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Employability - the Bev 4.0 Way

First posted at 13:37GMT on 26/10/09 by Hilary Cottam

The economy is never static, so why is our approach to unemployment? Take Bernard: he cooks a mean fishcake and has great entrepreneurial skills but he cannot read and write and is low in confidence.  To enter the labour market he needs an approach that helps him translate his skills.  This takes time, and works better over a cup of tea in his kitchen, than in a job centre office.  Working in a domestic setting we have been able to view the challenge Bernard and others like him face and translate this into employable skills, with considerable early success.

This month the number of people unemployed made a worse than expected jump, to a new total of 2.38 million, with job vacancies reaching an all time low of 429,000.  In response the DWP are scrambling to expand their network of job centres and the numbers who are employed within them – but to offer what exactly?  Perhaps tea and sympathy sweetened with the £60.50 per week job seekers allowance.

The problem we face is huge and expensive.  In addition to those currently losing their jobs, there remains the so-called ‘stock’ of long term unemployed, people like Bernard.  There are also a significant proportion of British workers, for whom the cycle will be a continual one between low skilled, vulnerable jobs and periods of unemployment.

The human cost in terms of misery is high.  So are the financial costs.  David Freud, previously advisor to the government and to the opposition, recently estimated that it would be rational to spend up to £62,000 per person on getting people back to work because the cost of unemployment is so high.

It is time for a radical re-think.  We need a system that makes new vertical connections between British people and emerging areas of employment growth – for example green jobs, the caring professions, nano-tech, social enterprise.  And new horizontal connections between soft skills, apprenticeships, learning and work.

In other words we need an approach that brings together soft and hard skills, geography and industrial policy; that integrates and greatly reduces the £40bn cost of unemployment; that starts from people’s front rooms and has the capacity for continued evolution.

Searching for work is a dispiriting process.  Despite a physical re-design, job centres remain more suited to the bygone era in which the welfare state was founded. Searching for a job online, as I did last week, is no different.  The electronic journey is long-winded and grey.  I was a nameless cog, identified only by my postcode, viewing jobs which rarely had a real description or salary attached.  The chasm between this and the compelling description of a job in the Times, or alternatively the way I might advertise my full range of skills on gumtree.com could not be wider.

At Participle we work with young people, so called ‘chaotic’ families and those over 60 in communities across Britain developing 21st century public services.  It has taught us a lot about work and how to move into it. 

In the eyes of the local job centre many of the families we work with have few if any of the skills that are needed to work in a modern service economy even in an upswing. In all cases however we have seen the power of meeting individuals and families where they are, visualising (literally) where they want to be, and working alongside them to get there.  Some of the best providers of welfare to work services already go some way to this approach but all are currently hampered by the silos in which their service has to be delivered.

In another strand of our work we have developed the concept of the ‘slip road job’: one that supports older people back into work either part time or in a different capacity.  The BMW worker made redundant earlier this year is a different case.  Here connections can be made between proven skills and job opportunities but new support systems are also needed to turn a potential crisis into a re-skilling opportunity, to keep motivated and think laterally about what is possible.

There are four fatal flaws in the current system and these will continue in the new contracts currently being handed out across Britain to those responsible for getting people back into work. 

One, the system is over specialised – like vast areas of our public services too much time and money is spent on sorting people into ‘pathways’ and ‘customer’ types.  Such an approach wastes more money on designing new entry points to what remains an old fashioned linear system.  What is needed instead is an open network that can support people in multiple ways and continue to move them up the skills curve.  Most of us find jobs through connections and you can’t do this if you are held in a queue with others whose barriers are too close to your own.

Secondly, service providers are currently competing for the £1bn market of welfare to work.  The real market however is approximately £40 bn when Further Education and so called ‘passported’ benefits to which the unemployed have access, are taken into account.  There is a clear opportunity to develop a service that starts with the individual and wraps a full service around them, stripping out a significant percentage of the £40bn resulting from service overlaps.

