Case Study Library

Climate change requires comprehensive responses at local and regional level which makes local government critical to the delivery of national and international policies. The establishment of four Climate Action Regional Offices (CAROs) as Centres of Excellence based on distinct geographic/topographic characteristics enables them to advise local authorities in their region on climate action strategies ensuring a coordinated response and assisting with the roll-out of national/regional policies at…

The Government of Korea is beginning to implement a new innovation investment model, 'R&D PIE', which leverages big data analytics and machine learning in order to assess disruptive changes in the technology landscape, and to identify overlaps and potential opportunities across the Korean ministries. Through this, the government has a way of identifying missing links in the innovation initiatives, fostering collaboration among agencies, universities, and companies, and solving social problems.

This project is about how new transportation technologies can be integrated into an existing public transit system. The City of Lincoln successfully tested a demand-responsive autonomous microtransit vehicle that operated in the University of Nebraska's Innovation Campus. Use of autonomous microtransit vehicles in public sector transportation systems will play a critical role in ensuring safe, efficient, affordable and equitable access to many people across the world well into the future.

With the drafting of its first Constitution, Mexico City had a great opportunity: to explore innovative ways of crowd-sourcing this historic document, setting an example to other cities in the world on how to design important democratic experimentation at the scale of a megalopolis. The result of the entire Constitutional process is a forward-thinking document with progressive social policy and human rights at its heart. It became a legal reality in September 2018.

Open and inclusive policy-making builds upon the idea of designing policies by broadening the evidence base. An innovative web-based tool called SME test enables the public (citizens, business entities, economic and other interest groups) to quantify the impact of their alternative policy proposals on SMEs, in addition to substantiating their comments and proposals on a public policy proposal. Despite the tool's ease of use, it enables users to conduct more sophisticated analysis.

High resolution satellite data were used to make a credible estimate of the number of brick kilns across the ‘Brick Belt’, helping to calculate the scale of modern slavery present. Brick kilns are high slavery-prevalent industries and before this work, the full scale of brick kilns and by proxy, slavery, was unknown, making action from the appropriate agencies difficult. This innovation provides data to help NGOs and governments fight modern slavery. This approach scales in time and space.

The Lab is an all-of-government neutral space enabling agencies to collaboratively innovate to make it easier for people to access government services. It's a design & development lab to experiment, drive and enable the systemic change of government for the benefit of society. We are providing a way to direct public funding to systemic improvements, horizontal efforts around shared goals, capability uplift, high value reusable components and actionable innovation for all participating agencies.

UNDP wanted to understand what strategies women outliers or “positive deviants” in remote and deeply conservative areas which have minimal technology coverage, used to successfully join the workforce, become educated and serve their communities. Positive deviance is an experiential problem-solving approach that identifies locally designed solutions and ensures narratives of the outliers are understood before designing a programme; this is critical for designing behavioural change…

Zika Mozzie Seeker (ZMS) transforms traditional presence/absence surveillance for invasive mosquito species by synchronizing citizen scientists set egg traps to provide 'early-warning' networks. Eggs from Do It Yourself ovitraps are aggregated and rapidly screened using a world-first method that can detect 'DNA' of one Aedes aegypti amongst 5,000 of the local species. Eggs from many (10-25) traps are batched into each polymerase chain (PCR) cohort, with results fed back to each participant.

The active-waiting robot was developed by the French local-level Seine Saint Denis Innovation Lab. We created the robot R2-D3 to help reduce the digital gap with Departmental Home for Disabled Persons (Maison départementale des personnes handicapées) users. It informs users on various topics in a playful and simplified way. It can speak and understand many languages, which is useful in the context. And it can also collect data from users. It is user-oriented and it's built upon new robotic…