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citizen-centred innovation - anthropological methods - service design - public development - communication - idea and concept development - innovation strategy - cross-institutional collaboration

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  • Jesper Christiansen
  • Anette Væring
  • Rasmus Kolding
  • Christian Bason
  • Nina Holm Vohnsen
Nina Holm Vohnsen

Labour market montage 1

By Nina Holm Vohnsen October 26th 2009

Academic work I // sketch for a presentation. I take a shower. Make a cup of coffee. Nescafe. Hotel room. I only pour half of it in my cup. Or I won’t sleep. I sit at the desk. I forget what I’m doing. Stare at the paper. Write the heading. The coffee. Tastes bad. Look at my cellphone. There is sand on the table. Look at the paper. Thoughts wanders off. The coffee. Tastes bad. Makes even real milk taste UHT. Why do phone cords always coil? Look at my mobile. Turn on my computer. The coffee. Surprisingly bad. I forget why I turned on the computer. Then I remember, though it wasn’t the reason to begin with. I switch to standby. One bullet on my list. I look at the coffee. Was it that bad? Yes. I finish it. Almost. I go insane. Push it away. Look at the mobile. Lean back in chair. Look out the window. Look at my mobile. Put down my pen.

Thought I // inspired by David Mosse. What if all the clever plans and schemes that policy makers go about developing serves no other purpose than being creative obstacles to those whose job it is to translate the politicians’’ intentions into practice? Thought II // inspired by Tim Ingold. How might you rethink policy (understood as an attempt at a prescriptive design) when you take seriously that shape giving is a constant process resulting from people’s engagement with life, each other and their physical surroundings and not an execution of any grand plan?

Irrelevant detail I // green eyes. Her irises are at least twice as big as any I have seen until now. They stabbed me or no one in particular through the stench of urine. Two gigantic jewels hovering above the cardboard box. Oh! She was just a junkie.

Academic work II // field work. He holds out a plastic bag. I don’t understand what he is saying, only that he wants me to look inside the bag. Guesstimate; there is about 40 boxes of pills in this plastic bag that he has brought with him into the computer room. He brings coffee and tea for the employees and the participants who have been referred to ‘the ’sickness benefit package solution’. He hands me a cup of coffee with milk and asks me who I am? Praises the employees. And then; the plastic bag. He intents something but I have no idea what. I look into the bag at the pills. I think he tells me that he wants to talk to his caseworker about the pills. I know nothing about pills. Here is what I know: He holds a string of rejected job applications; if he doesn’’t get a job he wont be able to bring his wife to the country; the municipality has invested in a ’sickness benefit package solution’ to get him full time employment; they pay around 1000 kr a week for 25 hour that are meant to put him ‘the citizen’ at the center and bring him closer to the labor marked. Here is what he knows about me: Nothing. 0. Zero.

Christian Bason

Must innovation labs be value-driven?

By Christian Bason October 25th 2009

On Oktober 12-13, 20 leaders of innovation labs gathered with academics and policy experts from the European Commission to formulate a vision for labs in Europe by 2020. The challenge was to show how innovation labs might help solve complex social, environmental and economic challenges through sustainable, human-centered and democratized innovation. See Stepháne Vincents photos from the event, which was held at MindLab, here.

Lots of topics were discussed, drawing on insights from the practical work taking place at diverse organisations like NESTA Lab and the Innovation Unit of the UK, la 27e Region of France, and Medialab Prado of Spain. One of the most fascinating aspects of the conversation was the question whether innovation labs are value-driven? Because if a particularly strong sense of mission and purpose is crucial for labs to be effective, what does that mean for the potential of labs, and what are the implications for how to create, lead and grow them? To shape relevant future policy, might we first have to better understand how values are selected and cultivated in a ‘lab’ enviornment?

The discussion made me think back to early 2007, when we started on the journey towards the second generation of MindLab. One of the first things we did in our newly assembled core team was, in fact, to formulate a set of common values. Through a creative process, we arrived at the following five value statements, which have proven to be, in fact, central to our daily work:

Challenge. We challenge traditional thinking and bureaucracy

Communication. Our communication is inspiring and straitforward

Cooperation. We challenge each other’s thinking

Atmosphere. We drink black tea and green coffee

Results. We experiment with the objective in mind.

