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Flashforward

What if our minds could move through time as easily as our bodies can move through space? In the movie Arrival (minor spoiler alert!), linguistics professor Dr Louise Banks learns an extraterrestrial language that expresses ideas in a timeless and nonlinear way. Through some science-fiction magic grounded in a grain of truth, Banks gains the ability to perceive time itself differently, and experiences flashes of future moments of great personal and…
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…
This guest post is written by Leeanne Douglas from BizLab within the Australian Government. We have learned lots of lessons running the first human centred design academy in the Australian Government. It has been a bit of trial and error for us, so we thought we would share a few things that might help others in the same position. BizLab, an innovation hub within Australia’s Department of Industry, Innovation and Science, was established in 2016....
The tale of the ‘erasable pen’ Say you have a doctor, an engineer, and a lawyer all sitting in a room. These three professionals work for the same firm and head office told them that company may now only operate with either pens or pencils. They have to make the decision. Their conversation goes like this: Engineer: I vote for more pencils because with pencils I can erase my mistakes if I make an error...
What is in a name? Would a toolkit by any other name seem as useful? In this post, I delve into what comprises innovation “toolkits”—and make a stab at classifying them. What is the difference between a playbook and a manual? This taxonomy development is a step in building our resource to help public sector innovators navigate, sequence, and tweak tools and methods to facilitate their innovation journeys. In one of my previous blog posts...
This blog was authored by former OPSI Policy Analyst, Matt Kerlogue In my previous blog post, I set out the OPSI’s beta model of skills for public sector innovation, structured around six skill areas: iteration, data literacy, user centricity, curiosity, storytelling and insurgency. But providing an outline and description of these six areas is hardly sufficient to enable the uptake of these skills. Our work to develop the skills model, alongside the Observatory’s wider work...