From spark to scale - Part 1
Reflections on catalysing change in complex environments
Shortly before I left Connected Places Catapult, a colleague working on the Innovation Procurement Empowerment Centre (IPEC) asked me what I had learned about seeding and scaling innovative ventures from the experience of establishing IPEC.
It was a great question, and I’ve been reflecting on it ever since.
IPEC grew from a simple roundtable discussion in summer 2019, exploring the true nature of ‘the procurement problem’. From that humble beginning it grew, attracting like minded allies, influence and (eventually) funding. By 2023 it had transmogrified from passion project into an initiative of strategic significance to the organisation and national partners, and was relaunched as a national centre of excellence. Since then it has gone on to influence national policy and expand its audience still further.
As it happens, IPEC was just one of several experiments in tactical innovation I seeded around that time, during a particularly rich season in my career for intrapreneurship. These experiments often began as insurgent initiatives, lightly resourced at the fringes of mainstream operations, designed to test an idea or build a movement. Not all of these efforts achieved ‘escape velocity’, growing into fully fledged programmes, but all of them provided valuable learning, informing and improving my future endeavours.
Reflecting on these ventures, the lessons that emerge are not about complex management theory, but about fundamental principles of mindset and method. They are simple truths, hard-won through practice.
Lesson 1: Adopting the Intrapreneur’s Mindset
Anyone aspiring to catalyse change from within an organisation must first adopt the intrapreneur’s mindset. This is a blend of two critical, and seemingly contradictory, impulses: a profound humility about your own limitations and a radical bias for action.
The humility comes from knowing that no truly significant venture is a solo pursuit. Few, if any, of the initiatives I’ve been part of could have been achieved alone. This understanding led to one of my most fruitful experimental ventures: creating an agile bench of Associates. Following a financial consolidation at Future Cities Catapult, the organisation needed a way to draw on deep expertise at low cost. The Associates - an incredible group which included a former Lord Mayor, a Nobel laureate, and a retired MEP - provided deep specialist skills on tap. Implementing and scaling this experiment required close collaboration, new processes, and significant effort to educate the wider team (of which more in Part 2), but these individuals quickly became the collaborative cornerstone for much of what followed.
No truly significant venture is a solo pursuit
The second part of the intrapreneur's mindset is the courage to just start somewhere.
Lots of people have ideas; intrapreneurs are the ones who step out and give it a go, even when the final destination is unclear. When we launched the 5G Action Learning Network (5G ALN), this meant boldly inviting local authorities to join something that didn't yet exist. At a time when large foreign corporations were approaching cash-strapped cities across the UK offering to finance the rollout of digital infrastructure, one of the Associates convinced me of a need to equip councils to make informed decisions. The 5G ALN was conceived as a peer-learning and co-commissioning vehicle to make the investment case for establishing publicly owned ‘neutral host networks’ for 5G, rather than outsourcing critical systems to third parties. The project was presented as a pilot and a cohort of authorities joined to co-design the content and share the journey.
Lesson 2: Master the Insurgent’s Method
Having the right mindset is crucial, but it must be paired with a practical method. Insurgent initiatives are by definition lightly resourced and operate at the edges. They cannot rely on large budgets or formal authority. Instead, their power comes from a specific method: using just enough structure to convene allies and build momentum.
The origin of IPEC wasn't a detailed project proposal, but a single roundtable discussion. The ‘structure’ was just a room, an invitation, and a shared question. From that one event, supported by the wise counsel of Malcolm Harbour CBE (another brilliant Associate), we commissioned and published a series of articles from roundtable attendees. Rather than using the organisation’s official website for this, I used the digital publishing platform Medium, which gave me greater agility and flexibility to drive the initiative forwards. (Critically, I had support from a senior sponsor to take this agile approach, an important distinction between the intrapreneur and the rogue operative.) This low-cost, high-visibility campaign was enough to build an engaged audience, mobilise external partners, and demonstrate the potential to internal decision-makers, which in turn expanded my freedom to pursue the venture.
Aim for just enough structure to convene allies and build momentum
Just enough structure to be effective was also a design feature of the award-winning Cabinet Office Policy School (COPS). Whilst working in central government, I was an early alumni and then co-leader of this immersive training programme which was designed to compete with traditional learning and development providers. Taking the form of week-long ‘learning sprint’ framed around a real-world policy problem set by a local authority partner, COPS integrated talks from practitioners in pioneering policy tools (e.g. behavioural insights, service design, commercial partnerships, social impact bonds), with field trips to deep dive into the challenge, culminating in a pitch to the Cabinet Secretary, and council chief executive.
COPS alumni reported significant improvements in their understanding and capabilities and routinely cite the experience as pivotal to their future careers. The ‘structure’ which enabled this initiative - a problem statement, a room, some guest speakers, and some participants - was very modest in organisational terms, yet the value it unlocked was tremendous. This is the insurgent's method: leveraging minimal structure to create maximum value and build a movement from the ground up.
“I have been hugely impressed with Policy School and initiatives like it that have sprung up – often as self-starting initiatives delivered outside people’s day jobs… Cabinet Office Policy School is an excellent imaginative example of how we harness the talents and energies of current civil servants and embrace a creative, immersive learning concept.” (Sir Jeremy Heywood, Cabinet Secretary, 2012-18)
Getting from spark to scale
To recap the key insights from my experience of intrapreneurship:
In an age of AI, where you can get virtual expertise at a click, never doubt the real value in working with passionate, informed individuals – my thanks to all the Associates, colleagues and partners who have inspired and aided the initiatives mentioned here.
Just start somewhere (ideally, with air cover from a friendly senior sponsor).
A modest amount of structure - just enough to capture and diffuse insights, identify and pursue shared interests - can unlock huge value.
However, as many of us know, getting started is only half the battle. In Part 2 of my reflections, I will explore the common - and often hidden - barriers that cause promising initiatives to stall, and introduce a framework for navigating the difficult but essential journey from spark to scale. I'll share what happened next with my own experiments in intrapreneurship as well as lessons from my time in the UK central government Implementation Unit, investigating why major policy programmes stall. Be sure to follow me on LinkedIn and at Recurve to stay updated.
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