By examining our top ten examples of radical efficiency in depth, we were able to extract the factors they had in common. This helped us to understand how this innovation works, as well as being excited that it exists. Building on these insights, we developed a model for doing radical efficiency in practice. There are four parts to our Radical Efficiency model:
- New Insights – where new ideas come from
- New Customers – re-conceptualising your customers
- New Suppliers – looking again at who is doing the work, and reconsidering the role of the customer
- New Resources – tapping into latent resources locked up in the people, assets and organisations that we take for granted
Our model describing the ‘how’ of radical efficiency makes an important distinction between new challenges and new solutions. It differentiates between innovators who creatively rearrange resources and suppliers to generate new solutions to old problems – and those who think afresh about the nature of the problem faced by their communities, before coming up with ideas to tackle them. The innovators who only tackle solutions succeed in eking a bit more out of the current system. They generate small, incremental improvements to existing services with 2-5% cost savings. Innovators who ask new questions about their challenge can generate radical efficiency: different, better, lower cost public services. They generate major improvements for users and savings of 20-60%.
