The City of Boroondara has completed the first year of its three year
innovation@boroondara program.
The brainchild of CEO Phil Storer, the program began when the City hired its first Innovation Leader, Rowena Morrow, in early 2013 to drive the organisation to become more innovative.
“As well as making the City of Boroondara more efficient and further boosting the already excellent service we provide our local community, innovation@boroondara is building the capacity of all staff to be innovators,” said Mr Storer.
“Having an Innovation Leader has meant we now have a framework in place where staff can contribute their ideas and the best can be developed, prototyped, evaluated and delivered.
The City of Boroondara now uses several tools to create opportunities for staff to contribute and discuss ideas including informal innovation conversations, innovation tournaments and challenges, plus an annual innovation showcase.
By far Boroondara’s most successful innovation tool to date has been the internal online ideas portal.
Launched last July, Boroondara’s staff have submitted 80 ideas via the portal.
Of those 80 ideas, over 70 percent have been developed by small teams into pilot prototypes.
“Boroondara’s online portal is a very open and transparent innovation tool where all staff can see the ideas and comment on them,” said Ms Morrow.
“I think that openness has meant staff are submitting the best ideas they have, rather than every idea they have.
“As a result, we’re getting concrete, valuable concepts that usually get to the prototype stage, if not implementation as well.”
Examples of some of the projects instigated by innovative thinking at Boroondara include Boroondara’s Library Service lending e-readers.
One of Boroondara’s librarians knew that many local people wanted to give their parents e-readers, but were uncertain about whether they would feel comfortable using them.
The program gives people a chance to ‘try before they buy’, lending them an e-reader with instructions on how to borrow e-books from the library.
“The Innovation Team helped the librarian who came up with the idea to pilot stage,” said Ms Morrow.
“It was launched on 22 May and while yet to be evaluated, initial feedback has been very positive.”
Other Boroondara staff ideas now being implemented include a business-sized card listing relevant Council and other local service phone numbers, and a temporary staff art exhibition that has received positive responses from both staff and community members.
“Some of these new ideas are remarkably inexpensive to implement.
“The art exhibition cost around $200 to stage and the phone number cards only $300.”
