One of the biggest challenges in taking a mission-oriented innovation approach is operationalising the ambitions in practice. While many missions have been announced – including missions to tackle climate change, enhance equality, reduce poverty, and many others – there is a lack of analytical reflection of what drives missions to success. To answer this question, the OECD Mission Action Lab and the Danish Design Centre conducted a survey in December 2021. Two hundred and twenty...
Blogs by Angela Hanson
Innovation portfolio management is becoming a core practice for intentional and proactive public sector innovation units to prepare governments to address a diversity of current and future challenges. The practice: Helps build clarity of purpose of innovation; Provides a high-level view of the interrelationships between innovation support activities; Identifies gaps and prompts for ideas for changes in direction or composition; and Identifies the types of innovation supports needed to…
Tools and methods for innovation, anticipation, and strategic foresight are a perennially popular topic and several hundred members of the global public sector anticipatory innovation tools community gathered to take stock of promise and pitfalls of future-oriented tool and method landscape. On Friday 12 March, OECD OPSI organised the session as part of a workshop on Anticipatory Innovation Governance hosted by the Government of Finland with the support of the European Commission’s…
Missions offer a formalised path to creating public value but urgently need more experimental and iterative approaches to make missions a reality in the messy world of public policy. Mission-oriented innovation needs not only an ambitious clarity of purpose but also the alignment of system-level operational and governance mechanisms. OPSI is remixing some of its systems tools to help with that and have redesigned a…
Since the launch of the Toolkit Navigator in November 2018, we have maintained it as a live and continuously growing resource and built up an active community of fellow tool and method experts and enthusiasts. In addition to adding new toolkits, including many submitted by our community, as well as encouraging reviews of existing toolkits from practitioners who have experience with the toolkits, we look forward to Toolkit Navigator enhancements in 2021. We are happy...
Do you know about real-world cases and examples of innovation management? OPSI would like to hear from you. We are starting work with Vinnova, Sweden’s Innovation Agency to explore what good innovation management looks like in practice. We will take a systematic approach to understanding the role, nature, barriers, and enablers of innovation in an organisation. This means considering innovation activities within a wider context of (e.g., leadership, culture, processes, capabilities) rather…
“In medias res” is a narrative technique, used in a variety of works ranging from The Odyssey to Raging Bull, in which a story opens in the middle of the action. I am co-opting the term here to describe the kind of learning teams we need now to learn alongside covid-19 responses. The covid-19 crisis has now affected almost every aspect of everyone’s life globally. Nothing in recent history has provided such a unique opportunity...
OPSI is issuing a call out to all levels of government, civil society, international organisations and the private sector to gather innovative solutions and inspiration on how individuals and organisations across the globe are responding to the crisis.
How might we take advantage of the possibilities that emerge in a crisis to build a better innovation portfolio? We took that question to a recent workshop with a delegation from the Government of Montenegro. The Montenegrins showed us what true agility looks like in practice. Montenegro: Fledgling or Agile? For context, Montenegro is currently one of two countries (including Serbia) in negotiation talks to accede to the European Union and this fact is an...
This post is a follow-on from our Part I post, which provided an overview of the design and development of our Innovation Portfolio Exploration workshop based on OPSI’s Innovation Facets model. Earlier this month, we facilitated a workshop with those from the public sector innovation ecosystem in Sweden. We were hosted by Vinnova, Sweden’s Innovation Agency. Vinnova invests 287 million euros annually in research and innovation projects across public, private, and academic sectors, especially…