Trying to innovate in any environment is difficult, says Claire Donaldson, co-founder of the Innovation Hub at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.
“You’re at the frontier, so you can’t really direct or explain. You can just give vision and passion and support and money and resources”. It’s harder still for those who are building transformational services within government, she suggests. “We are using taxpayers’ money… So there’s a hell of a lot of responsibility there, and there’s a lot of risk aversion in the civil service. And quite rightly so. Any risk, any change, needs to be done with incredible wisdom and analysis and thought.”
Donaldson is speaking as a guest on the CSW Changemakers podcast series. She says she believes the only way to embed an innovative culture and support new ways of working in the civil service is to put aside the structures that reinforce traditional approaches. “I think we have these operating models and hierarchies that are making it even more difficult in the civil service. And one of the things I’m passionate about is thinking about skills, not grades,” she says.
Change on this scale is “not easy and not quick,” she adds. “But I guess with the Innovation Hub, we were putting a flag in the sand to say, ‘We’re over here. Does anyone want to join us and do some experimentation in a safe way, in an ethical way… learning together to work in a different way?’”
“What have we learned in the past year? Not all senior leaders have all the confidence and all the answers and all the skills”
Donaldson describes the key components of this new model: “Multidisciplinary teams; thinking about skills rather than grades; and working in the open, being a community.” She describes it as scary, but also exciting. “And when you work in this way, rather than starting… all on your own in a dark corner, when you invite other people in from the very beginning and have that team around you with diverse skills and backgrounds and thoughts, it becomes more efficient.” This in turn leads to better outcomes, she says. “So I think we have to be brave.”
The first area of focus was upskilling, once she had the go-ahead to take the Innovation Hub forward. “We created an academy to give people the confidence and the skills to work in a slightly different way, and then we created a more traditional network, with a speaker series… getting people in to teach us.” The idea was to form a community, she says: “If someone had a nitty gritty beginning to a policy or a problem or a process, we were the people they could work with to take that initial step towards working in the open, working collaboratively and creatively.”
Donaldson stresses the importance of constantly learning through connections across government, but also with other sectors and with the public. “We want to start creating constructive relationships with the people that we serve, particularly the voices that we might struggle to hear from because they don’t have the time, the money or the resources to take part in a government consultation.” Learning from people’s lived experience is part of it, she says, but she wants to go further: “How can we bring them into policymaking and service design?”
The Innovation Hub launched just over a year ago in May 2024. What are some of the tangible things that have come out of it? “There’s a lot of focus on AI at the moment,” Donaldson says, partly due to the machinery of government change that brought the Government Digital Service and the Central Digital and Data Office into DSIT. “And there’s a real interest in how we can improve efficiency across government. So what we’re doing a lot of at the moment is learning from these two digital teams and supporting their pilots and their test-and-learns.”
"We’re still very much at the point with our communication where, unless it’s got a minister announcing something new, it’s really hard to say anything to anyone”
Donaldson is candid about what hasn’t gone so well. “I’m always sharing failures because I think that’s where the real learning happens,” she says. “It’s really good to be able to say, ‘Oh, if only we hadn’t done this, and if only we’d done that.’”
She thinks a key lesson to come out of a failure over the past year is that “not all senior leaders have all the confidence and all the answers and all the skills”. There’s a lot more work to do “on upskilling our leaders and getting leaders into government who have experience of working this way, and then role modelling,” she says. “Because, you know, a lot of people are so busy with business as usual that innovation is still seen as a nice to have. So we need to change that mindset.”
However, when it’s put to her that one team can’t change the whole government operating model on its own, and that senior-level support is vital for seeing through any significant change, Donaldson agrees.
“I think the cross-government campaigns are really helping,” she says. “There’s now this cross-government innovation leaders group and a few of us are going to be on that, so that will really help with us sharing our learning and pushing for different ways of working.”
From where Donaldson is standing, the coming year looks exciting. She’s looking forward to “getting that lived experience into our policymaking and into our services”. In particular, she wants to engage with young people. “Because I think if we are looking at technology, we’re missing a trick if we’re not talking to them. Whenever I do workshops with young people, everything I think of, they trump it. You know, I have so many lightbulb moments.”
Does she have any top tips for officials with ideas for change in the civil service? “Just be brave and grasp the opportunity,” she says. “Try and live what you’re saying you want the civil service to be. Try and get experience of what’s going on in the real world and infuse that into your policymaking or your service design.”
The other key thing is communication: “When I’ve worked outside of government, communication is that regular drum beat of ‘What’s going on? What are you working on? What are you thinking right now?’… Whereas we’re still very much at the point with our communication where, unless it’s got a minister announcing something new, it’s really hard to say anything to anyone.”
That, indeed, is Donaldson’s final word on the matter. “Work in the open. Really get a steady drum beat of what you’re thinking, what you’re feeling, what you’re working on,” she says. “Keep telling the stories.”
This article first appeared in the summer 2025 edition of the Civil Service World Magazine, which you can read here
Listen to the CSW podcast here