How do you manage a variety of innovation projects, with differing types of innovation, different goals, and perhaps different teams and funders? To avoid dealing with a mere list of projects, practitioners have recently become interested in innovation portfolio approaches. What we mean by innovation portfolios Portfolio management is an analysis and sense-making activity connecting innovation practice – specific projects, initiatives, and programmes – to the intent and purpose behind those…
Posts on Innovation Portfolios
Much of what the public sector seeks to do through innovation aims at making life simpler for citizens: adapting to evolving needs while also improving agility in the design and delivery of programs and services. Over the course of the past year in particular, governments have been relying heavily on adaptive innovation and agile approaches to respond to the rapidly changing needs of society. On 8 June 2021, OPSI, with the support of the EU...
On May 11th 2021, OPSI hosted a workshop in partnership with the Austrian Federal Ministry for Civil Service and Sport on Enhancement-Oriented Innovation, as part of our ongoing work on the Innovation facets through our Horizon 2020 programme of research. Over 100 people representing 36 nationalities joined us to hear about the relationships between innovation and public sector efficiency and productivity, as well as methods and tools…
Innovation portfolio management is becoming a core practice for intentional and proactive public sector innovation units to prepare governments to address a diversity of current and future challenges. The practice: Helps build clarity of purpose of innovation; Provides a high-level view of the interrelationships between innovation support activities; Identifies gaps and prompts for ideas for changes in direction or composition; and Identifies the types of innovation supports needed to…
Editor’s note: This is a guest blog written by Emily Wise, Lund University action researcher for Future by Lund, Sweden. Lund municipality’s innovation platform, Future by Lund works to catalyse development activities for sustainable cities – addressing complex challenges through collective action. Leveraging insights from OPSI’s innovation facets model (among others), the Future by Lund team is currently experimenting with new ways to steward and advance a portfolio of collaborative…
On March 11-12, 2021, more than 450 futures, foresight and innovation experts from 72 countries around the world gathered digitally to discuss the latest on anticipatory innovation governance. Over three sessions, the emerging Anticipatory Innovation Governance (AIG) model was explored, together with the future of the public sector, and tools and methods for anticipation. The series of sessions were co-hosted with the Government of Finland and supported by the European Commission’s Horizon…
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…
Tools and methods for innovation, anticipation, and strategic foresight are a perennially popular topic and several hundred members of the global public sector anticipatory innovation tools community gathered to take stock of promise and pitfalls of future-oriented tool and method landscape. On Friday 12 March, OECD OPSI organised the session as part of a workshop on Anticipatory Innovation Governance hosted by the Government of Finland with the support of the European Commission’s…
In my 20 years of being a public servant I have been fortunate enough to have seen or read about quite a few innovative projects (Have we told you we have a database of case studies? Why not submit your own? We have also opened a Call for Innovations on Cross-Border Collaboration). These have taken all sorts of forms and have involved varying degrees of novelty, though all shared a desire to make a difference....
Mission-oriented innovation helps the public sector direct innovation towards grand societal challenges. In the face of today’s wicked problems – from plastic pollution to rising inequalities – interest in mission-oriented innovation is growing across OECD countries and beyond. We invited organisations to a simulation to test mission-based approaches on the complex issues they work on. Since late 2020, the OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation has partnered with the UCL Institute…