Editor’s note: This is a guest blog by Benjamin Kumpf, Innovation Team Lead in the OECD Development Co-operation Directorate and was co-authored by Angela Hanson and Alex Roberts. It summarises the event ‘Government Capabilities for 21st Century Challenges: What Types of Innovation Do We Need’, co-hosted with the Observatory of Public Sector Innovation on 21 April, 2021. The governments of tomorrow cannot be the same as the governments of yesterday. Change is needed – but...
Submit your innovation today We want to know more about your innovative projects and initiatives—both big and small—that involve bringing together governments from different jurisdictions to collaborate and innovate. The OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation (OPSI) and the UAE Mohammed Bin Rashid Centre for Government Innovation (MBRCGI) are excited to launch the 2021 Call for Innovations in government, focused specifically on ways government are innovating through cross-border…
As a devoted fan of the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) for over 20 years, the coronavirus pandemic brought a big disappointment for me in 2020: the cancellation of the most important week of my year. As I had done in Kyiv, Lisbon, and Tel Aviv, I planned to travel to Rotterdam to see the live shows and embrace dear friends from all over the world in this joyful and camp annual extravaganza of music and...
This is a guest post from Johannes Mikonnen of Demos Helsinki, a partner in our recent work with the Latvian public sector. The world in which we live today calls for governments to find solutions to the most pressing challenges, and governments are falling short. Experimentation offers one particularly promising way for navigating the uncertainty and the rapidly changing circumstances of the 21st century. The Innovation Lab of the Latvian government embraced the transformative potential...
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 April 1912, an icon set sail from Southampton, heading into the future and making history at the same time. The Titanic, “ship of dreams”, was the height of technological achievement. Retrospectively referred to as “unsinkable”, she might as well have been called “future-proof”, such was the confidence she commanded. We all know what happened. We also know the main lessons learned: lack of lifeboats, a chaotic evacuation, and doubts over whether a floating wooden...
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....
Over the past four months the Observatory of Public Sector Innovation (OPSI) has worked together with the Government of Denmark to conduct this Public Sector Innovation Scan. Learning from public sector innovation: the role of scans Public sector innovation systems are dynamic and constantly evolving: there is no perfect end point. Regardless of how developed or successful an innovation system is, there is always need for critical reflection on the strengths, weaknesses and opportunities for...