Innovation Tag: Systems Change

Tertius has resulted in massive productivity gains for the building industry in DC, enabling developers & property owners to book (at a nominal cost) certified third party agency inspections. Outcome: Far more efficient matching of demand & supply for permit inspections, substantially reducing turnaround times. Tertius has driven revenue to the taxpayers, increased regulatory oversight, increased safety in the building community, saving property owners and developers thousands of dollars.

Officina is a lab for innovation in the public sector whose main objective is to catalyse the energy of young talents by offering them a transformative training programme. Officina was developed to address a triple urgency: future decision makers not perceiving the public sector as an attractive workplace; the public sector having high average age workforce and lack of innovative approaches; society at large needing a more modern and appealing public sector in this key historical moment.

A lot of innovative activities are carried out by Dutch and other governments. Unfortunately, the impact is limited. Innovations are stand alone projects, not implemented or scalable within primary processes. This reference model supports the implementation of an innovation management system for governments. The starting point is an Innovation Maturity Scan. Tooling, training and handouts are available supporting a social and process innovation transition at governmental organizations.

The rate of innovation often exceeds the speed at which regulatory systems can adapt, blurring lines between sectors and cutting across transitional regulatory and geographical boundaries. The RPF aims to keep the UK at the forefront of regulatory thinking and experimentation. It sponsors projects, led by regulators, aiming to help create a UK regulatory environment that encourages business innovation and investment. It is market-led and uses real-world innovation settings to deliver.

The Government of Armenia has launched “iGorts” - an unprecedented program that invites Diaspora Armenian professionals to work in Armenia's state institutions. Within the framework of the program, Diaspora Armenian professionals are placed in state agencies in need of their expertise and have the opportunity to lend their experience and knowledge toward improving and developing the state institution and its policies and programs.

With the Quality Tools an organisation can evaluate, monitor and compare the quality and use of its services within and between organisations. The tools include a Self-assessment, Customer Feedback and Utilisation Rate Measurement tool and are free of charge. The tools were developed primarily for public sector organisations to help them develop customer-oriented digital services and improve knowledge-based management. On a national level the tools provide data on the state of digitalisation.

Becoming a circular economy entails a deep transformation of industry, consumer behavior and policy. Traditional innovation funding focuses on technology, punctual projects and (single) companies, which alone fail to bring the required systemic change. Hence, the Flemish government launches the subsidy programme Living Labs Circular Economy for projects tackling complex challenges, with a high ambition level, in co-creation with very diverse stakeholders and employing system innovation methods.

How to bring new ways of working and problem-solving tools to the Estonian public sector? Over the course of a year and a half the Public Sector Innovation Team of Estonia developed a design sprint format suitable for the Estonian public sector. By constantly adapting and improving the format the Innovation Team has seen that it is a highly effective tool for spreading design thinking methods and generating enthusiasm around them.

In 2021 Statistics Canada, Canada’s national statistical agency, successfully implemented a new strategy for coding write-in responses to questions asked on the Census of population. Fasttext, a natural language processing algorithm, was applied to 31 questions and approximately 7 million write-in responses that would have in the past been completed by human coders. This innovation significantly increased the coding efficiency by decreasing the time and cost required to code the 2021 Census.

Since 2020, the City of Austin (COA) and the University of Texas (UT) have collaborated on over twenty diverse research projects under the legal and administrative framework of a five-year, ten million dollar master interlocal agreement (ILA). Among a very few of its kind in the USA, this ILA is an "innovation enabling innovation" that bridges the barriers between two large, extremely complex organizations and fast-tracks the launch of research and innovation projects by four to five times.