This blog post was authored by experts from the OECD Mission Action Lab, a joint initiative of the OECD Directorate for Science, Technology and Innovation, the OECD Directorate of Public Governance and the OECD Development Co-operation Directorate. It has been 10 years since Professor Mariana Mazzucato’s influential book “Entrepreneurial State” came out. It has inspired the European Union, states, agencies, regions, and cities around the globe to launch missions and mission-oriented…
Author: Piret Tõnurist
Take our needs assessment survey The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Mission Action Lab, together with the Danish Design Centre, is launching an international survey on implementing missions. The survey deadline is 13.12.21 and can be accessed here. The survey is open to all interested in missions or mission-oriented innovation approach: those who have launched or are involved in a mission, those who are still thinking about it or want to know more....
Intermediary report launch Over the past year the Observatory of Public Sector Innovation (OPSI) has worked together with the Government of Finland and the European Commission to build an anticipatory innovation governance model. As part of the work, the OECD assessed the current public policy steering system of Finland and its anticipatory capacity – the first results of the work are presented in a report accompanying the blog. Building an anticipatory innovation governance model First,...
Anticipatory innovation governance model – humble, yet ambitious Governments tend to look like powerful, overwhelming forces that are difficult to stop or change. Juggernauts if you will. Yet governments over decades have reformed a lot: they adopted new (and given away) services and tasks together with technological and societal development. They have taken on different public administration paradigms, successful and otherwise. The change, however, has been slow and, at times, painful. We all…
New Year’s resolutions are so frequently unfulfilled that it has become a cliché to cynically write them off as futile. We create them in the hopes of creating innovation in our lives, but often they fall short of the novel, implemented, impactful action that innovation implies. Why does this happen? Many would argue it’s to do with the resolutions themselves—their scope, ambition, execution, and definition. A quick internet search will find you countless advice articles...
Do you know about real-world cases and examples of innovation management? OPSI would like to hear from you. We are starting work with Vinnova, Sweden’s Innovation Agency to explore what good innovation management looks like in practice. We will take a systematic approach to understanding the role, nature, barriers, and enablers of innovation in an organisation. This means considering innovation activities within a wider context of (e.g., leadership, culture, processes, capabilities) rather…
We are taking OPSI’s portfolio exploration and assessment support into the virtual realm. We are asking for 20-30 minutes of your time to share initial thoughts and feedback on our first draft of questions for exploring: The way your organisation’s innovation portfolio is oriented Your organisation’s overall portfolio management capability Following the set of questions, there is an example output based on hypothetical inputs. We…
OPSI is researching innovation portfolios as part of our European Commission Horizon 2020 work and we are developing a self-guided portfolio assessment tool for people to analyse and explore their own organisational innovation portfolio. We welcome your feedback. Hero-innovators are imaginary Does your organisations still believe in hero-innovators? Probably not. Based on our research and observations, in order for innovation to be impactful, organisations need a lot of distributed…
In December 2019, OPSI launched a partnership with ITLA Children’s Foundation in Finland. The aim of the work is to examine mechanisms of Anticipatory Innovation Governance and to test some of these out on fast-changing challenges with high levels of uncertainty. To that end, we were together with Angela Hanson in Oulu and Vantaa at the end of February 2020 to kick-start a series of workshops on the topic. In particular, the anticipatory looking glass...
The annual meeting of the Mission-Oriented Innovation Network (MOIN) chaired by Prof. Mariana Mazzucato and Prof. Rainer Kattel took place at the Rockerfeller Foundation’s Bellagio Centre between March 27-29, 2019. In the picturesque setting by Lake Como, over 20 organisations worked on various aspects of mission-oriented innovation including evaluation and assessment, tools and methods to deliver on missions. I represented OPSI, as lead on systems thinking and anticipatory governance and my…