Creating the conditions for innovation to flourish

This chapter outlines some of the features, dynamics and constraints that characterise the social work and social care context in the UK, particularly within the field of extra-familial risks and harms. This discussion draws on a categorisation of ‘foundational contextual domains’ of innovation within which individual components may operate as barriers or enablers, depending on the degree to which they have been taken into account in planning and operationalisation. Individual innovation journeys may be particularly affected by one, several or all components within these foundational contextual domains. The chapter is structured with reference to our six-stage modelling of the innovation journey, which elaborates phases of: (1) mobilising; (2) developing; (3) designing; (4) integrating; (5) growing; and (6) wider system change. Within each stage, we consider ethical and practical principles for planning and implementing social care innovation. These should help an innovation to mobilise, flourish and sustain through its different stages, particularly in new systems and interventions at the interface between children’s social care, the multidisciplinary safeguarding field, third sector organisations and the transitional boundary to adult services with respect to young people in later adolescence.