I think I’ll, I’ll leave it there. So I’m going to now just jump over to yeah next steps and what we’ll be doing for our next session. But in the meantime, before our next session, if anyone is interested and wants to learn more about yeah developing innovation procurement friendly business cases or how to get better at identifying those internal allies and doing good stakeholder mapping, then feel free to reach out to me over email. If there is a group of people who want to learn more about either of those, we will look at setting up a session to go further into that and then I’ll drop my email in the chat. Now for those who are interested and want to follow up on that in yeah, the next session we’ll be looking at doing it in September.

89:37 – 90:53

We’ll be looking to do a hybrid session as well so we’ll allow for more in person interaction and hopefully we’ll be able to do more workshop related activities which will help you so work through some of these, these materials and the engagements in a more yeah interactive way. And the session that we’ll be doing in September will be focusing on engaging the market so doing that pre market engagement looking at how to. To set up a test bed and going out to market as well. So we’ll be setting up that session for September and then just quickly as well we have the IPEC community which yeah really encourage you to join and engage with. If you have any sort of more questions around innovation procurement please join the community via LinkedIn or through going on our web page and I think we’ve got yeah the QR code there so I’ll leave that up.

90:53 – 91:40

Hopefully that works for folk but if not then yeah, you’ll find us through through the search any search engine and searching yeah ipec.org but other than that I just want to say a big thanks to our speakers Rikesh and Nick and Helena for jumping in with some observations as well. So yeah, really I want to say a big thank you to our speakers and yeah thank you to everyone who has yeah joined the session today and your input as well through the the chat. If you have any questions obviously feel free to, to reach out and yeah, hope you have all a good rest of your days. All right.

91:43 – 91:44

Thank you, everyone.