Blog

This OPSI guest blog is written by Professor Leon Fuerth and Dr Sheila Ronis. Both served as co-researchers on The Project on Foresight and Democracy, funded by Rockefeller Brothers Fund and are currently co-directing the Project on Civic Leadership for the 21st Century at The Ohio State University. In the United States, liberal democracy is profoundly challenged by the accelerating rate of major forms of societal change, reflecting demographic transitions and technological revolutions. These…

Will in-person work be a distant memory 15 years from now? Will ministries’ offices only exist in cyberspace? Or will AI-powered bots become the norm when interviewing potential job candidates? While the answers to many questions like these are impossible to know today, one thing is certain: working in the future will be very different from what it is now. This will not only be determined by new innovative technologies, the disappearance of certain jobs...

As we emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic, our governments are beginning to examine how to fill the gap in public finances this massive crisis has created. We are standing at a cross-road, facing difficult questions: are hard budget cuts inevitable or is it time to promote another way of doing things within government? How can we increase the value of our tax money and, at the same time, deal with government spending challenges? How can...

OPSI and the UAE Mohammed Bin Rashid Centre for Government Innovation (MBRCGI) invite you to attend a high-level panel discussion from 16:00 to 17:30 CET on 23 November 2021. Our distinguished guests will be discussing the relevance and significance of experimentation and collective intelligence to cross-border government innovation. Click here to register for the event. The event will also mark the launch of our report, Achieving Cross-Border Innovation: Surfacing Insights and Experimenting…

“What is innovation, anyway?” It is a question we are asked at the OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation (OPSI) every day. The concept of innovation is varied and confusing. Intentionally managing and steering innovation in governments even more so. While the OECD’s public sector innovation definition outlines that innovation is something that is novel to the context, implemented and brings about impact (for example in the form…

Over the last year, OPSI and the UAE Mohammed Bin Rashid Centre for Government Innovation (MBRCGI) have worked in partnership to identify leading themes and key practices and success factors underpinning cross-border government innovation efforts. We are excited to announce the launch of our report Achieving Cross-Border Government Innovation: Governing cross-border challenges, which serves as the first report in a series of three on different aspects of cross-border innovation. The launch took…

What if our minds could move through time as easily as our bodies can move through space? In the movie Arrival (minor spoiler alert!), linguistics professor Dr Louise Banks learns an extraterrestrial language that expresses ideas in a timeless and nonlinear way. Through some science-fiction magic grounded in a grain of truth, Banks gains the ability to perceive time itself differently, and experiences flashes of future moments of great personal and…

Virtual Conference – Government Beyond Recovery: Towards a future-fit public sector: 18-19 October 2021 As we hurry to buy plane tickets to the next tropical destination or catch the latest James Bond movie in theatres, the sudden and dramatic restrictions we all experienced in early 2020 can feel like a distant memory. In the early days of COVID-19, many of us reflected critically on the things that mattered most in our lives and work; committing...

Intermediary report launch Over the past year the Observatory of Public Sector Innovation (OPSI) has worked together with the Government of Finland and the European Commission to build an anticipatory innovation governance model. As part of the work, the OECD assessed the current public policy steering system of Finland and its anticipatory capacity – the first results of the work are presented in a report accompanying the blog. Building an anticipatory innovation governance model First,...

How do you manage a variety of innovation projects, with differing types of innovation, different goals, and perhaps different teams and funders? To avoid dealing with a mere list of projects, practitioners have recently become interested in innovation portfolio approaches. What we mean by innovation portfolios Portfolio management is an analysis and sense-making activity connecting innovation practice – specific projects, initiatives, and programmes – to the intent and purpose behind those…