On 15 October 1987, renowned British meteorologist Michael Fish presented his usual television weather forecast, jovially remarking: “Earlier on today, apparently, a woman rang the BBC and said she heard there was a hurricane on the way. Well, if you’re watching, don’t worry, there isn’t!” He proceeded to give his analysis, which acknowledged the possibility of high winds but gave no major cause for alarm. That night, an extratropical cyclone with gusts exceeding…
Global: Innovation Portfolios
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...
A summary report of the Government After Shock conference, which presented an opportunity for collective learning, thinking critically about the implications of the COVID-19 crisis and exploring how to steer government and society toward preferred futures rather than reverting to the status-quo.
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...
As part of its response to the COVID-19 pandemic and in the lead-up to Government After Shock, OPSI is seeking and collecting different reflections and perspectives about the crisis and its implications for governments – particularly around their need to take a deliberate and consistent approach to innovation). This guest post by Benjamin Kumpf, Head of Innovation at the UK Department for International Development, provides a perspective from the international development angle. Trade-offs…
The Observatory is conducting an analysis of the public sector innovation system of Latvia, and we would like to share a project overview and update for anyone interested in innovation systems, the research approach, or how international lessons learned can help officials understand their own contexts. To begin: what is a public sector innovation system? A public sector innovation system can be seen as the set of organisations, capacities, laws, policies, processes,…