Most people usually agree with the quote above, which is from our communication strategy at MindLab. Much like ‘design’, ‘innovation’ is so all-encompassing and open for interpretation that it risks losing its meaning (Stewart-Weeks, 2010). Perhaps that is why it is almost a given at innovation conferences and seminars that some participant eventually asks ‘How do you define innovation?’

As discussed in the introduction, public sector innovation has evolved over a number of stages since the 1970s, the momentum picking up pace, the discourse changing from ‘what’ to ‘how’. Today, most public leaders tend to agree that more positive change...

Some years ago, the UK Department of Education set up an internal unit to foster new thinking and new practices in education,The Innovation Unit. Part of the legislation that set up the Unit included a clause called ‘The Power to Innovate’. This enabled the Secretary of State for Education to set aside regulations or legislation if schools could show they constrained their freedom to innovate – if the schools could show that the changes they had planned would be likely to lead to the improvement of standards. The role of the Unit was to advise schools on how to...

In the mid-2000s, the leadership of the Danish Ministry of Taxation decided to fundamentally transform the organisation’s relationship with citizens and business. Inspired by international discussions and experiences on the future of tax administration, not least within the OECD, the top executives asked: what if we believed that the vast majority of our users want to pay their taxes correctly and on time, but don’t always know how? What if only a very small percentage of them really want to avoid compliance?

Adopting such a perspective would entail a fundamental shift in how the Ministry conducted its business, and how...

A few years ago, Anne Lind, the Director-General of the Danish Board of Industrial Injuries, appeared on Tuesday evening television news to face citizens whose cases had been managed by her agency. The gist of the news story was that the board, a state agency, was not sufficiently professional in assisting people in their injury settlement process, adding to their distress in an already vulnerable situation. The low point came when one of the citizens in the television studio pointed out that she had been required by the board to see her doctor concerning the exact same issue – twice....

Over the course of more than three years, we at MindLab asked the project managers and staff we had assisted with innovation projects a number of questions about their experience of working with us. When assessing the projects they had taken part in, the vast majority said they would, to a high degree, apply our methodologies of co-creation and citizen involvement again in future innovation efforts. We took these responses as a powerful indication that a culture change was beginning to take hold.

Organisations don’t innovate, people innovate. The organisation is the context in which people come to work every...

When the City Council of Sunderland, UK, engaged with LiveWork, a service design company to find new approaches to helping economically inactive people into work, they also engaged in an entirely different development process. Over the course of the project, the designers spent three months following 12 people to gain deep insight into their lives, and more than 280 people were involved in idea-development sessions. Building on design approaches such as ethnographic research, service journeys, fast experimentation and prototyping, LiveWork helped the city council identify a range of possible solutions that could get people more efficiently on a path back...

‘You have to be healthy to be able to manage a work injury case.’ This statement by an injured citizen became a significant trigger of change for the Danish Board of Industrial Injuries. The agency is by any standard a very professionally run government agency. It has a sharply formulated strategy, effective performance management systems, has digitised much of its internal and external processes, and implemented lean management, speeding up case flows and increasing case quality. However, when the agency in collaboration with MindLab conducted in-depth ethnographic field studies of four citizens with a work injury, observing their meetings with...

During the past few years, a new term has entered the Danish government’s efforts to drive regulatory reform and make it easier to start and run a small business:burden-hunting. Widely reported in the business press, civil servants ventured out to conduct on-site field research, engaging with company owners, finance officers and accounting staff to better understand what it is like to own a business and to be at the receiving end of bureaucracy and red tape (MindLab, 2008). These civil servants, from across three different government departments, had been trained by MindLab in ethnographic research techniques and, through a...

Youth Villages is a non-profit organisation, headquartered in the state of Tennessee, that works on behalf of government agencies to serve emotionally and behaviourally troubled youth between the ages of six and 22. The organisation provides in-home and residential programmes that help children and young people improve academic achievement, make a successful transition to employment and avoid criminal activity. Most of the youth they serve have cycled in and out of foster care or are involved in the juvenile justice system. The results of Youth Villages’ efforts are remarkable: compared with traditional US child-welfare services, Youth Villages’ in-home programme has...

The New York State Associate Commissioner of Education, Sheila Evans-Tranum, is among the highest-ranking African-American women in US state government. As the first academic in her family (she has a double major in English and mathematics), she represents a remarkable story of overcoming enormous challenges to achieve a stellar career in public service. She also embodies a philosophy that speaks very strongly to innovation, for instance having emphasised accountability at all levels of the New York state school system as a key driver of positive change in the public school system. She firmly believes that what she tries to accomplish...