Participle is a newly formed company, we are working on our website and plan to have it up and running in Autumn 08. In the meantime, here is a little about us...

 

Who we are

participle delivers large scale projects by creating significant partnerships with private, third sector, local and central government organisations. These projects develop the next generation of public services, innovating practical, affordable solutions to the big and seemingly intractable social issues of the 21st century. Historically, our team has developed new public services in the areas of health, prisons and education, with our current large scale project, launched in September 2007, working with the ageing population. We run these projects based on our unique approach, called transformational design, and a significant precursor and outcome of these projects are new ideas.

participle is built on the track record of a small core team and expert network. In the UK we have raised £14 million over the last 5 years and delivered a series of demonstration projects.  Early successes have included transforming a ‘failing’ school into one of the country’s top 20 most improved schools; a prototype prison which would reduce habitual relapse into crime within the existing financial envelope; preventative health services which harness the power of small social groups to deliver sustained behaviour change.

 

The problems and opportunities that we address

Public services are in need of radical reform. Despite continual change over the last 20 years, the most successful, improved and arguably resilient public service institutions - such as schools, hospitals, and local council services – are not best equipped to tackle a set of long term, growing social problems such as obesity, anti-social behaviour, climate change or social isolation. Put simply, existing services are struggling to improve outcomes they were never designed to deliver.  Incremental improvements in their effectiveness and efficiency will not meet these new challenges.

participle has been set up to address this situation. We focus on ‘new’ problems, not just the persistent problems such as inequality, poverty and exclusion, that current public services are designed to address. These ‘new’ problems often arise from cultural changes such as changing demographics, new lifestyles and global resource constraints, for example. This results in ‘new’ problems such as: chronic disease and long term health conditions, learning cultures beyond the school, new approaches to crime and security, new approaches to community collaboration and social isolation and new energy systems.

These issues cannot be solved through traditional approaches to service provision and delivery since they depend on understanding individual motivations, behaviour change and the direct engagement of the citizen with the service.   Our focus is on harnessing this engagement to develop systemic solutions that work at scale.

 

How we do this

participle is a unique hybrid: we bring together systemic policy thinking and new ideas with a project methodology which enables us to harness the broader creativity and latent solutions visible on the ground to service users, front line workers and communities: we call this methodology Transformation Design.

participle creates future services with and for the public. Most attempts at innovation and service improvement start within existing institutions and ask how they can be reformed.  We start from the individual, unlocking a unique set of insights and motivations, which we then apply to the broad systemic problems we are seeking to answer.

Our hybrid approach also means we test and scale in a different way.  We rapidly apply our thinking and insights to the development of ‘prototypes’.  Prototypes differ from pilots: they involve early service models developed in situ, which are then tested and improved in rapid cycles, again in situ.  This approach reduces risk and tends to result in new services that work and can be scaled as well as important new policy insights.

Our hybrid approach and our person centred starting point enables us to work beyond existing service silos, efficiently harnessing a broader set of resources contributing to the development of affordable whole system solutions.

This approach differs from that of think tanks, consultancy and design agencies.  Think tanks contribute to leading edge thinking but typically do not have a record in transferring thinking into action, nor do they understand how to motivate behaviour change and encourage people to become participants in the problem solving process.  Consultancy models are highly embedded within current institutional frameworks and boundaries.  Design agencies have an important understanding of service experience and interfaces, but rarely understand systems and expertise in policy thinking.

To see examples of how we have put this into practice, please view the following project areas:
Learning
Health
Criminal Justice

And click here for some smaller project examples.

 

How we operate

We engage in three closely linked types of work:

• Projects - Projects that design new public services are our core activity.  Project work provides ‘proof of concept’: Real and measurable differences have been made at the neighbourhood level, in cities, rural communities and nationally.
  
  
• Transformation Design - Our work is underpinned by a simple, highly effective design led process which we call transformation design.  Transformation design provides the tools and methodology for our inter-disciplinary team and partners, the framework for defining a project brief, tools for a creative problem solving process and the methods for rapidly prototyping solutions.
  
  
• New Ideas - We produce world leading, rigorous new analysis and proposals to influence the development of policy.  Our thinking both learns from and feeds our project work, and is informed by the research and knowledge in academic institutions and public service organisations. We cannot over-emphasise the importance and unique value of this link between thinking and doing: we will be helping to develop policy, which is truly evidence based and grounded in practice.

 

Team Leadership

participle has been set up by four directors; Hilary Cottam (award winning social entrepreneur), Colin Burns (former MD of IDEO London), Charles Leadbeater (internationally renowned thinker and innovator) and Hugo Manassei (entrepreneur and enterprise consultant.)  They are working with a small inter-disciplinary team that includes, economists, designers and policy analysts.

 

 

Hilary Cottam
Social Entrepreneur, DAVOS Young Global Leader 2006, UK Designer of the Year 2005, former Director of RED at the Design Council, former executive with the World Bank

 

Charles Leadbeater 
Writer, speaker and adviser on innovation, entrepreneurship and the knowledge economy. DEMOS Associate, former RED Policy Associate

 

Colin Burns                 
Independent Multi-Disciplinary Designer & Innovation Consultant, Former Director of IDEO London, Professor of Innovation at Dundee University, former RED Design Associate

 

Hugo Manassei
Entrepreneur, designer and enterprise consultant, co-founder of Method5 (New York) and Oyster Partners (now LBi), founder of UK’s Creative Pioneer initiative, former director at NESTA.

 

Contact us

If you are interested in working with participle, either as an investor, a partner organisation, a collaborator or an employee, please email us.

hello@participle.net
Studio 2, Swan Court, 9 Tanner St, London, SE1 3LE

Participle has been generously supported through initial seed sponsorship from NESTA (The National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts).

Participle Ltd
Registered in England, No. 6279941