Country: Canada

The CRA undertook an ethnographic project focused on the tax filing experiences of the homeless and housing insecure. Researchers worked directly with persons from these populations to gain insight into barriers to accessing tax benefits. The project will improve services to vulnerable Canadians to enhance their standard of living, and underscores the value of innovative qualitative research.

Open government carries the promise of more effective, accountable government. To capitalize on this potential, governments like Canada’s have made commitments to becoming open by default. Canada has launched a pilot to implement its vision, providing access to working documents to inspire innovation and create exponential benefits for citizens.

Department of Community Services has piloted Career Rising program which provides a continuum of employment-related supports that help break the cycle of inter-generational poverty. The program is designed to provide youth with comprehensive and sustained support that will lead to increased participation in academic and economic activities. Youth participants gain employability and leadership skills, build confidence, connect to community, engage academically, and help meet labor market needs.

NRCan's Office of Energy Efficiency (OEE) Social Innovation UnLab (SIU) is working with program colleagues and Carrot Insights to deliver an energy efficiency rewards pilot via the Carrot Rewards mobile app. Our hypothesis: Engaging Canadians on their smartphones and gamifying learning and action will improve awareness and adoption of energy-efficient behaviours. The pilot is delivering results and entering its third phase this year (2018).

Carrot Rewards is a platform promoting healthy living and public engagement that leverages behavioural economics, mobile tech and the power of loyalty programs to motivate and educate users to make better everyday lifestyle choices for themselves, their families and the planet. Created in collaboration with public sector agencies, leading Canadian health NGOs and the private sector. With over a million downloads, Carrot is driving sustainable positive behaviour change on a population scale.

The OEE established a Social Innovation "UnLab" (SIU) to test an embedded innovation model and amplify energy efficiency policy and service impacts in Canada. The SIU creates value for energy efficiency stakeholders in three ways: Building relationships and capacity for energy efficiency policy and service innovation; Generating evidence and collective learning by co-creating and testing insights and interventions; Amplifying impacts by scaling learning and implementing what works.

A first of its kind (in our context), cross-jurisdictional partnership between three levels of government to research, co-design and test prototypes with citizens to inform and improve the experience and uptake of home energy efficiency labeling and reporting. The core team was comprised of representatives from Natural Resources Canada’s (NRCan) Office of Energy Efficiency (OEE), the Province of Alberta’s CoLab, and the City of Edmonton with service design support from Situ Strategy.

Challenges facing the public sector are constantly evolving and managers increasingly require rapid access to talent to meet short timelines. Despite this, we still rely heavily on permanent hiring. In this context, we are testing a new workforce model. In this model, public servants are free to choose work that matches their skills and interests and can be rapidly deploy to work on projects.

ADAPT was established to increase awareness and use of novel policy tools (e.g. Prizes, Open Policy Making, AI, Experimentation, etc.) across the ministry. Instead of using the typical research, write, consult model for building organization-wide policy, the team a Lean Startup methodology.

A collaboration between government and community, Systemic Design eXchange (SDX) is an Edmonton-based community of practice for people interested in learning about systemic design as a methodology for addressing complex, real world issues. Together, we explore systems thinking, design thinking, and change lab approaches. With a bias towards learning by doing, SDX aims to be a watering hole where multiple sectors can come together, learn together, and act together.