We often refer to these values when making key decisions: Who to join the team, which projects to take on, how to relate to the barriers we encounter, how to treat each other, who to collaborate with externally. (Ohh, and what kind of coffee to drink!).

Our values are, in many respects, of greater operational importance than our strategy.

So, yes, MindLab is value-driven. And perhaphs innovation labs have to be, in order to maintain a strong sense of purpose and direction in the midst of a chaotic, complex and difficult reality.

I would therefore like to extend an invitation to our fellow innovation labs around the globe to join the conversation here on MindBlog:

What are your values, and what do they do for you?

Because perhaps by understanding the role of values better, we can also learn how to create effective innovation labs that can help shape the future we desire.

Rasmus Kolding

Design as a driver against climate change

By Rasmus Kolding September 29th 2009

This is a small film we produced in the aftermath of the Manuel Toscano speech & workshop during Copenhagen Design Week. Music by Apollo Music.

Anette Væring

MindLab event during Cph Design Week 09

By Anette Væring September 8th 2009

MindLab hosted a speak and a workshop on Sep. 2nd, on the topic of ‘Design as a driver against climate change’. The speak was given by Manuel Toscano, from the NY based design studio ZAGO.

See the video and the pictures below.

Christian Bason

What could design do for government?

By Christian Bason August 25th 2009

INDEX seeks to improve life. So does government.

Copenhagen this week is dominated by design. On the beautiful Kgs. Nytorv square, world class designs are on display in transparent plastic bubbles. This Friday, a select few of them will win the prestigious biannual INDEX:Award in categories like body, home, work and play.

Now, that’s all very well. But there isn’t an INDEX: prize category for government.

What if there was? Could design also change the way government works? For INDEX: the slogan is “design to improve life”. Believe it or not, but most government agencies are created to improve how society works and how life in society is lived.

What if design thinking characterised the very way government develops new services and policies? At MindLab we are increasingly learning how design can dramatically improve the process of shaping future visions for society, both in the abstract and the very practical. From climate change strategies to how we meet individual citizens at a job centre, the design process offers us a new way of realising desirable outcomes.

What could be the contribution of design to government? Here are some suggestions:

See everything as an experiment.

Challenge the status quo.

Value the citizen.

Be concrete.

Co-create.

Visualise.

Iterate.

Could these seven principles transform how government works? Perhaps. When a network of 25 design experts and practitioners meet in Copenhagen this coming weekend for another design event, the Co’creation summit, to write a manifesto for the future of design, my guess is that some of these principles will be part of the package. For many of the participants, this will not be very surprising. But if public managers really, really took design to heart, it could be the beginning of a revolution.

Christian Bason

Why should government care about social innovation?

By Christian Bason July 25th 2009

Returning from the Social Innovation Exchange (SIX) summer school, which was held in Lisbon on July 14-17, I am feeling energized and confident that social innovators hold the key to many of the new ideas and solutions that our societies so desparately need. From health care to education to climate change, their efforts create real value to citizens, every day.

MindLab presents at SIX Summer School

MindLab presents at SIX Summer School

However, to most people in government, at least in Denmark, social innovation is still a broad and vague term that doesn’t elicit much enthusiasm or even recognition. In a welfare state where every third person in employment works for the government, there isn’t a lot of consideration of potential social solutions coming from outside government…

So why should government care? Following my conversations with fellow innovators at the Lisbon event, I would suggest at least three pressing reasons:

First, bureaucrats aren’t smarter than anyone else. So, to get the best ideas to tackle wicked social problems (or, in SIX terms, “Fixing the Future”), we need everyone to contribute — not least savvy social entrepreneurs.

Second, social innovators are close to the citizens. One of our key challenges here at MindLab is to get citizens and businesses involved directly in the public sector innovation process. To most social innovators, a deep understanding of the underlying, implicit or explicit needs of citizens is at the very heart of their work. For government to remain legitimate and relevant, it has to support those that make a difference in people’s lives at the local level.

