“Everyone is afraid of making a mistake. Everyone is afraid of the consequence of error, but the greatest error is not to move. The greatest error is to be paralysed by the fear of failure.”– Dr Michael Ryan, WHO Executive Director, WHO Press Conference (13/03/2019) The stakes for innovation have never been higher, the risk of failing has never felt greater. Whenever an organisation innovates they are always taking a step into the unknown, with...
Posts on Systems Approaches
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...
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...
This is a guest post from Robert Braun, Johannes Starkbaum and Anna Gerhardus of the Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna, Austria, and the RiConfigure EU research project (Grant agreement No.: 788047). Public sector innovation is widely seen as a key for ‘doing things better’. However, innovation per se will not necessarily lead to ‘the better’ nor define what ‘the better’ actually is. Just as the novel OECD Declaration on Public Sector Innovation suggests , we...
A reflection on a workshop co-designed with Piret Tõnurist and Kevin Richman as part of a programme led by Piret Tõnurist. Building on OPSI’s ongoing systems work, including in Scotland, Finland, and Slovenia, the team travelled to Estonia to learn about their policymaking approach and design a custom workshop module to build capacity around systems-thinking. I am sharing the tools and materials here in case others find them useful. This session comprised a module in a...
OPSI held its conference 'Innovation in Government: Steps, leaps and bounds' on the 19 and 20 of November 2018, convening leaders and innovators from around the world in Paris.
Today, the OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation (OPSI) is pleased to announce the release of The Innovation System of the Public Service of Canada, the first of the OECD’s reviews of a national public sector innovation system. The report was launched at a panel discussion at OPSI’s conference “Innovation in Government: Steps, Leaps and Bounds” with speakers including: Marco Daglio, Head of the Observatory of Public Sector Innovation, OECD Rodney Ghali, Assistant Secretary of...
When we opened up registration for our first webinar, we knew there was pent up demand to use different mediums to share OPSI’s knowledge, expertise, and thinking, but we were not sure if webinars were the right solution. After three webinars, 450 attendees from over 70 countries, and countless requests asking for the recording and presentations, we feel we are on the right track. Moving forward, we will be hosting webinars on a monthly basis....
In our first visit to Brasilia in May, members of the Observatory of Public Sector Innovation team were on a journey of discovery to uncover the innovation context for the Public Service of Brazil. In our recent second visit, we dove deeper to get a better sense of the key characteristics and developments, and to gain insight into what the dynamics of the public sector innovation system are. To assist us in this process, this...