Skip to content
An official website of the OECD. Find out more
Log In | Register |
Created by the Public Governance Directorate

This website was created by the OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation (OPSI), part of the OECD Public Governance Directorate (GOV).

How to validate authenticity

Validation that this is an official OECD website can be found on the Innovative Government page of the corporate OECD website.

AIR
Questions
Cases
Approaches
Themes
About
Contact

Anticipatory Innovation Starter Kit Portugal

Description

An Anticipatory Innovation Starter Kit (AISK) is a set of guides, tools, and step-by-step instructions for a user to learn from and be inspired to take action towards developing anticipatory and foresight practices in the Portuguese Public Administration. This kit will allow public organisations to have at their disposal a practical, actionable and appropriate methodology, thus allowing them to respond with quality and efficiency to emerging and future challenges that lie ahead. This methodology offers public entities a way to anticipate changes and transformations and prepare themselves for future challenges.

Objectives and impacts

The idea is to put anticipatory innovation into practice: building an actionable, user-centric and problem-oriented kit for beginners. Hence, the envisaged audience would be those at the strategic and operational levels of government who have little experience in future studies and foresight.

The following guiding principles have driven the initiative:

  • User friendliness: enabling an accessible and easily explainable instrument, which assumes little prior specialist knowledge and experience.
  • Problem-solving approach: focused on real needs in order to make it meaningful for practitioners.
  • Do-it-yourself/learning by doing: the user can engage autonomously with anticipatory innovation in an autodidact process.

The end goal is two-fold:

  • Starting point for capacity-building: promoting the awareness and practice of anticipatory innovation among beginners (beginner practitioners).
  • Shortening the knowledge/action gap: giving anticipatory innovation an actionable and contextual nature, integrating it in the organisational practices.

Design

The project started with a prototype. Several sessions were held with officials and civil servants from various public administration organisations to give their insights on AISK and test its tools, as well as owning the opportunity to test its application in real projects:

  • A Workshop preceded by a webinar co-organized with the OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation, aimed at the leaders of Portuguese public administration organisations, to explore the concepts and different tools of AISK based on the characteristics and specificities of the Portuguese context and reality. The workshop had the following specific goals:
  • Test concepts from the AISK with people who know the end users
  • Gather potential problems and use cases for future AISK users
  • Clarify users’ most relevant challenges (barriers and enablers) while engaging with anticipatory innovation in their contexts
  • LabX held two collaborative sessions with contextual portraits obtained from the application of a tool and/or technique taken from AISK to public administration teams, ensuring the testing in context of the tools in this methodological package and the subsequent production of results analysis reports of the sessions, with a view to a characterization of the public body that hosts the session and the return of contributions that allow them to improve their activity.

These two-hour sessions, which involved real projects and challenges of public administration, had as specific objective:

  • Demonstration of the potential of anticipatory innovation through the concrete application of a starter kit tool in a public organization. At the end of the sessions the LabX delivered a report to the teams with the main results of the application of the tool to his project or challenge.
  • By obtaining a demonstrative example, the promotion of this methodology can be supported by tangible results – and it is intended to achieve a practical hands-on involvement by participants who are still, in general, in the first stages of familiarity with anticipatory innovation.
  • Test tools in real context and introduce improvements and optimizations in AISK resulting from learning

Impacts

Anticipatory innovation in is a practice largely unknown to most of the Portuguese Public Administration. Participants in the above sessions noted that the kit can be a catalyst for introducing anticipatory innovation in public organisations. This area of innovation and the appropriation of the tools in the kit requires familiarisation with the theme and the tools, as well as the creation of a culture of planning and preparing for the future.

This incubation and experimentation of the Kit, with concrete projects, demonstrated its viability as an instrument to support public organisations in the adoption of anticipatory innovation. It is a document that will probably have to be evolved in subsequent stages to fully respond to the needs of its envisioned users, through more applications with other organisations and focusing more on the more complex tools, thus accumulating learning to optimise it. Its evolution will have to be accompanied by a dissemination strategy and most likely there will have to be an interactive digital area dedicated to the topic to support entities to make use of the tools in the kit, if necessary, specifically for the more complex tools.

Reflections and evaluation

LabX intends to explore and evolve this version and, at the same time, promote its dissemination in the Portuguese Public Administration. This kit will be available at the beginning of 2022, to be used and appropriated by the Portuguese Public Administration.

Further information

For more information please visit LabX.