Third, a critical challenge for any innovator, whether in government or beyond, is to not only get the ideas but turn them into practice. Social innovators possess the skills and dedication to get their visions implemented, and not only can government learn from that, government can benefit from creating mutually positive alliances and partnerships with organisations whose ideas have already stood the hard test of meeting reality — but who may need the power and scale of government to make the solutions available to many more.

Social innovators at work

Social innovators at work

Even if we succeed convincing our colleagues in government of these benefits, I still see a major challenge that must be overcome: How do we empower government to not just understand, but also to support and strengthen social innovators? Perhaps part of the solution is that government itself must become more innovative. That was at least MindLabs message at the SIX event. What do you think?

Rasmus Kolding

Speech by Bill Moggridge

By Rasmus Kolding June 25th 2009

Bill Moggridge of IDEO gave a speech at MindLab last week, and this is the full video. Please share and enjoy!

Jesper Christiansen

Policy-based evidence or evidence-based policy?

By Jesper Christiansen June 25th 2009

“If we want people to innovate, the responsibility has to be with them” (John Seddon, 2009)

At MindLab we often experience how innovation the public sector can be a complex matter in a system that seems to be built for stability and not for development and change. John Seddon addresses this issue in his new book ‘Systems Thinking in the Public Sector’ where he tries to come with solutions for what he calls “the failures of the reform regime”.billede1

According to John Seddon innovation in the public sector is drowning. An intense monitorism poses systems of extreme control which leaves public workers demoralized in a high rate. Seddon argues that this is due to the neglecting of one almost too evident matter: the creation of systems based on the implementation of service experience from the points of view of workers and users.

He introduces what he calls ‘systems thinking’ which is based on the basic thought that the design of the system determines how actors behave. The only plan you will need, he argues, is knowledge by studying the system and the flow of demand in customer terms. Seddon puts it this way: “Things always go wrong. If something is going wrong predictably, you can only turn it off by re-designing the service”.

This should be done by involving public workers in control and development. “If you want someone to do a good job, design a good job to do. Workers have to have the means to control and improve their own work. The work of managers then changes to a cooperative role, working on the system. Working on the work with the worker”.

The measuring of public service should instead be based on the actual local work that is being done and in this way make room for variety and unexpected innovation. Thus, for Seddon there is no good way to set up target standards because they will always be arbitrary and never fit on a broad scale. This means, as we often underline at MindLab, that the complexity of public demands should be taken into account and policy should aim at coping with these rather natural and human circumstances.

This doesn’t mean that governments should stop talking about visions and purpose. As Seddon puts it: “It’s entirely legitimate for the government to talk about purpose, but it must be the managerial responsibility to make choices about measures and method”. This changes the locus of control and puts public workers at the centre of understanding and improving their work. As it should be according to Seddon to avoid a regime “that looks for policy-based evidence, not evidence-based policy”.

Quotes taken from the lecture ‘Cultural change is free‘ at 2009 conference of the Human Givens Institute.

Also read “Systems Thinking in the Public Sector” (John Seddon, Triarchy Press 2009) and check out The Systems Thinking Review.systems-thinking-cover

Jesper Christiansen

Should we aim to create urbanity in public governance?

By Jesper Christiansen June 25th 2009

How to think about change in the public sector: thoughts from the CBS-conference ’Contemporary Issues in Public Management’

The urban city is often presented as a place of significant segmentality which makes self-presentation a complex matter with varied ways of making one known to others. It is not only a place with segregation of roles in different groups and networks. It also segregates moral judgements. In the city people can, at least situationally, slip out of their existing social settings and participate in different groups and partnerships with different expectations and values (see Hannerz 1980). In this respect, urbanity provides an interesting frame of thought when trying to grasp the concept of change in the public sector.

The public welfare sector is often seen as a problematic and unlikely place for significant change and innovation. The way forward is by many claimed to be based on the creation of new partnerships which are able to combine and take advantage of different competences in close interaction and cooperation. This is thought of both in terms of public-private innovation partnerships and public-public partnerships between different public actors.

