It's not always clear what people mean when they say 'government innovation' but for us it's about finding better approaches to deal with public problems. We break in down in three ways.

Reframing the work of government

At the Danish government innovation unit MindLab and The Australian Centre for Social Innovation respectively, we often said that “we have a loyalty and respect for how the system works, but we also have the obligation to challenge it”.

We spent a lot of time reframing tasks – from reframing citizen engagement as spending actual time in the everyday contexts of people’s lives or co-designing new ideas with them. Or reframing policy implementation as an experimental process – remaking policy-making as a craft of testing and adapting a series of hypotheses.

Finding better approaches to public problems

The bigger picture here is that the ability to innovate ultimately becomes about how governments improve the way they serve the public. As economic, social and environmental challenges are becoming increasingly complex, governments are struggling to effectively solve the problems they face with their traditional instruments and toolkits. Government innovation, then, is about finding better approaches to deal with public problems. This means improving the capability to:

• Understand. Capturing everyday experiences of citizens, unpacking the causes and consequences of public problems, and analysing their dimensions and implications.
• Imagine. Expanding the scope and options for creatively identifying or generating new ideas (through new forms of user-involvement, foresight, collaboration, solution mapping, etc.).
• Synthesise. Prioritising ideas by drawing upon the right evidence, experiences and expertise and shaping the initiative, its enabling conditions and decision-making process.
• Experiment. Testing how the initiative will work in practice and enabling iterative learning and adjustment in light of unexpected consequences and opportunities.
• Operationalise. Turning the initiative to a new, consistent practice by creating an effective and appropriate dynamic between intervention, implementation and learning/feedback.

Innovation as a means to an end

For all of its buzzword status, innovation or even government innovation should be valued in terms of improving the ability of governments and public administrations to deal with public problems effectively. Real value comes when innovative ideas or innovation methods become mechanisms for strategic change. Where they transform core government operations; build institutional capacity and create governments as innovation leaders; and reframe and reshape the core tasks of government with the ultimate aim of improving outcomes for citizens.

Simple as that.