“The Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust (LCFT) Innovation Incubator”[Greenhouse]
What is an Innovation Incubator?
Innovation is about taking a new approach to your work which will result in an improvement in quality, a reduction in cost and/or a time saving. It can be a new way of doing a process, a new product or even an entirely new service.
An Incubator in this sense tends to be used for the starting of new businesses. They are safe and supportive environments which help take entrepreneurs from having ideas to building successful businesses.
At LCFT the Innovation Incubator will help staff and service users to develop their innovative idea put it into practice and share the learning with others. It will do this by:
- Investing up to £1,000in each idea, to be spent on whatever the Innovator thinks will help get it off the ground
- Inviting Innovators to a monthly Incubator Breakfast with the Executive Director of Transformation & Innovation and another member of the Trust Board. This will be an opportunity to share experiences and ask questions of other Innovators and members of the Trust Board.
- Giving access to external experts from our Innovation Partner [insert name of partner e.g. Virgin Media] who can provide advice, support and mentoring.
Why do we need one?
We all have ideas which, if we were able to put into practice, would make things better for LCFT service users.
What all these ideas have in common is that most of the time they stay as ideas.The ideas that we have in the shower in the morning rarely survive the journey into work. There are few obvious incentives to Innovate and as an organisation we often inadvertently put barriers in the way of people trying to make things better.
The Innovation Incubator will nurture those ideas by listening, providing funding, advice, support and recognition for people who step forward with a great new idea. The Incubator will also permanently remove barriers where these are an unnecessary barrier to making things better.
What do I need to do?
We want to keep this simple All you need to join the Incubator is a new idea and the enthusiasm to turn it into a reality. There is no limit on the number of great ideas we are willing to support and the first group of 10 Innovators. will join the Incubator and receive their investment from January. To be part of the first group you will need to:
- Pick your best idea
- Get your initial proposal into the length of a single text message to me,
- Craig Barratt, Executive Director of Transformation & Innovation: 07985 237454
- You will receive up to 5 text message questions back within 24 hours
- You will find out within 1 week if you have a place in the incubator.
Another group of 10 Innovators will be selected in June.
What happens then?
Once you’ve been selected all we ask is that:
- You do what you think is right with the investment you receive
- Ask for help when you need it
- Share what you learn with others
Any tips?
There are no more rules but it would be worth considering:
- Ideas for new services or businesses that would bring in money to help provide extra money for our core service offerings
- Whether someone else in the Trust is already working on the same or a similar idea and if you should get together to develop it further
- If your idea can bring benefit across the Trust or even the whole NHS, or if the benefit is just a small and local one. All could qualify for inclusion in the Incubator but it is worth thinking it through
- Ideas that frustrate a lot of people such as: not being able to spend enough time with patients and service users; excessive bureaucracy; having so many emails that there’s no time to do any work; unproductive meetings
- Getting together with colleagues and/or service users as a way to identify new ideas
- Looking outside of Lancashire and the NHS to see if there are ideas that we can learn from
It takes just a few minutes to submit an idea. Start texting!
“The Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust (LCFT) Innovation Incubator”[Greenhouse] What is an Innovation Incubator? Innovation is about taking a new approach to your work which will result in an improvement in quality, a reduction in cost and/or a time saving. It can be a new way of doing a process, a new product or even […]