Good For: Insight finding

This playbook defines smart cities through human experiences, including 3 "mindsets" (lenses to understand) and 6 "plays" (ways to start). Originally developed for the City of Calgary, Canada, it offers ways to document, prioritize and advocate for individual human experiences at the nexus of networked technology, data and urbanism. It promotes embracing complexity and designing responsive systems, policies and governance around people for people-centered smart cities. Both PDF and slide deck…

Features: Checklist, Examples or Cases, Techniques

This kit explains how to evaluate a public policy approach/initiative, through the lens of several methodologies, including theory of change, agile (agilismo), deep dives ("Inmersiones profundas"), adaptive planning and adaptive management.

Features: Guiding framework

This is a set of resources for designers who are approaching legal challenges with a creative, generative, human-centered approach. The toolbox provides guides, tools, and examples to help you scope & tackle these challenges with design. It includes a Legal Communication Design Toolbox, a Legal Design Pattern Library, and a Legal Product Typology. It covers policy prototyping, visual design, and data visualisation.

Features: Examples or Cases, Guiding framework

This resource is developed by and for open government influencers - civil servants and civil society representatives seeking to collaboratively make governance processes transparent, participatory and accountable. It is intended for those who want to be an open government influencer. The original guidance includes recommendations and experiences from experienced leaders in Europe and Central Asia. It follows the publishers' joint journeys in navigating challenges to creating an enabling…

Features: Facilitators guide, Tactics, Techniques, Tips&Tricks

This resource gives the real story of how government innovation labs develop in the development context in Eurasia, Asia and Middle East: organic and people-driven, often operating under the radar until safe to emerge. It shares a truthful examination of the twists and turns of seeding, starting up and scaling labs, covering the challenges UNDP faced and their failures, as much as their successes. It includes in-depth histories and lessons regarding 4 UNDP innovation labs. The resource is meant…

Features: Checklist, Examples or Cases, Techniques

The Sustainable Livelihoods Approach (SLA) is a method of analysing and changing the lives of people experiencing poverty and disadvantage. It is a participatory approach based on the recognition that all people have abilities and assets that can be developed to help them improve their lives. The SLA Toolkit For Wales provides practical tools to help people with participatory community development. The toolkit describes what the SLA approach is and how it can be used. The appendices then contain…

Features: Tactics, Techniques, Tips&Tricks

This online repository contains knowledge products, tools, inspiring practices, and projects to guide those interested in developing a research and innovation system that puts societal needs and desires at its center. The repository can be filtered by who it is useful for, topic, expertise required, related social challenge, category, and language. The site also offers a self-reflection tool to assess your research and innovation practice on the basis of Ethics, Gender Equity, Governance, Open…

Features: Examples or Cases, Interactive diagnostic, Peer-reviewed literature repository

The resource is intended for those working in the international development or social impact space to assesses the future impact that innovation can deliver in a system. It focuses on three "systems": The Problem Space, The Innovation Space, The Context. It's goals are to precipitate better understanding of the problem of focus and the context in which it exists, assess enablers and barriers to innovation, track system change over time, and assess the impact of a program ex post facto. It…

Features: Examples or Cases, Guiding framework, Techniques

14 methods and 3 recipes suggesting how to combine them, associated with a guide book available for sale by the toolkit publisher. Accompanying each method: Purpose, Outcomes, How to do it, and Tips as well as a worked example, to help readers understand how the method and associated template can be used at the early stage of designing an innovative service.

Features: Tactics, Techniques, Tips&Tricks

The GovLab's Public Problem Solving Canvas is an online interactive canvas based on twenty questions to create and develop your public interest project. These twenty questions are designed to help you refine your understanding of the problem and those whom it affects; express your Big Idea; and turn that idea into an actionable strategy in the real world to the end of improving people's lives.

Features: Interactive diagnostic