Steps towards a New Data Deal: Prototyping an evidence-based innovation panel for the Portuguese Public Administration A rigorous, realistic, and actionable knowledge of current innovation practices is indispensable in order to meet the present challenges and proactively prepare the future of Public Administration. From the outset, innovation practices in Public Administration must understand the specificities of public service guaranteed by the State. For the Experimentation Lab for Public…
Today, we are pleased to launch OPSI’s third innovation primer, Cracking the Code: Rulemaking for humans and machines. Exploring the exciting emergence of Rules as Code (RaC) in the public sector, we hope the primer will equip public servants (and others) to consider, understand and possibly implement RaC in their own work. Rules as Code (RaC) is an exciting concept that rethinks one of the core functions of governments: rulemaking. It proposes that governments create...
Have you ever felt pulled in different directions at once, such that you do not feel like you are really making headway? Or that when trying to do multiple things at once, you end up not doing any of them well? In this post I’d like to explore what happens when innovation projects try to cater to multiple purposes at once. In a previous post we have discussed how when activity overlaps in different innovation...
The OPSI mission has three pillars: Uncovering emerging practice and identifying what’s next Turning the new into the normal Providing trusted advice In 2020, the work that supports this mission shifted sharply; suddenly, there was a deluge of “emerging practice” as every country on earth was facing different shades of the same problem. We, in turn, experimented rapidly with ways to support governments: collecting responses to COVID-19 as a platform…
OPSI is partnering up with our sister team, the Digital Government and Data Unit, for a series of projects involving researching and evaluating government efforts to promote the digital transformation of public policies and services, including the application of innovative and emerging technologies for well-being and the public good. Some areas of our work include: AI in the public sector. Open data. Data governance and ethics. Public services design and delivery. Systems thinking. Cybersecurity…
The last few months have been a period of immense growth and learning, personally and within governments and organisations. This crisis has demonstrated an overwhelming need, opportunity and business case for why innovation is essential and possible in government. We have collectively experienced a terrible shock – and while the crisis continues and evolves, we need to make sense of that shock, to understand how we need to change and adapt to a world that will never be…
This OPSI guest blog, written by Thomas Gegenhuber (Leuphana University Lüneburg/Johannes Kepler University Linz), Johanna Mair (Hertie School/Stanford University), Rene Lührsen (Hertie School/Leuphana University Lüneburg) and Laura Thäter Lührsen (Hertie School/Leuphana University Lüneburg) shares insights gathered from the #wirvsvirus hackathon on how to carry forward the ideas produced in hackathon environments into concrete action and projects. Moving from sprint to marathon…
As part of its response to the COVID-19 pandemic and in the lead-up to Government After Shock, OPSI is seeking and collecting different reflections and perspectives about the crisis and its implications for governments – particularly around their need to take a deliberate and consistent approach to innovation). This guest post by Benjamin Kumpf, Head of Innovation at the UK Department for International Development, provides a perspective from the international development angle. Trade-offs…
Recently I posted about a sensemaking project to collect, curate, and provide tools to understand and contextualize the many ideas emerging from the COVID-19 crisis. Over the past months, there has been a deluge of articles taking the form “COVID-19 urgently proves the need for X,” where X is an investment, approach, program, policy, or complete paradigm shift. Which we think is a genuine and needed examination. “William Hynes, Head of the New Approaches to...
The Observatory is conducting an analysis of the public sector innovation system of Latvia, and we would like to share a project overview and update for anyone interested in innovation systems, the research approach, or how international lessons learned can help officials understand their own contexts. To begin: what is a public sector innovation system? A public sector innovation system can be seen as the set of organisations, capacities, laws, policies, processes,…