Toolkit Format: PDF publication

The toolkit's goal is to help actors conceptualize and operationalize their ambitions in terms of supporting social innovation. It contains not only “procedures” but also knowledge concerning social innovation. The guide was designed to support European Social Fund (or other) funding organisations that want to focus mainly on service innovation (as opposed to systems innovation or internally oriented process innovation). But it also recognizes the idea of broader societal transitions and the…

Features: Guiding framework, Techniques

The resource addresses the use of financial prizes to source solutions to challenges. It draws on academic literature, interviews with analysts and practitioners, surveys of prize sponsors and competitors, databases of small and large awards, and case studies of 12 effective prizes to produce lessons from a range of sectors, goals, and prize types. It provides frameworks and recommendations to help improve current prizes and stimulate effective future use. While it is targeted to philanthropic…

Features: Facilitators guide

The Policy Quality Framework describes the key characteristics of quality policy advice, as well as the ‘enablers’ of great advice, like considering multiple perspectives, good commissioning, quality assurance processes and work planning. It is one of three improvement frameworks co-designed for and by the policy community in New Zealand to help government agencies improve their policy quality and capability. It includes several policy assessments for different stages of the policy cycle and…

Features: Techniques

A collection of tools created during the Open Data Innovation Week, which was a gathering of innovators from across the Asia-Pacific region to build a box of tools and methods for improving the design, practice and implementation of open data initiatives to help solve the region’s key political, economic, and social problems. Tools range from ethnography to mapping and analysis. Each tool contains instructions: purpose, prerequisites, who to involve, difficulty, time-frame, and step-by-step…

Features: Checklist, Tactics

A part of the Australian Public Sector Innovation Toolkit, this provides guidance on what horizon scanning is and how to do it. It includes assessments, checklists, and specialised information about techniques.

Features: Checklist, Examples or Cases, Tactics, Techniques, Tips&Tricks

Ethnographic Experiential Futures, is a protocol for surfacing and documenting existing images of the future. It combines Ethnographic futures research, EFR, a protocol for surfacing and documenting existing images of the future. Experiential futures, XF, is a family of approaches for vivid multisensory, transmedia, and diegetic representations of images of the future. The hybrid approach puts together two modes of futures research and practice in a step-by-step guide. Its intent is to help…

Features: Guiding framework

The toolkit includes 5 methods for designing a more inclusive lab. The toolkit begins by guiding users through basic user observation, identification, and categorization processes (observation, interviews, and personas). It then moves into problem definition and stakeholder prioritization, and finally defines a concrete suggestion for increased diverse stakeholder governance. It includes templates and examples for each method.

Features: Examples or Cases, Tactics

This is a report produced in conjunction with IDEO after a 2-year initiative of the Rockefeller Foundation called Paper Prototyping, an effort to better inform investment decisions of the Foundation. While this resource is not a typical innovation toolkit, it was included because it describes an often implicit and invisible process of developing and testing proposals for innovative solutions to complex problems.

Features: Examples or Cases

The Collective Action Toolkit (2nd edition) is a set of activities and methods that enables groups of people anywhere to organize, collaborate, and create solutions for problems affecting their community. It guides users through methods according to six action areas, with suggested pathways from one method to the next. For each method, step-by-step instructions are given, in addition to the time, roles, and materials needed. Some methods include canvasses to guide activity. The toolkit is…

Features: Facilitators guide, Guiding framework, Techniques

This guide is a facilitation toolkit for staff at Horizons and others interested in practising the Horizons Foresight Method in their own organizations. Its aims are to build foresight literacy in general, to explain the Horizons Foresight Method in particular, and to build capacity for horizon scanning in the Canadian federal government and other organizations. It provides a detailed description of concepts and processes, divided into 6 modules. Modules include facilitation guides, tip sheets,…

Features: Facilitators guide, Techniques, Tips&Tricks