Jennie Winhall

Jennie is an award winning designer and social innovator, who has been a pioneer of system innovation for the last 15 years, working with governments, municipalities, foundations and businesses to create greater systemic impact on social challenges.

Participle

Jennie was a founding member of Participle where she spent 10 years as Innovation Director, designing the relational public services outlined in the popular book Radical Help and supporting their scale-up across the UK both as social enterprises and through the organisation’s influence on public policy. Jennie designed and built a number of new services as exemplars of how more relational care and welfare could work in practice. She worked directly with the most disadvantaged groups in society to co-design new approaches that better suited their lives and aspirations, and ran multi-disciplinary teams to design and prototype new services and turn them into working social ventures which she helped to scale in partnership with local and central government. She is best known for working with families living in chronic crisis to co-create a service that puts them in the lead in creating better lives. Jennie co-designed Circle, a new kind of mutual for older people - a cross between a social club and a concierge service, that develops local relationships to provide low-level care, practical tasks and social engagement - which scaled to six regions of the UK.

Rockwool Foundation

Jennie started working with the Rockwool Foundation in Denmark in 2014 to set up a new Interventions Unit to tackle complex societal challenges at scale. She developed the unit’s innovation methodology, and led several multidisciplinary teams to co-create new approaches to youth employment, education, vocational training, integration and mental wellbeing with young people and their families.

Jennie designed the unit’s flagship initiative NExTWORK which operates in six municipalities across Denmark and is being evaluated as a random control trial. NExTWORK creates a network of local businesses and young people who work together to create new opportunities for work for disadvantaged young people and develop their work identity and has so far created better outcomes for thousands of young people. The scaling up of NExTWORK is based on a small set of system-shifting principles and the evaluation takes a principle-based approach too.

NExTWORK paved the way for Jennie to create the System Innovation Initiative, with Charlie, which has now become System Shift.

Future of Work

Jennie led the ground break Alt Now programme at the Banff Centre in Canada, exploring market based solutions to inequality. That led to the development of a programme on how to prepare people and communities for the Future of Work with artificial intelligence, in Canada and the UK. With Charlie she helped to launch the global Future Work Awards at the Royal Society of the Arts, which in turn led to the Economic Insecurity, Impact Accelerator, with 12 social ventures tackling work related insecurity. That programme then spawned the Job Design Lab, which Alt Now is developing with cities in the UK, as a new way for people to prepare for fundamental work transitions brought on by new technology and the green transition.

Design for social impact

Jennie was the first person in her family to go into higher education. After leaving Glasgow School of Art she won a prestigious Royal Society of Arts student design awards. Since then Jennie has been at the forefront of movements to make design more socially purposeful. She was among a handful of people who started the fields of Service Design and design for social impact. She wrote Transformation Design in 2004 which had a significant effect on the service design industry and spawned several university courses. She is a contributing author to several books including Design for Policy, a forthcoming chapter on service design for system change, and System Shifting Design with the UK Design Council.

Health, wellbeing and care

She played a key role in setting up the Innovation Centre for one of the UK’s largest NHS Mental Health Trusts; ran several healthcare innovation initiatives with DIG/AstraZeneca in China, the UK and the US, introducing a patient-centred approaches to innovation; was pivotal in setting up a place-based initiative in the US with AstraZeneca, Digitas LBi and other partners, working with local residents to co-design a local platform to raise the health of the whole community through life-style changes.

Teaching and mentoring

Jennie’s residential course of design and leadership at the Banff Centre’s Leadership Development centre won top ratings from participants for eight years. She teaches short courses on system innovation for both the MBA and EMBA programmes at the Skoll Centre, Saïd Business School, Oxford and Masterclasses for the Institute of Innovation and Public Purpose at UCL.Jennie has been a long time mentor for the social venture accelerator Bethnal Green Ventures in the UK, delivering core programme content for seven years; and is a Fellow and mentor for the social venture accelerator Zinc in the UK for the past four years. She is an occasional contributor to the Wolf Willow Institute in Canada.

She has given various highly regarded talks including to TedX Oxbridge on Building systems for the future while trapped in today's patterns Swedish Social Innovation Forum keynote on the Future of Work and labour market security RSA Student Design Awards 2021 Keynote Address

Advisory roles

She was a member of the advisory board for the UK Design Council’s Transform Ageing Programme, building new approaches to ageing and care in England; for the National Lottery Community Fund’s Growing Great Ideas Fund, an innovative fund to invest in system change initiatives on a ten year horizon and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s Emerging Futures Fund.