This post is authored by OPSI team members Alex Roberts and Piret Tõnurist. We at the Observatory of Public Sector Innovation have discussions about public sector innovation every day. So, it can be surprising when we are asked, on a fairly regular basis, ‘what is innovation anyway?’ Of course it really should not be that much of a surprise. The word innovation gets thrown around a lot and is used to describe many things in...
Every now and again I see the claim that there’s too great a focus within innovation discussions on technology and tools, rather than on people and their needs. The argument runs that the specific technology is not what matters. Instead, attention should be paid to what is needed, and then technology options assessed by what they are able to deliver against those needs. The fear is that if the focus is on the technology then...
“We need more innovation!” It’s a phrase we hear a lot. Politicians, Ministers, Secretary Generals, organisational leaders, and middle managers – mostly everyone agrees that the public sector needs to increase innovation capacity. In response, most of our work at OPSI is geared towards improving, assisting or developing resources that help countries increase their innovation capacity. One of the quickest and most effective ways to see an immediate increase of innovation capacity is by…
Over the last few months, the OPSI team did a lot of assumption testing, prototyping and usability testing of the “meta-toolkit” concept (which we are now calling Toolkit Navigator). This web resource will offer self-service guidance to public sector staff and policymakers on existing methods and toolkits, as well as related case studies, peer connections, and capacity building resources based on their specific needs and contexts. As we launch the beta site for the purpose...
If you have a good idea, does being polite help or hinder you when you try to introduce it? Or to put it another way, if you have an innovative proposal that you want to pursue, do you need to be good at dealing with established processes, or is it more important to be comfortable with upsetting the apple cart? In this post I want to explore the relationship between innovation and process, and I’m going...
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