Join our Housing Innovation Community

I recently joined SFHA on a 12-month secondment as Innovation and Future Thinking Lead. Many thanks to everyone who has got in touch, the response has been fantastic – it seems there is an appetite for Scottish housing associations to come together to create something new, which is exciting.

I have spent my first few weeks coming up with a plan and here it is:

Home of the future

The opportunity: innovation in design, construction and maintenance will deliver higher standards and maintain affordable rents. The Home of the Future will be designed around the individual needs and desires of people living in them and will bring people together.

The challenge: can the housing and construction sectors, and others, come together to create a vision of future living?

Customer service transformation

The opportunity: digital technology will transform how housing associations work, making staff and services more agile, more responsive to customer needs and more efficient. Housing association customers will be digitally connected, bringing wide economic and social benefits.

The challenge: how will different types of customers and staff experience services in the digital future, and what does this mean for housing associations now?

Tackling poverty and demonstrating impact

The opportunity: many people on low incomes feel powerless, denied the same choices as others and often paying over the odds for goods and services. Housing associations enable people and communities to be resilient. However, we could do even more to improve the lives of the people we are here for.

The challenge: can we collectively develop practical approaches for housing associations to co-design local services and demonstrate impact on poverty and the economy on an on-going basis?

Are you passionate about one of these areas? Do you have ideas that you don’t know what to do with? If so, this is your chance to come together with others to create something special.

For each these three areas, we will have a core team who will oversee the work and develop proposals and ideas for key stakeholders. The core teams will be made up of between 15– 20 people each; as diverse a group as possible, with a wide range of experience and perspectives.

Being part of the core group would entail coming along to a one-day innovation boot-camp in August, where we will come together as a team, agree our plan of action, and try out a range of different innovation tools which we may use during the year. We’ll also agree how we’d like to keep in touch and work together as a team.

Please contact me at lwilson@sfha.co.uk if you would like to be part of our new Scottish housing innovation community. Let me know if you’d like to be part of one the core teams, or if you aren’t able to commit to this, if you’d like to be kept up to date and input as we progress.

I look forward to hearing from you.