Innovation Tag: Process Facilitation and Co-design

The Future Mentors programme is a reversed mentoring programme in which a small group of young people mentor a decision maker from their own city about the hopes, dreams, and fears of the young generation regarding the future of their city. The programme is a platform for youth in cities to get into a dialogue with the decision makers and get their concerns and wishes heard. Twenty-six cities around Europe participated in the programme in 2022.

The Latrobe Health Assembly has undertaken a co-design process with service providers, government and people with lived experience to develop an innovative mental health cafe model for Latrobe City. The cafe has and continues to involve people with lived experience at all levels. It aims to: increase opportunities for peer support and social connection; reduce emergency department presentations for non-emergency mental health issues; and improve mental health consumer experiences and outcomes.

Transformation Wagen - "Daring Transformations" is a learning programme co-developed with and for public servants in the field of Environmental Politics in Germany. Aiming at enhancing tools for public administration to renew itself, it creates capacities and methodologies to handle major societal challenges and foster a transformative mindset to actively shape the future and not just react to what is happening.

Easy Government invites people with disabilities to redesign legal and administrative texts (i.e., laws, subsidy formulares) using an easy-to-read approach based on pictograms, simple words, short paragraphs, and the creation of new products that are simpler and clearer for all audiences (i.e., seniors, immigrants, people with low reading comprehension, children). With the lenses focused on diversity and inclusion we seek to address complex issues faced by these population groups.

Aviation is regulated in a vast set of laws and agreements, on an international and national level and is to be respected by aviators of all sizes; from big national airports, till little children playing with drones. All these different rules and moreover national differences lead to an incredibly complex system to implement. The Belgian Federal Public Service Mobility has developed a system that translates these legal requirements into a single online aircraft registration platform.

This is an account of how managers became enthused and took responsibility for leading change and co-creating it with their staff within the Planning service. The approach they took was in stark contrast with their standard and legislative based thinking and obvious digital solutions. They incorporated new management behaviours and team working. Waste was dramatically cut, and the staff environment created a highly motivating culture. The impact of the customers needs was profound.

The EGTC GO represents an instrument to unlock cross-border potential for innovation, competitiveness, and sustainable growth. It promotes innovation in local governance through a supra-regional method to solve cross-border challenges - administrative and legal burdens – in order to provide concrete solutions for its territory and citizens. Flagship cooperation projects on Health, Culture and Social Innovation are key examples of the innovative added-value of the EGTC GO.

In 2020, Barcelona Alumni’s global virtual platform was launched to leverage the network of international talent educated in Barcelona but residing abroad and contribute to feeding scientific evidence into the local policy-making process. By connecting international experts and local challenges, this first-of-its-kind digital platform provides a pioneering approach to policy-making, making it more crowdsourced, evidence-based, replicable, scalable, accountable, and transparent.

KAFACI and AfricaRice jointly developed the Africa Rice Development Partnership project to increase rice productivity in Africa. Using modern breeding technology that shortens the breeding period from 10-15 years to 3-5 years, and by crossing Korean Japonica rice with African varieties, five high-yielding varieties were developed and registered in three countries. The newly released varieties directly benefited farmers, consumers, retailers and policy-makers due to their high yield and quality.

Governments traditionally don’t share information and learnings and they are often slow to evolve. OneTeamGov is an innovative community that spans the globe, bringing together individuals who are committed to radically reforming government services and learning from each other. OneTeamGov are an entirely volunteer-run network of individuals who continue to share ideas, project learnings, new ways of working, and continue to push government to be better for all.