What is innovation?
In this video, Lucy Hawkins (Senior Consultant) describes our understanding of the term ‘innovation’ and the conditions that allow it to flourish.
What’s the role of evidence?
In this video, Alison Turner (Managing Consultant) outlines the key principles of Evidence – including some of the approaches we take in the Strategy Unit and the main challenges faced.
Why are we working on this?
In this video, Peter Spilsbury (Director) summarises why we’re working to support innovation and evaluation and the core features of our offer.
Testing your innovation in theory
In this video, Fraser Battye (Principal Consultant) describes the process of evaluating an innovation ‘in theory’.
Using logic models in evaluation
Logic models are increasingly being used to support the design and evaluation of complex change in the NHS. This briefing provides a brief introduction to logic models and how they can be used to support evaluation of change.
This briefing was prepared for NHS England, by the Strategy Unit, as part of a programme of training to support national and locally-based evaluation of the Vanguard programme and sites. This paper accompanied a series of national workshops for Vanguard sites and is designed to support stakeholder engagement in the development of logic models, providing a brief summary and signposting further information.
Using Logic Models in Evaluation - Breifing
Tools & templates:
Problem structuring
Problem trees and driver diagrams can help you to understand the causes and effects of your problem. These methods will also support you to identify potential interventions or solutions and anticipate the effects that these may have.
Knowledge sharing
Knowledge sharing is vital for sharing good practice, enabling adoption and spread of innovations, and preventing people from making the same mistakes again. This guide will introduce you to different types of knowledge, some principles and techniques for knowledge sharing.
Pre-mortem
The pre-mortem technique was developed by Klein (2007) using ‘prospective hindsight’ to identify risks at the outset of a project. This provides the opportunity to address those risks or concerns and increase the project’s chance of success.
Other points of view
Use Edward deBono’s ‘Six Thinking Hats’ or consider a wider point of view, to approach a problem or potential solution from different perspectives. This will support you to better understand the problem faced or to provide constructive challenge to a potential solution.
Edward de Bono’s 6 Thinking Hats
Breaking the rules
Generate new ideas to solve a problem – by identifying the underlying assumptions, unwritten rules and thinking that maintain the status quo. Then ‘break the rules’, to support development of potential solutions.
Five Whys
Keep asking ‘why’ to peel back the layers of your problem, until you identify a potential root cause. This will help you to identify and tackle the source of a problem, rather than focusing on symptoms alone.
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.