Evidencing and empowering innovation in adult social care

Innovation in adult social care can help improve lives. However, there is little research evidence to help the sector start-up, implement and spread innovations that work well for everyone.

The Supporting Adult Social Care Innovation (SASCI) project team will host an event on 2 October sharing key research messages and bringing the sector together to set an agenda for empowering innovation.

The team, led by the Care Policy and Evaluation Centre at the London School of Economics, has spent the past five years investigating the process of innovating in adult social care. Our aim was to develop evidence that can help people involved in innovating to be more successful and guide others, like policymakers, who have the power to change the conditions to enable innovation to flourish. 

Innovation has become a buzzword

People use it to mean different things, and sometimes they do this deliberately to create an innovation mindset that smooths the passage of change. We encountered a diversity of views about what is and isn’t an innovation that were in some cases difficult to reconcile. Our lived experience group also grappled with this question in response to our literature review on innovations in social care and wrote the beyond simply scaling up blog.

When we started this work, some people questioned whether there would be any innovation to observe. They thought the sector was sterile, lacking any innovation, and that was the reason for the lack of impact. Others argued that there was plenty of innovation, people just struggled to sustain them and get them to reach any kind of scale.

Evidence of innovation

We found lots of evidence of innovation and entrepreneurial activity taking place in adult social care. However, much innovation was in the form of time-limited projects and only a small number of innovations had spread widely. Our research suggests that the sector has work to do to sustain, scale and spread innovations.

We studied some innovations that had achieved spread and some of the entrepreneurial and innovating organisations that have rarely featured in accounts of innovation in adult social careThese cases illustrate how the nature of the innovation affects the innovation journey, raising slightly different sets of challenges that require different strategies from organisations and different policy responses. We have identified three types of innovation journeys – business model, systems and social innovations -- from the examples we studied, but there may be more. Innovators can use this typology to figure out how to improve the likelihood of their journey being a success.

Through the wealth of data we gathered from the case studies and witness seminars, we learnt about:

• How adult social care organisations can be more innovative.
• What it takes to be an organisation that innovates again and again.
• The different ways that organisations from across the sector come together to sustain, scale and spread innovations.

We also saw what looks like difficulties in the sector’s capacity to innovate. This includes how innovation is financed throughout the journey, flexibility of rules and regulations, and the limited role of research in the innovation process. We shared our reflections on what this means for innovation in adult social care and how research could take on a larger role. You can also read the transcripts from the witness seminars: Care Certificate, social worker registration in England and the Ordinary Life initiative.

Innovation and financial savings

A final point on the elephant in the room: the lack of money in the sector. This formed the backdrop to the research. Our survey shows it influences how local authorities view innovation – seeing it as a tool to save money. Care providers were less driven to save money, but it did influence how they approached innovation, using creative ways and trusted processes to reduce financial risks.

An unresolved but critical question raised through this research is whether it is possible to deliver transformational innovation when led first and foremost by the goal of saving money.