It can be hard to make strategy something that is actionable and that leads to real change. Strategy comes up against how things actually work, and can often be the loser (Culture eats strategy for breakfast[1], right?) Indeed, at our last meeting of National Contact Points (our liaison points with national governments), one of the questions put forward by a country was about how to develop an actionable innovation strategy, one that would support a...
Month: January 2020
Making the invisible visible. While this is one of my favourite phrases from our 2019 Global Trends report, it is also the phrase I find myself using to describe OPSI’s work with public sector innovation systems. We try to make the implicit explicit to allow people within the system to reflect “is this what we want and intended? If not, what can we do to change it?” And every system is unique and the evolution...
If you talk to public servants anywhere in the world about innovation, it usually doesn’t take long before the words “risk aversion” come up in conversation. A lot of people feel that trying new things in the public sector is difficult because there is little ability to take risks. There are many reasons why this might be so, but one issue that comes up fairly often, sometimes with a little shudder of the shoulders, is...