Thirdly, there needs to be a new approach to risk sharing.  It is accepted that most work is found locally but there is currently little incentive to innovate locally since the returns and risks are held by central government.  Again the result is a static, rigid system when what we need is a approach that addresses the constantly shifting needs of individuals based on a living, breathing, changing economy.

Fourthly – it’s personal.  Being unemployed is a deeply personal thing – whether you are the skilled but newly unemployed worker from BMW or the returning to work mum lacking in confidence – you need someone to work along side you.

Despite the rhetoric providers do not currently work with people they do things for and to them, too often perpetuating a workless culture.  Treat people like children and they will behave like them.  Current service frameworks do not make it possible to take a whole life approach with an individual.  Technology does, front line staff can and yes, the unemployed really want this type of approach.

A reformed, modern welfare state would offer something completely different.  The core would be a universal, locally rooted and highly personalised offer.  Not a job centre at all, but a network of facilitators, linked to a powerful system of job vacancies, training opportunities, seed enterprise funding linked to the benefit system, mentors and coaches to keep your pecker up, peers you can speak to during the weeks ahead.  Replicating the support networks that most people reading would automatically draw on, would cost less and more importantly, would work.

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‘Run’, Open Innovation, ‘Run’

First posted at 21:23GMT on 05/12/08 by Hugo Manassei

Last week I was in Tokyo, exploring how we could develop the cuusoo.com Open Innovation platform here in the UK, for the creation of new public services (not for the design of products, its use in Japan). The system is currently in Japanese, but if you can manage it, have a go at designing your own product, then create and manage your own market for selling it. It’s a very powerful system, seen as an energising resource for the Japanese manufacturing industry, which is very similar in structure to the Italian model - comprising over 5 millions manufacturers, with the most common size of company just 5 people. I’ll post more about this system later.

But, I left the UK in turmoil. The country was struggling. Yes, the population was dramatically split. On the one hand, we have those that believe Leona Lewis’ version of ’Run‘ is better than the original. On the other, those that remember the 2007 V festival, with Snow Patrol in full swing, as a complete high point of their life.  I, myself, was eagerly awaiting Leona’s version’s entry into the charts, because really, if it reached higher than number 5 (which was the highest the original reached), then we’ve got some data to work with. While I was away, a record company error meant it failed to make it into the charts at all last week, but we’ve still got some data to work with.  Readers of The Sun reckon it would have walked into the number one slot, and on iTunes in the UK and in Ireland, the song reached number one in minutes. In fact, the BBC reported yesterday that the track has become the fastest-selling digital-only track in the UK. In terms of numbers, I think that means Leona has it, sorry NME.

The result, and Leona herself, have open innovation written all over. (Not least because of the lyrics of the song - Light up, light up, as if you have a choice.) Leona was voted to success by winning a UK TV show, the X Factor, which this year is enjoying weekly ratings in excess of 12m viewers (that’s roughly 1 in every 6 people in the UK), several million of whom vote for their favourite singer by telephone every week, week after week. Leona Lewis is one of us, the people, an East London girl who worked as a receptionist before going to her X-Factor audition.

In my studying of Open Innovation systems, the most comprehensive list of activities I have found is here. I don’t find the catagorisation very useful. I prefer those that are broken down as follows: Mass Problem Solving (ie. Innocentive, in fact the vast majority of them listed), Mass Customisation (ie. My Starbucks, Lego Factory), Mass Customer Insights (ie. some of the early Proctor and Gamble systems, Muji) and Mass New Market Creation (ie. Cuusoo, Etsy, Threadless). If you have a better list of catagorisation, please let me know.

Back to Leona and the X-Factor, not only did we participate in ‘Mass Problem Solving’ voting her to win, and receive a US$1.5m record deal, but we also ‘Mass Customised’ her success, her version of ‘Run’ was never planned for album or single release, but following Radio 1’s broadcasting of it, demand hit the roof, and the track was rapidly shoe-horned into a new ‘deluxe version’ of her latest album and released as a downloaded single.

