Global: Innovation Declaration

Living Futures: Scenario Kit is a design tool for understanding, discussing, and shaping the future. It consists of four alternative versions of year 2050 explored through narrated stories from future citizens, themed analyses, and other media files, as well as a set of design tools that puts the scenarios to work. The kit can be used to future proof business models, develop new strategy, and understand and discuss important trends and developments in the present. The kit is flexible and can be…

Features: Guiding framework

This toolkit is targeted towards impact entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, partnership brokers and facilitators, and accelerators supporting impact entrepreneurs who are initiating value chain partnerships, partnerships where organizations seek to integrate existing or create new value chains. The Partnership Co-design Toolkit (P.ACT) includes four stages of co-design and 12 tools, each building on the previous, to bring partners closer, to developing a complete partnership model, and get ready to…

Features: Facilitators guide, Guiding framework, Tips&Tricks

The first public service-wide Innovation Week in Ireland was held in December 2019 where public service bodies collectively developed over 200 events and activities across the country to spotlight innovation. Teams had an opportunity to explore the meaning of innovation in order to create a common language, participate in engaging and creative sessions and collaborate with colleagues from across other areas of the public service and beyond.

The Public Service Innovation Fund provides public service bodies in Ireland with a means to fund innovative projects that may not otherwise get financed by their organisations. It was developed to help promote a greater culture of innovation and experimentation in the Irish Public Service, and to showcase the benefits of innovation to other public servants considering embarking on their own innovative project. This is Ireland's first public service-only innovation funding mechanism.

USE-IT!, Unlocking Social & Economic Innovation Together!, is a whole neighbourhood approach to addressing urban poverty. It innovates by building bridges between the places, the people, the public sector, the private sector and civic society partners in a community so they can co-produce solutions to poverty that unlock opportunities and that fits their needs. By doing this, USE-IT! works by respecting what is already there in a community rather than by assuming what needs to change.

Informed Participation is a unique way to bring the public into government decision making. It gives government a method to solve complex issues with the public in a way that gives them a meaningful role in balancing competing interests. Public policy is becoming increasingly complex and trust in government is declining, so new innovative ways of engaging with citizens is needed. This method shifts engagement from obtaining buy-in to building ownership and creates more legitimate solutions.

Advice for Making Your Strategy Stand Out Over the past few years, innovation has become a popular term in the public and private sectors. Many are beginning to look for ways to make their company or unit more innovative, wanting to offer a service, product, or policy that is different and more creative than what currently exists. But when everyone else also tries to think ‘differently,’ how does one actually do so? This challenge can...

It can be hard to make strategy something that is actionable and that leads to real change. Strategy comes up against how things actually work, and can often be the loser (Culture eats strategy for breakfast[1], right?) Indeed, at our last meeting of National Contact Points (our liaison points with national governments), one of the questions put forward by a country was about how to develop an actionable innovation strategy, one that would support a...

Recently, OPSI travelled to Latvia to participate in the top-level managers conference “Dare + experiment + create = innovation.” This event, hosted by the State Chancellery and #GovLabLatvia, sought to further build the innovative capacity of top-level managers in the Latvian administration. During the event, leaders interacted with the OECD’s Declaration on Public Sector Innovation by looking at how to operationalise and contextualise the OECD Declaration to fit the Latvian context. The…

This is a guest post from Magnus Karlsson, project manager, innovation management system at RISE Research Institutes of Sweden and national expert and chair of TK 532 innovation management at SIS Swedish Institute for Standards. Magnus shares some of the work being done to develop standards around innovation management, and its relevance to the public sector. Towards a common platform for boosting innovation management in public sector organisations The urgency to innovate in the public...