Housing Futures is entering its ‘insight’ phase – what does this mean for you?

Housing Futures, our UK-wide innovation programme, is now four weeks in and we are thrilled with how it has progressed.

We started with an ‘identify’ phase, asking for housing association residents and staff in every region of the country to tell us about the biggest challenges we should be tackling. A big thank you to everyone who took the time to contribute – we received hundreds of brilliant responses.

We had a big variety in responses, but some themes emerged, including challenges around the climate crisis, fuel poverty, the wellbeing of residents and building safety.

Throughout February we are running our first steering group meetings, in every region of the country, and the first task for each group is to consider all of the feedback from our identify phase and decide which challenge to focus on. This challenge will then move into the next stage of the Housing Futures innovation programme – the insight phase.

The Insight phase 

The key to great innovation is falling in love with the problem. Once we have identified a regional challenge our task is to dig deep into it and understand what’s going on. We’ll be asking ourselves – what really is the problem here? And why is it happening?

By working together to get under the skin of the challenge, we have the best chance of successfully developing a collaborative solution in response to it.