Blog

“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,...

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...

This is a guest post from Anne Pordes Bowers and Peter Glenday of SOIF, the School of International Futures. COVID-19 has underlined the importance of thinking systemically about the future, even though our institutions are not well structured or incentivised to do this. More urgently than ever, governments need to reinvent how they do strategy and policymaking. Strategic foresight is an organised, systematic way of looking beyond expected trends to better assess uncertainty and complexity....

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…

***Deadline extended to 9 August 2021. To apply, please submit your application on the OECD careers portal here. We are building out our team at the OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation (OPSI). We are looking for a Communications and Strategic Engagement Officer to lead our efforts in designing and executing our overall communications strategy, as well as our efforts in building and strengthening OPSI’s innovation community and connecting with other relevant networks and…

After an amazing and intensive five years with the team at OPSI, I’m leaving the OECD to move on to new adventures back in Australia. Before I go, and with the indulgence of my colleagues, I’d like to take this chance to reflect on some of what I’ve been lucky enough to learn. After all, a big part of innovation is learning, and while it’s very easy in these tumultuous and fast-moving times to not take the time to consider the...

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…

In previous years, OPSI and our project partners at the UAE Mohammed Bin Rashid Centre for Government Innovation (MBRCGI) developed reports on global trends in public sector innovation. A focus on trends inherently focuses on what governments are already doing. This year, we’re doing things a bit differently and looking at what governments need to be doing more.  Namely, we’re focusing on innovation through cross-border and cross-jurisdictional collaboration. As the COVID-19 crisis has…

We are building up our team at the OECD based on the strong interest and growth in several innovation topics in demand by our OECD member countries. We are looking for early career specialists in a variety of fields connected to futures thinking and strategic foresight, behavioural insights, organisational change, innovation management, mission-oriented innovation, emerging tech,  innovation portfolios and/or applied…