Case Study Library

“Madrid, Digital Capital” is a city-wide transformation model that redesigns how Madrid delivers services and makes decisions using real-time data and digital tools. It simplifies procedures, improves daily services and helps the city respond faster to citizens and businesses. It is innovative because it turns digital transformation into a single, measurable system for running government, not just isolated projects, and that is fully user and citizen centred and also environmental centred.

Many rural communities face difficulties accessing government services due to distance, ageing populations and digital barriers. Navarra created Mobile Citizen Offices: travelling public service units that bring administrative procedures and digital support directly to small municipalities. By reversing the traditional model—government travelling to citizens—the initiative reduces territorial inequalities, simplifies access to administration and strengthens trust in public institutions.

Government digital systems can create invisible barriers for civil servants and citizens. Experiência.Gov is an evidence-based UX methodology created by public servants at Brazil’s Ministry of Management and Innovation in Public Services to identify and eliminate these frictions. The approach combines behavioral science, observation of real use, and agile prototyping to turn usage evidence into concrete improvements in government digital systems.

Latvia's public administration struggles with complex challenges due to siloed operations and a deep fear of failure. Rather than structural reforms alone, Latvia is pioneering cultural shift through Humble Governance framework by Demos Helsinki with Prof. Charles Sabel (Columbia Law School) prioritising trust, shared responsibility, and courage under uncertainty. Cross-ministerial teams tackle real challenges through experimentation, shifting from a zero-mistake culture to iterative learning.

OTT2 helps Estonia’s Unemployment Insurance Fund identify which jobseekers are most at risk of long-term unemployment. It combines data from public registries and updates each person’s employment outlook as their situation changes, helping counsellors provide more timely and tailored support. This is innovative because it replaces a labour-intensive and inconsistent manual process with a dynamic, explainable and highly accurate system that improves how public resources are used.

Chile manages 400,000+ surgical waiting list records monthly. Cancer patients often remain invisible within this volume — despite facing 7.5x higher mortality than the rest. We built a sovereign in-house AI that screens oncological risk across all 29 national Health Services, flagging a high-risk group in hours instead of weeks. Sensitivity: 95%. Manual review burden cut 99.76%. No vendor, no black box: AI flags risk, humans decide. Every patient, every region, the same standard.

Governments often struggle to decide which emerging technologies are worth adopting and how to apply them responsibly. The Future Technology Observatory helps government entities identify, assess, and test high-potential technologies before adoption. It is innovative because it connects technology foresight with practical experimentation and adoption guidance in one shared government capability.

Public administration runs hundreds of projects and processes, but most public events still focus only on success stories. Spodlet za zalet creates a safe space where public servants openly share mistakes, wrong assumptions and unexpected turns, and reflect on what they learned. Inspired by Fuckup Nights, it turns failure into a practical source of learning and trust which encourages public sector innovation.

Digital public services often fail not only due to lack of provision, but because of invisible barriers that hinder or even prevent citizens from accessing and interacting with government in digital environments. The FCINCO Anti-Sludge method systematically identifies and removes these barriers. Applied in real services, it can improve access, reduce friction, and increase the efficiency of public service delivery.

Tax laws are very complex, requiring much time from public servants to apply them consistently, check for errors, or predict the effects of changes. To address that challenge, Germany's Federal Ministry of Finance is piloting Rulemapping – a methodology that converts legal rule sets into structured visual diagrams, making the logic of the law easy to read, test, and analyse. Unique worldwide, it enables finding errors in laws and testing the effects of proposed changes before implementation.