Lean Startup model has not been mainstreamed in the public sector. Its principles and process often run in direct opposition hierarchy, policies, and incentives of bureaucracy. For example, our team had three operating principles: be cross-sector, collaborative, and apply a lean startup approach. In practice, we could engage any executives within government or outside of government going through the typical approvals.

Current Phase:

We've handed off the departmental policy on policy and program experimentation, and associated products, to the Strategic Policy Division. We have handed-off the whole of government products/services, e.g. Policy Innovation Portal and the Policy Community Conference, to a new team responsible for revitalizing the policy function across the federal government.

Essentially, our mandate was to gain clarity on what would be required to drive more contemporary policy instrument choice, identify levers for our desired impact, create the minimum viable products/services to shift the target levers, and then to have what we'd built absorbed into core operations. Because we used a Lean Startup approach, one of the key implementation tools that we used was working directly with departmental teams advancing policy and program innovations/experiments (e.g. project scoping, design and implementation, and barrier navigation).

We supported both small teams (with $15K) and large teams (responsible for building a $1B program). Another core principle for our team was reporting out on what we were learning, as it:

- It helped us reflect on what has and hasn’t worked

-It supported other practitioners responsible for similar work

-We wanted to model the behaviours we feel are most appropriate

-It drives greater research and development (R&D) in public and social impact sectors

X-sector: - One of the teams core principles was to be crossed sector. It mean that we constantly engaged experts outside of government on new policy tools, change management, social R&D, etc. in order to increase our ability to thoughtfully implement the work we were pursuing and avoid rookie mistakes.

Government of Canada: Given that we were a smaller team, we always engaged other teams with similar mandates across the federal government to share work. Often we would create and maintain the platform, and we'd have other teams input the content or expertise.

Lean Startup model prioritizes engagement with end-user, so we spent a lot of time providing direct support for teams and then mapping where they're work was getting sped up or slowed down. Using that knowledge, we then crafted our theory of impact and core work streams. Our close working relationship with operational staff also allowed up to close the often large gap in trust and language between the innovation team and everyone else.

37.5% conversion rate: (add a prize/challenge to medium-term planning, use a prize/challenge for interdepartmental coordination, host a policy innovation practitioner conference, use a hackathon to prioritize data for publishing, use blockchain back-end for public disclosures, apply data analytics to administrative data, add public sector innovation publications to weekly policy research summaries, embedding policy innovation into results & delivery)

Client Request Growth Rate - Linear growth of support requests, i.e. 2 requests in Oct 2015, and 15 requests in Oct 2016

Policy Innovation Portal - Over it's initial 8-months the Portal had had approximately 7,000 unique visits and 25,000 total page views. The Portal consistently captured 70% of policy innovation content consumed on Government of Canada wiki.

Symbolic Gestures - Deputy Minister sign-off on policy on policy and program experimentation, including associated performance metrics for executives - “My Director General told me that experimentation is going to be in our performance agreements; which of these experimentation options would be best?” is an example of the impact on the middle management layer that is often hard to engage with regards to public sector innovation initiatives.

Most execs don’t think about public admin. R&D (they’re too busy, it’s too hard, they’re aren’t good incentives, etc.). If there is buy-in, it’s seen as a nice to have, not an essential function to be resourced appropriately. To address this, we took on the added responsibility of trying to shift organizational culture (e.g. exec performance agreements), as well as coordinating resources and influence across teams with similar mandates.

Leadership: our DG and ADM applied a “light touch” so we were given the time to clarify our mission and flexibility to pursue it in the way we thought most effective; they also supported our principles (cross-sector, collaborative, lean startup), and our theory of change.

Institutional location: working within the coordinating policy shop, and reporting to the responsible DG and ADM legitimized our work and provided access to high-value intervention points.

Incubation model: the IN.spire team’s incubation model provided accelerant (core team skills available; ecosystem primed; conducive culture, space and tools available), a shield (reduced exposure to bureaucracy and executive taskings), velocity maintenance (core team skills available, risk manage budget, team recruitment and onboarding, administrative hacks)

Team members: entrepreneurial, networked, cross-sector Timing: alignment with GoC priority areas (i.e. results & delivery, experimentation).

High replicability if there are appropriate conditions.

Thoughtful implementation: get good design and implementation tactics from experts who are often outside of the public sector.

Managing up: you can't provide strong advice if you don't protect time to think, and create space to engage with experts, end-beneficiaries and other networks/organizations responding. Creating and articulating a theory of change helped push back on tasking.

Leadership alignment: need leadership all the way up the chain of command to be on side. Even one missing link will create fatal bottlenecks for your innovation.

Leadership pelotons: execs move often, so you need a community of leaders championing your work.

Take an asset based approach: work with what is already working within your environment.

Move the middle: don't focus on early adopters as this will not result in the system change you seek - you need to find a way to change the habits and routines of the early- and late-majority.