Housing associations have developed a range of innovations. Over recent years these innovations have placed emphases upon services to existing users and ongoing incremental innovations, or continuous improvements to services in keeping with government public services programmes, such as Best Value. In this chapter we move on to explore the characteristics of innovative housing associations and seek to answer a number of questions. These include:

• • Are the innovative associations small or large?

• • Do they have many or only a few staff?

• • How extensive are their operations?

• • What is their geographical spread?

• • Are there staff specialists?

• • Have they appointed new senior managers recently or has their senior management team been static?

The answers to these questions will allow associations to rank themselves against our population of innovative associations, and compare themselves to the innovative characteristics and the archetypal innovative association presented in the conclusion to this chapter. The explanations of the innovative housing association we offer relate to the people or actors in the association, the nature of the organisation and its management.

The database used in the chapter includes 474 housing associations. These vary in size, from around 100 homes in management to over 20,000. The housing associations included in the analysis are those that are developing and/or own 250 or more units. While these associations represent only about a quarter of the total number of registered housing associations, they constitute the population of ‘active’ housing associations (Chapter 3), that is housing associations who have a critical size (250 or more units) or who are actively developing regardless of size. This distinction is important, as it allows the analysis to ignore registered housing associations with no intention of being innovative because their aims are to manage and maintain their stock. Small almshouses would fall into this category. The analysis presented here does, nevertheless, offer useful lessons to smaller associations, in keeping with the findings in the last chapter which noted smaller associations’ use of partnerships for innovation.

These ‘active’ associations in our study are also those that are regulated by the Housing Corporation. This is because they are either currently in receipt of, or have been the recipients of public subsidy. As part of the annual regulatory process these associations complete a detailed questionnaire that provides information on their staff, organisation, management, and so on: the Regulatory and Statistical Return (RSL) (Long).