Case Study Library

In Estonia, there are a number of people who do not know how to speak the official language well enough. This prevents people from finding a better job, participating in Estonian cultural life, communicating with Estonians, and finding personal fulfilment. The goal of the project was to understand the needs of an adult language learner to then know how to organize language education for them so that it helps them better acquire the Estonian language. As a result, a common agreement that improves…

How to bring new ways of working and problem-solving tools to the Estonian public sector? Over the course of a year and a half the Public Sector Innovation Team of Estonia developed a design sprint format suitable for the Estonian public sector. By constantly adapting and improving the format the Innovation Team has seen that it is a highly effective tool for spreading design thinking methods and generating enthusiasm around them.

We detect wicked problems and turn them into new spaces for innovation. It is a platform for all Estonian ministries, the public and the private sector, experts and entrepreneurs to join forces and build the future that we deserve. We are untapping new markets with a powerful but lean public-private collaboration.

The tree of truth project was called to life in the beginning of 2019 together with Estonian main government office. We tried to solve the problem of how to display the 135 most important indicators of Estonian life to express the health of Estonian society.

The number of traffic accidents resulting in human casualties have not shown any significant decrease in Estonia over the past ten years. While velocity is one of the factors to significantly increase the severity of the consequences, user-centric approaches also lead to the realisation that in Estonia speeding is a widely accepted social norm. An innovative approach was developed in order to test the effect of losing time, instead of money, as a potential measure to affect drivers’ behaviour.

The Governments of Estonia and Finland are exchanging data across borders in an X-Road Trust Federation. The countries had already developed and implemented their own national data exchange layers based on the X-Road technology. The two instances now communicate with each other in the first international interoperability ecosystem of its kind, facilitating the real-time availability of information on population and businesses in the face of increasing trans-border economic activity.

The Digital Court File is an everyday tool for judges, court staff, lawyers and parties to a proceeding that will replace the paper-based court file entirely. It links hundreds of pages of court files into a single view, and all participants in the proceedings can access the documents electronically. The Digital File can also be used as a tool to make cross-references, add notes and comments, search by keyword, filter documents and export them to your computer.

Estonian Government has launched an action plan for life event service design. The target is to have by the end of 2020 seven life event services designed and live. One of the first of these life event services is having a child service that has the first part of it, proactive offering of the family benefits is live since October 2019. It means that once the birth of a child is registered and given a name, an email is sent to the parents to receive family benefits.

The Estonian state offers families all different types of family benefits that new parents had to apply for. We found that such an important benefit should not be claimed like that. We built an IT system that allows us to offer benefits to families in a proactive way. Ou innovation is as simple as that - "congratulations on having a baby, here are your benefits!" Because the baby requires attention, love and of corse time, why waste it on communicating with the state.

As a pilot project, the first piece of AI software developed in public-private cooperation was recently added to the Estonian code repository, which can be re-used and developed further free of by all public and private stakeholders. We also created a new form of cooperation, a framework in order to make cooperation between companies and the state sector in IT development possible in the complex web of procurement rules. This project enables to build solutions for the digital state by anyone.