Snow Patrol, by contrast, followed the traditional band success route. They met at university (largely still the domain of the middle class), got a record deal in Glasgow, worked the gig circuit, and finally, their talent won out through CD sales and the festival circuit. It’s an old-skool type rise to fame, boosted by ‘those in the know’, starting with a record company A&R person finding them. NME helped out, too. But, it’s the traditional route, albeit largely down to luck, being in the right place at the right time, and having talent too. Leona has talent, let’s not say that her success is solely down to us, her voice, by any standard is outstanding, and her success outside the UK is testament to that.

So, back to ‘Open Innovation.’ The web based communities can only dream of the numbers displayed on TV, 12m+ viewers of The X Factor, every week in the UK, 50m+ viewers of American Idol in the US. If our interaction with the X-Factor was translated into web based interactions (just go with me here), we would have a website that would have 48 million visitors per month, which would most likely translate into 250 million page views a month, the equivalent of a website receiving a billion hits.

I know, I know, its boring to compare the TV with the internet, and boring to compare the entertainment industry to more ‘serious’ industries such as manufacturing, commerce, business and public services. I also know it is strange to try and compare the data between The X-Factor and, say Innocentive, but here’s my beef - If we are talking about ‘open innovation’ systems being ‘open’, particularly when we are talking about developing a system in public services, then we must reach as wide an audience as possible. If not, we’re not ‘open’, and we might as well re-think this in terms of ‘A-tiny-little-bit-open Innovation.’

So, help me out, here. I have 4 questions:

1) How can these ‘open innovation’ system reach as wide an audience as TV?
2) What can ‘open innovation’ in earnest sectors learn from the successes of the ‘open innovation’ entertainment business (politics seems to have managed it, no?)?
3) Where are the business models that actually work in ‘open innovation’?
4) Generally, please, tell me, where is the data to support the term ‘open’?

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Three things I read this summer…

First posted at 21:11GMT on 26/08/08 by Hilary Cottam

On a wet and windy beach, which made me think about families, youth, the Beveridge welfare state..

Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell.  Set in Manchester in the 1840s – a period of industrial unrest and extreme deprivation, at the height of the industrial revolution – this novel tells the story of Mary, a factory worker’s daughter whose beauty attracts the attention of the mill owner’s son.  A page turning Victorian romance, Mary Barton made headlines in its day for its realistic portrayal of the lives of the mill workers and their acute suffering.  Chronic hunger, infant deaths, atrocious living conditions and the struggles of the early union movement...it’s a sobering reminder of just how much our welfare state and the original Beveridge achieved.

Governing the Present by Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose.  These two LSE academics have spent the last decade thinking about how personal and social lives have become the subject of government.  They look closely at how issues become constructed as ‘problems’ and in particular how policy has come to focus on behaviours and engineering the human soul.  They argue that it is false to think of issues waiting to be uncovered or discovered – they are rather things constructed and Miller and Rose are interested in how something is made into a policy area.  So far, so good.  What is great is the way they explore these ideas through numerous everyday mechanisms from accounting, to advertising.  It’s pertinent and challenging for our work.  Did you know that the idea of ‘growth’ as a key indicator of economic health only emerged in the 1960s?  Because the technology finally existed for measurement.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz.  With the rest of the Dominican diaspora, I have been waiting 10 years for Diaz to write this book, after reading his brilliant collection of short stories, Drown.  It was worth it.  A great sancocho of science fiction, Dominican history and family sagas.  ‘What did you know about states or diasporas?  What did you know about Nueba Yol or children whose self hate short circuited their minds?  What did you know … about immigration?’ Apart from being wildly original and entertaining this fiction tells the story of the myriad ways in which behaviour seen as perverse by the social policy makers is a deeply rational response to realities at the margin.

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People Library

First posted at 17:52GMT on 22/08/08 by Emma Southgate


One man’s experience as a human book in the first Living Library in the UK can be read on Times Online
The UK Living Library website can be found here

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Employability - the Bev 4.0 Way

The economy is never static, so why is our approach to unemployment?