Back when I was an exchange student in France, I lived in an apartment shared by nine people, all from different countries and cultures. We had a large kitchen and lived on the city’s main square, so it was a prime location to host some of the best house parties. Imagine: nine people each bring a dozen friends and you’ve easily got over a hundred people in your home! One of the things that most...
New technologies, techniques and concepts are rapidly changing policing, border management and law enforcement across the world. For example: The Netherlands is taking a systems approach to community policing through multi-agency collaboration. The police, the public prosecutor’s office, victim support, and the probation service are all based at one single location, enabling them to handle complete cases more effectively. The city of Chula Vista, California have implemented drones as first…
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Artificial intelligence in the public sector: An engine for innovation in government … if we get…
On 22 June, I had the privilege of participating in the conference “Artificial Intelligence: What’s in it for the Public Sector?”, organised in Brussels by the European Commission, the Interoperability Unit of DG DIGIT and the Joint Research Centre. It brought together policymakers and experts to discuss the opportunities that artificial intelligence (AI) brings to accelerate governments’ digital transformation and improve the design and delivery of public services. The event was a…
If your organisation had a crystal ball, what questions would you ask about the future? What would you do with the answers it received? In this post, we consider the ways in which innovation agencies – government-funded or managed institutions that provide financial and other support to catalyse private sector innovation – can use imagined visions of the future to shape present decisions. Today’s innovation agencies take on a wide range of tasks and duties,...
Seismic events and trends like infectious disease, migration, climate change and technological disruption demand that governments respond rapidly and decisively. Yet without preparation, such decisions must be made from a rapidly diminishing number of options. Sometimes, there is only one clear path left to follow – and it is far from the best one. Finland is trying to identify a better way. The latest OECD report on “Anticipatory Innovation Governance Model: Towards a new way...
The standard advice for government innovators is: “First make sure you have the support of agency leaders.” That’s like advising soldiers: “First make sure the enemy has run out of ammunition.” It would be great, but if you wait for it to happen then you may never act. The Independent Demonstration Project is a strategy to innovate in government without…
Our next round of internships is coming up! OPSI is looking for one or more talented individuals to join our team for a six-month internship experience and drive forward public sector innovation projects. The deadline for application is 26 June 2022, 23:59 CET (instructions below). The OECD Internship Programme is designed to bring highly qualified and motivated students with diverse backgrounds into the Organisation and provide successful candidates with the opportunity to improve their…
When working with stakeholders around the world, we often ask them: If you could wave your magic wand, what would you change about your country’s public sector to make it more innovative? While the responses vary, one aspect remains unwavering, regardless of the country of study: that individual public servants are strongly motivated to innovate and push for change, even though the systems they work in are sometimes fighting against this. We need to better...
This guest blog was written by Siwert de Groot, Sil Vrielink (Researchers at the ICTU Foundation, The Hague /NL) and Frans van Dongen (Programme Manager at the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, The Hague/NL). Drawing on the work of the Observatory of Public Sector Innovation and following the lead of the Nordic countries, Denmark in particular, the Dutch Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations has recently published the results of the first...