Global: European Commission Collaboration

Convening intentional conversations on crisis implications The crisis of this year has required governments at all levels around the world to respond and adapt. The COVID-19 crisis is unique in the sense that, while many individuals, communities and countries have suffered disproportionate impacts, there has also been a global, collective impact that has spared no one. There has been a terrible shock, one whose aftereffects will continue to be felt for some time. It is...

The last few months have been a period of immense growth and learning, personally and within governments and organisations. This crisis has demonstrated an overwhelming need, opportunity and business case for why innovation is essential and possible in government. We have collectively experienced a terrible shock – and while the crisis continues and evolves, we need to make sense of that shock, to understand how we need to change and adapt to a world that will never be…

Recently I posted about a sensemaking project to collect, curate, and provide tools to understand and contextualize the many ideas emerging from the COVID-19 crisis. Over the past months, there has been a deluge of articles taking the form “COVID-19 urgently proves the need for X,” where X is an investment, approach, program, policy, or complete paradigm shift. Which we think is a genuine and needed examination. “William Hynes, Head of the New Approaches to...

Tobacco use is extremely harmful to health and its illicit trade causes billions in tax revenue losses each year. The EU Tobacco Products Directive (TPD) provides for the establishment of a tracking and tracing system that enables the authorities to follow the movements of every packet of the 26 billion or more sold or produced in the EU, along every step of the supply chain, via real-time reporting by industry. The system is a tool for authorities in implementing their tobacco control policy.

If there’s one thing that I can promise about the year 2020 – and given the past few months of unpredictability, it will probably be only one thing – it is that there is going to be a LOT said about this year. We’ve all experienced a big shock that has upturned our lives and there’s certainly a lot to talk about.  A big part of these conversations will be to do with governments, their role, what they did well, what they might have…

Co-Design launch of Government After Shock  Last week, together with our partners at Cofluence, we launched the co-design process for the Government After Shock November event. Our vision for this event is not to be a traditional conference presented online, but rather, an opportunity to collaborate, promote global dialogue and use the crises we are experiencing across the world as an opportunity for change. It’s for this reason that co-design is at the heart of...

We are taking OPSI’s portfolio exploration and assessment support into the virtual realm. We are asking for 20-30 minutes of your time to share initial thoughts and feedback on our first draft of questions for exploring:   The way your organisation’s innovation portfolio is oriented  Your organisation’s overall portfolio management capability   Following the set of questions, there is an example output based on hypothetical inputs. We…

This working paper seeks to contribute to the understanding of the public sector innovation process It argues that organisations need to take a multifaceted portfolio approach, combined with a more deliberate recognition of other actors in their ecosystem. It finishes by examining how the innovation lifecycle plays out in practice, and suggests criteria to guide organisations and teams in selecting tools and methods to support them along the different stages of the innovation lifecycle.

OPSI is researching innovation portfolios as part of our European Commission Horizon 2020 work and we are developing a self-guided portfolio assessment tool for people to analyse and explore their own organisational innovation portfolio. We welcome your feedback.  Hero-innovators are imaginary Does your organisations still believe in hero-innovators? Probably not. Based on our research and observations, in order for innovation to be impactful, organisations need a lot of distributed…

We’re building an incubator at OPSI and we’d like to share the current thinking, hear your thoughts, and put out an preliminary call for interest for the (free) alpha version of the model. Typically, incubators provide start-up or scale-up private and social sector organizations with office space, administrative services, financing, coaching, and networks to help them build and scale rapidly. This will be inspired by a similar value proposition, but customized to support and develop...