Innovation support partnerships

We have designed a comprehensive support offer to equip funders and the innovators they support with the skills and tools to innovate, sustain and scale lasting impact.

We built this offer to address the critical support needs we’ve identified over 10 years of delivering data & digital transformations:

• Innovators need the full range of design, data, technical, commercial and sector skills – low confidence around knowledge gaps can deter new types of partnerships.
• Innovators need communities for knowledge exchange, guidance and inspiration, so that they don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
• Scaling effectively requires deep knowledge of complex systems. This often requires partnership building to bring together experts in data & digital innovation with collaborators who have experience of scaling innovations within the public sector.
• Funding data & digital innovation needs an agile approach, ensuring teams can build their understanding of the problem, and embed a ​‘test-learn-adapt’ cycle throughout. 
• The cliff-edge in many funding models limits long-term impact, and there is a critical need to support early thinking about the model and resources for sustainability.

We draw on our unique, multi-disciplinary expertise to provide end-to-end support that equips innovators with the skills and knowledge to develop, sustain and scale their ideas, including: 

• Skills training workshops, combining expertise from our library of training modules, alongside tailored support topics for specific impact areas. 
• Convening a learning community to leverage insights from peers, share resources, receive iterative feedback and foster broader networking. 
• Targeted technical coaching from sector experts across our diverse areas of expertise, including digital transformation, product development, data science, user research, strategy consultancy, public sector operations and innovation financing structures. 
• Communication and dissemination to help innovators make the public case on how their work can transform systems, including coordination of interactive​sessions and networking events. 

Social Finance supports impact innovators with the tools we know are needed to build their products and services:

• Human-Centred Design: explorative research, user-centered design and our experience in co-design with people and communities to make sure that innovations work for and with user groups. 
• Technical support: adopting agile product development practices and implementing a ​‘test-learn-adapt’ cycle throughout development to maximise impact.
• Support to scale: leveraging expertise in business case development and financial modelling to help innovators build the case for scale, map the resources they need, and embed ongoing evaluation and learning. 

Social Finance works with funders who want to invest in data and technological innovations that deliver on your impact goals:

• We’re experts in scaling impact. We use our Routes to Scale framework to support innovators to design for sustainability, drawing on our experience in designing and developing solutions from scratch that have successfully scaled.
• We design our support programmes around a phased innovation pathway to take a long-term, strategic view. 
• We’re driven by impact rather than technology – we focus on outcomes and target support to achieve them. 
• We act as your strategic learning partner to maximise the impact of each programme, adapting our approach in response to learnings, and developing learning materials to disseminate for wider impact.