“It’s nice in principle, but where do we start?” In our collaboration with countries, this is a question we often encountered in relation to the application of the OECD Declaration on Public Sector Innovation. We learned that identifying the first step is often the hardest. In response, the OECD Innovation Playbook 1.0 was launched in 2022, offering public officials and managers a solid starting point to apply these principles effectively. Today, we’re excited to introduce...
Posts on Innovation Declaration
“We create and re-create narratives throughout our lives to make sense of what happened, to process experience, to interpret and reinterpret our view of the world as life unfolds. I believe that beautiful and difficult process is what it is to be human.” Lauren Oakes For me, significant transitions in life prompt such introspection and recreation of narratives – to reflect on key moments that have shaped who I am and how I think. Recently,...
Asking people to do things or think differently is not always welcome. In the public sector, new things are often (or can seem to be) in competition with existing work or priorities. This is one reason why we at OPSI strongly support public sector innovation networks (and communities or practice / forums / etc.). They can be valuable means to connect with like-minded others who you can learn from, share with and sometimes just vent to...
Advice for Making Your Strategy Stand Out Over the past few years, innovation has become a popular term in the public and private sectors. Many are beginning to look for ways to make their company or unit more innovative, wanting to offer a service, product, or policy that is different and more creative than what currently exists. But when everyone else also tries to think ‘differently,’ how does one actually do so? This challenge can...
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...
Recently, OPSI travelled to Latvia to participate in the top-level managers conference “Dare + experiment + create = innovation.” This event, hosted by the State Chancellery and #GovLabLatvia, sought to further build the innovative capacity of top-level managers in the Latvian administration. During the event, leaders interacted with the OECD’s Declaration on Public Sector Innovation by looking at how to operationalise and contextualise the OECD Declaration to fit the Latvian context. The…
This is a guest post from Magnus Karlsson, project manager, innovation management system at RISE Research Institutes of Sweden and national expert and chair of TK 532 innovation management at SIS Swedish Institute for Standards. Magnus shares some of the work being done to develop standards around innovation management, and its relevance to the public sector. Towards a common platform for boosting innovation management in public sector organisations The urgency to innovate in the public...
In May, 40 countries officially adopted the OECD Declaration on Public Sector Innovation. In the months since the formal adoption, countries are exploring how to use the OECD declaration to help boost their own public sector innovation agenda. Recently, the Irish government used the OECD Declaration to create their own Declaration on Public Service Innovation. In Latvia, OPSI has been working with the State Chancellery and the recently created innovation labs #GovLabLatvia to adapt the...
Putting public sector innovation at the top of the ‘to-do’ list is not an easy task for government. Even if there’s notional support, trying something new often means that you face inertia, confusion and even fear about what exactly innovation is, what goals it can serve or how to do it. To combat these common barriers, the Irish Public Service Leadership Board took matters into their own hands. They created their own Declaration on Public...
Today the Declaration on Public Sector Innovation has been adhered to by national governments from around the world. This is an important milestone in the growing global practice of public sector innovation. It sends a strong signal that this is something that governments believe is a priority. It demonstrates that there is a budding consensus around some of the concepts and principles of public sector innovation. Access the full OECD Declaration and supporting materials, here....