To equip the Welsh Government to become more open, innovative and adaptive to change, the Education Directorate commissioned the OECD to undertake an assessment of the capacity of the Directorate to develop as a learning organisation (LO). This article explores the outcomes of the LO assessment and provides an early insight into the next steps. To get an overview of what learning organisations are and the OECD’s work in Wales, read OPSI’s previous blogs on...
Global: Innovative Capacity
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...
Innovation is essential. Now more than ever, that is clear, with the coronavirus crisis bluntly hammering home the need for the public sector to do things differently. All of a sudden, things that were unthinkable have become demanded. And as my colleague Sam has outlined and we have been tracking and observing, governments are already innovating in response, working with partners to quickly try new things for one of the most important reasons – in...
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...
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...
Making the invisible visible. While this is one of my favourite phrases from our 2019 Global Trends report, it is also the phrase I find myself using to describe OPSI’s work with public sector innovation systems. We try to make the implicit explicit to allow people within the system to reflect “is this what we want and intended? If not, what can we do to change it?” And every system is unique and the evolution...
If you talk to public servants anywhere in the world about innovation, it usually doesn’t take long before the words “risk aversion” come up in conversation. A lot of people feel that trying new things in the public sector is difficult because there is little ability to take risks. There are many reasons why this might be so, but one issue that comes up fairly often, sometimes with a little shudder of the shoulders, is...
Wales is in the thick of a major education reform process focused on large-scale school improvement. With such an ambitious agenda, the challenge wasn’t just about getting the policy right in the first place, it was about seeing it through to effective implementation so it could start transforming what, and how, students learn. To that end, the Welsh Government Education Directorate worked with OECD colleagues in the Education Directorate’s Implementing Education Policy team to…
Wales is in the midst of a major education reform process. As we know, good education policy is not about perfection on the page, it’s about what happens in the classroom. This is why Wales needed to think about not only effective policy development but also effective policy implementation. What conditions make for effective policy implementation? Our colleagues in the OECD Education Directorate’s Implementing Education Policy team collaborated with key actors in the Welsh education...
English Today the OECD reports The Innovation System of the Public Service of Brazil: An exploration of its past, present and future journey and Innovation skills and leadership in Brazil’s public sector were launched by Marcos Bonturi, Director of Public Governance, at the Brazilian public sector Innovation Week. The Innovation System of the Public Service of Brazil is the second OECD deep-study of a national government’s public sector innovation system. It provides insights into how...