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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...

Official dates for the next edition of the World Government Summit at Expo 2020 Dubai have been announced. It will take place in November 22-25, 2020. The event is a four-day summit that will gather over 10,000 high-profile officials, 30 international organisations and 600 experts and scholars. The World Government Summit– Expo 2020 will present new platforms and exceptional ideas to foster forward-looking government culture on a global scale. It will also offer the world’s...

Putting public sector innovation at the top of the ‘to-do’ list is not an easy task for government. Even if there’s notional support, trying something new often means that you face inertia, confusion and even fear about what exactly innovation is, what goals it can serve or how to do it. To combat these common barriers, the Irish Public Service Leadership Board took matters into their own hands. They created their own Declaration on Public...

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...

“I want to do something new. It’s going to take time and effort to get right. I don’t know whether it will work, and even if it does, it won’t instantly be better than what we already have. There will probably be unintended consequences and some of our known stakeholders will likely lose out or be displeased. Those who might benefit may not even recognise that we made the difference. If it goes wrong, it’s...

Today the Declaration on Public Sector Innovation has been adhered to by national governments from around the world. This is an important milestone in the growing global practice of public sector innovation. It sends a strong signal that this is something that governments believe is a priority. It demonstrates that there is a budding consensus around some of the concepts and principles of public sector innovation. Access the full OECD Declaration and supporting materials, here....

40 countries adhere to the OECD Declaration At OECD Headquarters in Paris, France, Ministers from 40 countries officially adopted the OECD Declaration on Public Sector Innovation today, 22 May 2019! In doing so, they have sent a strong message to the international community that public sector innovation is important, worthy of attention and support. The OECD Declaration is a set of five principles, and associated actions, that governments and public organisations can use to inform...

Have new technologies made you reconsider what you hold dear? Has change or innovation ever come into conflict, or sat uncomfortably, with your core values? Why is it that we as individuals can react negatively to things that are supposed to be beneficial? This post explore why different forms of innovation can spur different reactions from people, and what that might mean for practitioners seeking to introduce novel initiatives. We at OPSI think this is...

This post is a follow-on from our Part I post, which provided an overview of the design and development of our Innovation Portfolio Exploration workshop based on OPSI’s Innovation Facets model. Earlier this month, we facilitated a workshop with those from the public sector innovation ecosystem in Sweden. We were hosted by Vinnova, Sweden’s Innovation Agency. Vinnova invests 287 million euros annually in research and innovation projects across public, private, and academic sectors, especially…

All models are wrong, but some are useful Over the last few months, OPSI has been testing a model for public sector innovation based on our experiences with system-level studies in Canada and Brazil. As the field of public sector innovation grows and diversifies, we need a more nuanced understanding of its purposes and mechanisms for its stewardship.  The multi-faceted innovation model provides a common language and a way to contextualise the purpose of innovation....