Innovation Carve-Outs: Curating the space for innovation

Over the course of this paper we lay out the basis of the Carve-Out method, an approach that leverages a behavioural framework to allow organisations (even those burdened with layers of bureaucracy and entrenched ideas) to create intentionally designed environments that give people the space, resources and support they need to explore and test new ideas. Ideas that may go on to transform the core of their organisation. The Carve-Out method is based on a simple insight: That if we want to deliver real world, enduring impact then we must recognise that it’s real (often irrational, always human) people that are doing the work of innovating. So to deliver the outcomes we seek for people and our planet then we must explore and unlock the human behaviours that we need to get us there. The Carve-Out method makes this possible by creating the conditions for continuous innovation so that existing teams are empowered to explore solutions and bring those transformational ideas to fruition. To get there, first we look at the idea of the innovation lab or ‘skunkworks’: typically physical spaces, built away from business-as-usual constraints and processes where a small team can move quickly and with relative autonomy. We explore the legacy skunkworks principles have left on our contemporary innovation landscape, for example, how the iPhone was developed by a skunkworks team at Apple, as well as the proliferation of government innovation labs in the public sector. We then go on to examine some of the downsides involved in creating isolated innovation units, particularly the potential disconnect between the innovation process and core business operations, and the result this can have on products that might lack relevance to the market or practical applicability to the company’s mainline business. The second section of the paper looks at another model of organisational innovation, which has been adopted by tech companies such as Google and Netflix. This bottom-up model, exemplified by Google’s ‘20% time’ policy, gave employees the freedom and dedicated resources to explore transformative innovations. The paper looks at how these companies leveraged their employees to fuel ‘strategic risk-taking’, but also how this introduced significant pressure on individuals, and the difficulties in sustaining this level of innovation while scaling over the long term. In the third section we introduce the CarveOut method for organisational innovation: a powerful solution for organisations seeking to foster a culture of ideation experimentation, empower teams, and accelerate the development of impactful innovations and drive sustainable growth. Here we show how systematic, continuous, scalable innovation requires genuine integration and the application of behavioural science practices. This combination allows both for the creation of the space, time, and resources for innovation, as well as carving out the psychological and emotional space necessary for changemakers to thrive and grow within an organisation. Through multiple examples we show how designing and shaping the ‘innovation environment’, it is possible to create an integrated and agile system of organisational innovation that allows for the ‘carving out’ of time, resources and space, but also of cognitive bandwidth and the environmental conditions that enable individuals and teams to take creative risks, embrace new perspectives, and engage fully in the innovation process. We lay out five key principles that underpin the Carve-Out model: 1. Commit to evolving and create structures to enable it 2. Keep the people, change the mindsets 3. Learn fast, fail small 4. Invest and scale in line with confidence 5. Do in order to learn The final section of the paper looks at how the Carve-Out method has been successfully applied in real-world scenarios across a number of sectors. The first story looks at how behaviourally informed features were brought to bear on the Frontier Tech Hub, a programme that supports government officials in the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) to explore radical, early-stage tech ideas that might solve big development challenges and in doing so, evolve the innovation culture of a government department. In the second story we look at how, after the COVID-19 pandemic led to school closures, Lebanon-based NGO Jusoor worked alongside Brink to explore and test a new way of ensuring access to education for refugee children that would eventually shift the whole education system. And in the third story we explore how the uBoraBora fund for education implementers in sub-Saharan Africa, supported teams to take an experimental approach to exploring and testing key questions to enhance their product or service alongside their businessas-usual, and integrate what they learn with governments’ education systems. We end the paper by asking our readers to imagine what could be achieved if they could dedicate a small portion of their organisation’s time and resources to create the conditions for innovation, so their teams could operate with a different set of rules, and be empowered to explore solutions in a safe and supportive environment. We also provide links to a number of tools and resources created by Brink so others can begin to put the ideas found in this paper into action in their work.