Supporting adult social care innovation (SASCI)

Innovation or doing things differently is often seen as a solution to the problems facing adult social care today and for the foreseeable future. Adult social care might seem to be an area where new approaches will naturally flourish (e.g. competition between providers, different people paying, choice over types of care and provider). Yet, while there are many innovations and good evidence that some benefit people using care services, they do not spread rapidly and are often do not become mainstream. Many get abandoned, despite seeming promising.
There may be several reasons for this but we are not sure what really stops good things being taken up. Compared to other parts of society, we don't know lots about innovation in social care and why things do not spread. Many organisations and people offer to help with innovation but we do not know much about what they do and how they do it, or what works. Overall, there has not been much effort to draw together experiences of innovating or changing things in adult social care to let people know what might help and avoid 'reinventing the wheel'.
This is the reason for our proposed research. We want to support the adult social care sector to start up, implement, spread and scale-up affordable innovations that work well. We will produce: 1) new evidence about the process of innovating (doing things differently), what influences the process (what helps and what hinders), what helps people and systems change, what support is available to help people, and the sector's experiences of and views about that support; 2) a theoretical framework (the 'big idea') for understanding social care innovation that will help to design, plan and learn about innovations; 3) an evidence-based discussion about innovation overall in the care sector and its prospects; 4) descriptions of types of social care innovations, including the people and organisations involved, and types of support for innovation.
If our research is to support social care to do things differently and better, then our findings need to be translated into actions. We will build and foster strong relationships with stakeholders (e.g. users/carers, care providers, local authorities) and work with them to design and choose the focus of the study and develop recommendations. Doing this, we will swap ideas and share learning, which should encourage use of the research. We will also ask people who have helped us with the research to tell us what they learnt, if/how they have used the findings, and what we could do better.
Innovation is a dynamic or changing process, involving many organisations and people. It needs to be understood in its particular context (e.g. support at home or a carers' group). So, we will develop illustrations or case studies of innovations around selected topics (e.g. integrating systems, making the most of human resources (people), promoting choice and control) to explore the process in-depth. We will explore how individuals, organisations and the wider context all influence innovation. We will focus on parts of adult social care where there is potential for a lot of learning (e.g. research evidence and capacity, stakeholder networks and knowledge leaders, organisational characteristics, 'misaligned' or 'perverse' incentives around costs and benefits). To develop more general claims about what influences innovation and what are the necessary conditions for it to flourish, we will study different types of innovations and conduct a national survey to test findings from the case studies.
Informed and supported by strong and diverse user and carer involvement, our study should a) inform decision-making about how to foster the right conditions and policies for innovation to flourish in adult social care; b) inform the design and planning of innovations, work out what innovations are more likely to succeed, and gain learning from innovations; and c) provide evidence-based recommendations for policy, practice and research.

The study will provide rich insights into the innovation process in adult social care (ASC), its drivers, the sector's capacity to innovate, the infrastructure for supporting innovation and perceptions of it. Our findings will inform multiple groups, including service providers; local and national government; NHS bodies; trade and professional associations; user and carer organisations; ASC practitioners and the public.
Our research will support the ASC sector to innovate successfully by producing the following outputs:
1. A theoretically-informed, evidence-based framework for understanding innovation in ASC of considerable value to everyone involved in developing and implementing ASC innovations, including policymakers and practitioner-researchers. It will inform the design of innovations; their implementation, scaling-up and roll-out; and help identify innovations more likely to succeed.
2. A qualitative and quantitative characterisation of innovation in the ASC sector, the sector's capacity to innovate and how conducive current conditions are to innovation. Together with the theoretical framework, this evidence will be useful for policymakers, organisations and individuals looking to innovate and those who stand to benefit. It will help locate local innovative practice in the national context and help decision-makers foster ASC innovation by identifying capabilities, activities and conditions necessary for innovation to flourish in ASC.
3. A qualitative and quantitative characterisation of the support infrastructure for ASC innovation, with analysis of how the infrastructure relates to the range of innovations, conditions for innovation and capacity for innovation. Recommendations about the direction of travel for building a support infrastructure for innovation will be developed so as to be of value to national and local policymakers, private and third sector organisations and others involved in innovation.
4. A typology of ASC innovations and work towards a typology of the infrastructure for ASC innovation, with accompanying web-based inventories detailing the range of innovations and support infrastructure within the sector. These will be useful resources for organisations and individuals, to help them identify innovations and contacts from whom they can learn more about how to design, implement and sustain such approaches.
5. Detailed insight into particular types of innovation (e.g. integration innovations) and challenges faced by the ASC sector (e.g. research capacity and use of research evidence in practice) emerging from stakeholder and public engagement activities as foci for the study. These findings will be of interest to stakeholders operating or using services in those specific areas.
Given the current limited evidence base, we also expect to generate recommendations for future policy, practice, research and (perhaps) approaches to impact.
Our strategy for impact focuses on developing strong partnerships and fostering relationships with networks of stakeholders throughout the study in order to exchange ideas and facilitate shared learning to increase potential for influence and impact. These relationships are likely to endure beyond the project to inform future research. We have developed partnerships with carer/public representatives and other ASC stakeholders, and will maintain these relationships through regular meetings, contact and communications. During the study we will build further relationships with a wider group of stakeholders, including more service users and carers. Stakeholders will shape the direction of the research, synthesise the findings and identify ways to communicate them to and discuss with different stakeholder groups. As far as possible, evidence will be made available during the course of the study. We will prepare briefings and blogs; and use our website and social media to improve reach, presenting findings using engaging infographics, visual notes and 'talking heads' films.