Last week I had a meeting with a council chief officer to discuss innovation within his authority. He characterised the council as having a 1980's culture, being very risk adverse, with a hierarchical structure and a command and control approach to management. He repeatedly used football analogies to make his point. In the innovation league, this council was mid-table.
How does an organisation such as this set about becoming more innovative?
Another chief officer in the same council suggested an approach that she has now twice tried in two different councils. This is to set up an innovation incubator, a sort of research and development unit for public sector innovation. This incubator would operate in a different way to the rest of the council. It would be more entreprenural. It would have its own culture, distinct procedures and be empowered to experiment with new technologies to the council.
This is the skunkworks approach. The term was coined at Lockhead, the US aircraft manufacturer. In the 1940s, the main factory at Lockhead was assembling bombers for the British forces. They were approached by the US military to develop and build a jet fighter capable of combatting the perceived growing threat from Germany. A small team was put together, working in secret, separate from the main organisation, with the authority to take risks and make some decisions without referring to the line of command.
According to Wikipedia, skunkworks is "widely used in business, engineering, and technical fields to describe a group within an organization given a high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy, tasked with working on advanced or secret projects".
The public sector skunkworks was an interesting organisational innovation to observe. In its three-year life it gained a number of national accolades for its technological innovations. But its distinct culture and private-sector approach caused many tensions within the council which eventually led to its demise. The Lockhead skunkworks has survived for many decades. Why did this public sector version fail so quickly?
