You can't be successful at innovation unless you get your hands dirty. Clever ideas are useless unless you make them real.

We've learned that a successful approach consists of three stages:

Having a new idea

... which actually happens and becomes reality

... and produces evidence that shows impact

Having the idea is the easy bit, making it happen is much harder and demonstrating the impact is harder still.

It's no surprise to us that people conveniently forget about the evidencing of impact and concentrate on telling a good story instead.

Being evidence driven is vital for a good innovation culture. Having the data to back up the decisions that are made helps everyone get onboard with the vision and direction.

Our Innovation and Insight teams have always worked closely together at Bromford - but in the past two weeks we've literally moved them together in the Lab.

Why?

Creativity isn't an end in itself and new ideas and approaches have to demonstrate impact if they are to scale.

Over the next few weeks you'll see changes to our pipeline of work as we combine our knowledge and resources to solve problems in new ways.

We want Bromford to document innovation processes in an honest, detailed way. We believe this will be of benefit to future projects on evidence and innovation, and also be valuable to other individuals and organisations who are attempting their own innovations.