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...
Posts on Innovative Capacity
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...
This blog was authored by Alexander Metcalfe, Head of Public Sector Policy, ACCA As the global body for professional accountants, connections matter a great deal to us and our many stakeholders. We believe wholeheartedly in the possibilities of connectivity, and since our foundation in 1904 ACCA has been a super connector. We have always recognised the importance of joining up our network – to find solutions and to be innovative. Indeed, one of our values...
Wales is in the thick of a major education reform process focused on large-scale school improvement. With such an ambitious agenda, the challenge wasn’t just about getting the policy right in the first place, it was about seeing it through to effective implementation so it could start transforming what, and how, students learn. To that end, the Welsh Government Education Directorate worked with OECD colleagues in the Education Directorate’s Implementing Education Policy team to…
Wales is in the midst of a major education reform process. As we know, good education policy is not about perfection on the page, it’s about what happens in the classroom. This is why Wales needed to think about not only effective policy development but also effective policy implementation. What conditions make for effective policy implementation? Our colleagues in the OECD Education Directorate’s Implementing Education Policy team collaborated with key actors in the Welsh education...
English Today the OECD reports The Innovation System of the Public Service of Brazil: An exploration of its past, present and future journey and Innovation skills and leadership in Brazil’s public sector were launched by Marcos Bonturi, Director of Public Governance, at the Brazilian public sector Innovation Week. The Innovation System of the Public Service of Brazil is the second OECD deep-study of a national government’s public sector innovation system. It provides insights into how...
For better or worse, the minutiae of government operations can easily fly under the radar of the average person. Not so, in the domain of education. The success or failure of an education system hits close to home, as most people have been through it. If they later come to care for learners who go to school, any faraway memories of textbooks and schoolyard games transmute into something more urgent. The school becomes a locus...
From the 11 to 13 of March, OPSI travelled to Israel to interview high-level leaders from across the public sector to understand the Israeli context for innovation better. “This trip was our first foray into this fascinating place, a short scan of how the public service operates. Israel has such diverse communities. Just how vastly different “innovation” looks to each community is the thing that really stood out to me’, said OPSI Analyst Kevin Richman....
This guest post is written by Leeanne Douglas from BizLab within the Australian Government. We have learned lots of lessons running the first human centred design academy in the Australian Government. It has been a bit of trial and error for us, so we thought we would share a few things that might help others in the same position. BizLab, an innovation hub within Australia’s Department of Industry, Innovation and Science, was established in 2016....