05/10/2016 (Nesta)
- We're orchestrating the world’s best people to strengthen innovation
capacity across governments and develop the next generation of public
innovation learning.
Why are we doing this?
Governments have pioneered innovation throughout history.
However, as economic, social and environmental challenges become increasingly
complex, governments are struggling to effectively solve the problems they are
facing. As the environments and tasks of government change, so do the
competencies and skills needed to be an effective public leader or official.
The ability to innovate is ultimately about how governments
operate to create public and democratic legitimacy. Governments dedicated to
driving innovation are being forced to rethink and develop their structures,
capabilities, methods and tools in the search for effective action.
An ever expanding landscape of potentially disruptive
innovation approaches is available to public decision-makers. These include
abilities to experiment, test and improve promising ideas rapidly; to generate
and use data of all kinds; to harness knowledge from many sources and in
multiple ways; to design interventions that resonate with people’s lives and
aspirations; and to make the most of successive generations of digital
technology.
The challenge is how to approach this complex innovation
space. There is a genuine need among public leaders and policymakers for better
strategic and practical support of this transformational process. However,
current training and development offers in the field are falling short of
fulfilling the task of educating and enabling better government innovation
capacity.
What are we doing?
Nesta is developing the i-school – a new way of develop and
supporting public innovation learning for creating public impact. The objective
of the i-school is to strategically support the people, teams, labs, offices
and organisations inside government with a mandate to innovate and/or tasked
with developing new approaches that increase the ability of governments to
innovate. These include different levels of government (city, regional, national,
institutional), different parts of the government hierarchy (from cabinet
offices to operational units) and different departments (across all policy
areas).
The i-school will seek to create an environment for
accelerated learning and a curriculum for government innovation to ensure a
more useful, consistent and evidence-based field. We will co-create learning
experiences, insights and approaches based on how people and organisations
practically create successes in their innovation work.
The i-school aims to advance the field of innovation
learning beyond methods and tools by focusing on the craft of
government innovation – what it takes in practice to navigate and apply a range
of innovation approaches, as well as managing the conditions and implications that
these new approaches create within government organisations.
Partners in the i-school will get strategic support for
their government innovators in their task to build new practices, skills,
capabilities and cultures. Nesta is currently working with pioneering
government partners, innovation labs, international institutions and
educational organisations around the world to explore and co-create new
insights, frameworks and material. This happens through multiple, peer-led
parallel experiments and systematic research and co-development.
The background
The i-school is first and foremost building on the
expertise, experiences and ideas of the current community of practice within
government innovation. In addition, Nesta has a wide-ranging portfolio of work
focusing on government innovation. Significantly, several projects are
exploring how innovation teams work in government, innovations in democracy and
public participation, data-led governance innovation, and redesign of public
services within core areas like health and social services.
The i-school is furthering this work and is specifically
building on the i-teams research focusing on how to dedicate innovation
resources within government organisations. Equally, it links to further the
insights presented by the monthly newsletter focused on innovation lab practice LabNotes and the global
gathering of government innovation labs atLabWorks in 2015.
Moreover, the i-school is building on the experiences of
developing and leveraging innovation learning resources such as the DIY toolkit, practice-guides
for innovation labs and Design
for Europe.
We are currently open to including potential partners
that have a significant ambition to take effective action and develop approaches
and skillsets that are better suited to the challenges of the 21st century. If
you wish to be a part of this movement, we are eager to hear more about your
ambitions and talk about possibilities for collaboration.
For more
information, contact Jesper
Christiansen, Senior Programme Manager.
Source: Nesta
No comments:
Post a Comment