Radical Efficiency a Practical Guide - Nesta

PART 1: WHY RADICAL EFFICIENCY? 6PART 1:WHY RADICALEFFICIENCY?Radical efficiency is all about different, better and lowercost public services. It is about innovation that deliversmuch better public outcomes for much lower cost.Radical efficiency is not about simply improving currentservices. It is about creating new and different services withmuch better outcomes for users. This is necessary becauseof short-term pressures on public finances and medium-termpressures on the old ways of delivering public services.In the short term, if we simply cut 25-30 per cent out of existingservice models, users will suffer. Services are often close tobreaking point already. Even with major operational efficiencies– like streamlining procurement or making better use ofbuildings – with cuts of this scale there will be no choice but tooffer the public ‘less for less’.In the medium term, we know that existing services arestruggling to deal with big, messy problems like obesity, climatechange and anti-social behaviour.So for the sake of the public and the professionals who areaccountable for quality service provision, there is a real casefor practitioners to learn how to develop different and bettermodels – not just lower cost versions of existing ones.Our case studies of radical efficiency from across the globedemonstrate cost-savings of between 20 and 60 per cent. Weare not arguing that these innovations can or should be directlytransplanted from Scandinavia, Africa, South America or theUS to the UK. We argue instead that the conditions and ways