Municipality of The Hague: vision and overview of healthcare innovation
The challenge
The aim of Care & Innovation action programme is to ensure that technology aligns more effectively with residents’ care and support needs. An incredibly complex challenge involving many different parties and interests.
Over the course of such a large program, a program team can easily become entangled in all the projects and their individual goals. And even when the assignment is clear and the vision is strong, how do you maintain oversight and keep a firm grip on the execution of all components?
As the first phase came to a close, the program team wanted to clearly map out everything they had accomplished so far – and where they currently stood. To show how the Municipality of The Hague is bringing together the social domain and the tech world, we created an interactive, clickable, visual. At the same time, we developed a visualization of all subprojects and involved parties.
All to provide a clear, comprehensive overview.
Crossing domains with many different stakeholders
Technological innovations — and the transformative power of the tech sector with its start-ups, entrepreneurs, and investors — are exactly what’s needed to truly innovate the social domain. The major challenge lies in connecting two worlds: the social domain and the tech world. These worlds don’t always meet naturally. To ensure that The Hague is prepared for upcoming developments, and can benefit from them as much as possible, the municipality needed to take an active role.
Together with various partners in the city, they launched the action program.
Exchange and collaboration between residents, entrepreneurs, care chain partners, care providers, educational and research institutions, and the municipality are essential. When you look at the action program, you see many different perspectives – each with its own challenge. Every issue is different. Differences in funding and legislation can sometimes hinder innovation, and broad interventions or programs can be difficult to implement due to the sheer number of stakeholders involved.
Maintaining oversight on a major innovation challenge
For each partner and perspective, sub-goals were defined. The action program brings all these sub-goals together into one coherent approach. Several large underlying programs sit beneath it, each working from a single perspective to gradually shift the system – making care innovation possible together.
Ultimately, the municipality aims to make itself unnecessary and ensure that all parties can continue independently.
Innovation is a team sport in which everyone must be involved – an iterative process carried out by people with different areas of expertise. To bring people along, the shared importance must be clear to everyone. Visuals and roadmaps help align and keep everyone aligned, because change requires imagination.
“Ideally, I would start with what residents need and how we can strengthen that with technology. In practice, I see it happening differently. It takes a lot of coordination and small steps to connect the innovative with the old systems.”
Dreaming big while taking small steps
Damiët Groen, Program Manager for Care and Innovation, describes the challenge: “Ideally, I would start with what residents need and how we can strengthen that with technology. In practice, I often see it happening the other way around. Step by step, I hope we can connect the innovative with the old systems.”
We soon started calling it “visualizing dreamscapes,” because instead of focusing on constraints and obstacles, we took the ideal world as our starting point. This allowed us to map all collaboration partners, the system landscape, and the underlying programs. In multiple co-creation sessions, we explored both the ideal and current situations in detail — making all remaining steps clear and manageable.
The result
Interactive visual: revealing the world behind the dreamscape
Of course, as a program team you need a clear overview of your own program, but it’s just as important to keep communicating your work to others. Sharing and validating innovations — even while they’re still in development — helps build support. People should be able to see and understand what sits behind that dreamscape, even when you’re not there to explain it.
Visual overviews and animations support this and sharpen the plan even further, because they help people spot overlaps, opportunities, and possibilities — and see how they fit into the bigger whole. For that reason, we created an interactive version: a clickable visual.
Ready for more vision
We’d be happy to help you shape your next steps. Get in touch with Thomas.
Visual Strategist
