Global: Innovation Facets

Tools and methods for innovation, anticipation, and strategic foresight are a perennially popular topic and several hundred members of the global public sector anticipatory innovation tools community gathered to take stock of promise and pitfalls of future-oriented tool and method landscape. On Friday 12 March, OECD OPSI organised the session as part of a workshop on Anticipatory Innovation Governance hosted by the Government of Finland with the support of the European Commission’s…

Mission-oriented innovation helps the public sector direct innovation towards grand societal challenges. In the face of today’s wicked problems – from plastic pollution to rising inequalities – interest in mission-oriented innovation is growing across OECD countries and beyond. We invited organisations to a simulation to test mission-based approaches on the complex issues they work on. Since late 2020, the OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation has partnered with the UCL Institute…

Missions offer a formalised path to creating public value but urgently need more experimental and iterative approaches to make missions a reality in the messy world of public policy. Mission-oriented innovation needs not only an ambitious clarity of purpose but also the alignment of system-level operational and governance mechanisms. OPSI is remixing some of its systems tools to help with that and have redesigned a…

After Government After Shock we invited event hosts to share with us recordings of their events, any write-ups of their event or some after-the-event reflections on their event and what they learnt. This blog post provides an easy reference point to help interested people navigate between these. You can also find these materials on the relevant event listing on the Government After Shock site. Event recordings We have created a YouTube playlist where you can find a...

This working paper introduces the key concepts and features of anticipatory innovation governance. It draws on academic literature and OECD work on a range of areas including public sector innovation, foresight, anticipatory governance and emerging technologies. It outlines an emerging framework to guide policymaking in complex and uncertain contexts and highlights questions for further research.

This article is jointly published on the UCL IIPP blog. As part of an ongoing partnership between the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) and the OECD’s Observatory of Public Sector Innovation (OPSI), we hosted an online immersive workshop on 2 December 2020 to explore the challenges and opportunities of directing mission-oriented innovation in practice. The event brought together leaders from across a range of government institutions in OECD countries and from the...

Many of you working in the public sector may want to prepare for uncertainty, or set up a future-oriented vision in your organisation. Many of you may have heard of anticipatory innovation or have engaged in foresight activities, but the sheer flurry of methodologies and tools in this space can be disorientating – and they may seem to require special abilities if you are not used to apply them. For this reason, OPSI and LabX...

Have you ever felt pulled in different directions at once, such that you do not feel like you are really making headway? Or that when trying to do multiple things at once, you end up not doing any of them well? In this post I’d like to explore what happens when innovation projects try to cater to multiple purposes at once.  In a previous post we have discussed how when activity overlaps in different innovation...

This report identified five key themes that drive public sector innovation efforts during the COVID-19 crisis. The report is part of the 2020 Trends Report series, an annual trends report developed by the OECD-OPSI and the UAE’s Mohammed Bin Rashid Centre for Government Innovation (MBRCGI).

Future-oriented change in an environment of radical democracy Over the past few months, we have been reminded that despite scenario planning and strategic foresight, it’s easy to be caught off guard off guard and unprepared in the face of crises and changing circumstances. Today’s policy context is one of complexity and uncertainty: an environment that requires more adaptive, anticipatory and systemic policy and governance approaches. This is…