Service Innovation Deep Dive: Capturing and Leveraging Learnings from Service Innovation during COVID-19

The COVID-19 crisis has brought about unplanned and radical changes to the provision of services across the community service sector. Services that have a strong focus on face-to-face service delivery to meet their clients’ needs have been severely impacted by the effects of the pandemic. As a result, many organisations faced a period of rapid learning, experimentation and innovation.

The Service Innovation Deep Dive: Capturing and leveraging learnings from service innovation during COVID-19 report examines how services in Western Australia in the aged care, emergency relief and disability sectors adapted or innovated their delivery models during COVID-19 and their ambitions moving forward. The research was conducted as part of the Pulse of the for-purpose sector and Build Back Better program of the Centre for Social Impact and was undertaken by a research team from all three CSI centres: Swinburne University of Technology, University of New South Wales and The University of Western Australia.

Each state and territory in Australia has had vastly different COVID-19 experiences, restrictions, and impacts. To capture the nuance and depth of these experiences, the team explored their respective state’s findings separately before coming together to discuss commonalities. This report presents insights and themes from interviews with Western Australian organisations. Separate reports detail the New South Wales and Victorian insights, and a national report focuses on the themes that were common across the three states.

The WA COVID-19 experience

Western Australia is well known to have had a very mild COVID-19 experience, with ‘lockdown’ conditions including regional border closures, restrictions to operation for certain businesses, and limits to face-to-face gathering that were implemented in mid-March 2020 easing by mid-May. Schools were closed for only three weeks, and the state returned to almost pre-COVID-19 conditions by mid-June 2020 (Callis et al. 2020).

The impact of COVID-19 varied between organisations as well as within the different functions of organisations. Organisations experienced increased demand for many services and decreased demand for others; many organisations had to temporarily shut down face-to-face programs or services; and several organisations adjusted their staffing and processes to enable working from home and plan responses to the pandemic.