I wrote that article I mentioned last time. And a few days later I had a new LinkedIn connection with someone in Rostock who runs a Centre for Entrepreneurship for the university, and who, a first in this entire state, at least from what I can see, is “certified in Service Design Thinking” according to their bio.
I asked for a chat. We had the chat, on Zoom, and this person told me that they are doing amazing stuff with our clinic and everything is great. If people have ideas for things they want to change, they can go apply to the “Inspired” competition.
I was around the clinic environment for just a few months when I started looking for the people doing innovation. Someone with the job title of “digital” anything. I asked inside the clinic, I searched, I even asked the Chief Digital Officer of the university that the clinic is attached to and she didn’t know. I found nothing.
Until this week.
And this guy (because of course it was a guy) sits down with me for half an hour and tells me how great everything is and how great the stuff is they are doing with the clinic, and then he had to move on to the next thing.
After the chat I looked up the ideas competition and it’s a startup competition so completely not relevant to people who have problems with the clinic processes.
So rather than writing the 2500 words in the article for that silly magazine I could have written 15. “Asking people for ideas with profit as the main goal won’t result in better processes.” User need is the first principle for improved processes and services in the public sector. Not “one criterion out of five” in a startup competition, among things like market potential analysis, founders’ skills and unique selling point. (The aforementioned Chief Digital Officer is on the Jury for this thing. She obviously didn’t think of the head of this Centre as someone in a position of Service Innovation Consultant for the clinic, like he did himself.)
This guy is extremely protective of his relationships - after all, he’s the one advising on this stuff, and if I come in there and say “actually that’s rubbish”, he’ll look very bad. I get that. But if I meet any of the people in the hallway who I’ve tried to talk to about “change”, I definitely have something to talk to them about. And we can come up with ideas to do despite of this guy . A grassroots initiative or something limited to the department.
I can definitely confirm my feeling from the very beginning: If whatever the clinic does in order to change with the times is so hidden that can’t find it despite how much I look, it’s not doing its job.