In both cases, the new organizational setting aims to develop new possible solutions which the different actors otherwise wouldn’t be able to develop. And in both cases, the goal is to enhance what Professor Garth M. Britton at the CBS-conference ’Contemporary Issues in Public Management’ called ‘change capability’. He understood this as an individual’s or organizational group’s “capability to change capabilities”.

Central to his argument was that he saw public value as the basic strategic driver for the partnerships aiming to change the public sector. He argued for an understanding of the relevant units and linkages between them in terms of values, operational and administrative capability, and the authorizing environment. As he puts it: “The interrelationships between formal and informal actors in chains of public value creation (complex and fluid) are a fundamental source of adaptability and change capabilities”.

One of the issues of these interrelationships is the question of agenda and experience of the actors involved. Going into a partnership which has a new, defined purpose gives possibilities in terms of generating new roles and identifications in the particular partnership. However, this process is difficult if existing professional agendas are strictly maintained in the partnership and the individual thus feel a strong obligation to keep certain ideas about for instance work practice. In other words, the interrelationships of one individual can collide with each other when he or she has to take different agendas into account.

This issue was among other things the concern of Adina Dudau who in her presentation at the CBS-conference focused on the interactive identities in welfare partnerships. Her argument evolved around negotiation when public or public-private actors cooperate about the change of welfare issues as it depends on one or more of the interdependent levels of motivation. The catalysts and obstacles of the partnership are to be found in the ‘complex whole’ consisting of individuals, professions and organisations. The most productive and innovative partnership, she argued, occurred when the partnership worked as a new established organization and a ‘cross professional identity’ was created. In comparison, longer standing organizations tended to be more resistant to change.

So that creates a dilemma. On one side you want to draw upon the existing experience of the different actors, but on the other you want to have them forget where they came from in order to abolish existing ties and make worth of their experience in the new organizational setting.

This leads us back to the concept of urbanity. For the urban individual it is legitimate and accepted when he or she separates his or her engagement in different networks and groups without making one known to the other. Whether you are a representative of a company or a public unit you are in the same way participating in different types of network with different levels of importance to your main work place. The difference is that here you are often obliged to keep your main role which make your participation on other networks a complex matter.

To think urban living into innovation partnerships is interesting because it leads to following questions: what if the individual participating in a welfare innovation partnership wasn’t confronted with his or her particular role in that partnership? What if the only parameter of moral judgement was the one inside the partnership? What if innovation in the public sector becomes a matter of temporary roles in new established organizations and cross-professional identities instead a matter of doubt in terms of confronting the new establishment with one’s existing organizational setting?

Christian Bason

Larry’s three laws: Lessons from Stanford’s Center for Design Research

By Christian Bason June 25th 2009

“We are dogmatic about prototypes.” So says Larry Leifer, a university professor and the Founding Director ofStanford University’s Center for Design Research. Over the past 25 years his institution has produced more than 40 design research Ph.Ds, all of whom are closely cooperating with some of the world’s leading companies to solve specific problems. When you visit the Center for Design Research, as I recently had the chance to do, you are struck by how down-to-earth and practically focused the work of the institution is. The design school is linked to Stanford’s engineering area, and the engineers’ feel for technology and practical problem-solving is contagious. Many of the students have obtained a Masters degree in technology before coming to the design school. A peek into the school’s biggest room reveals 4-5 groups of students working dedicatedly on projects for companies like BMW, Panasonic and SAP. Flat screens are ubiquitous, the walls are all covered with whiteboards, and large notices describing case studies and project descriptions hang beneath the ceiling. Lego bricks lie scattered on the shelves, and in one corner of the room sits the entire dashboard from a German passenger car. On the other hand, there are no partitions separating the various workgroups, and no bookshelf stands more than waist-high.

Work environment at Stanford's Center for Design Research
Work environment at Stanford’s Center for Design Research

“We believe that in a knowledge environment, we ought to be able to see each other,” says Larry Leifer. He says that over the years he has become known for “Larry’s three laws”, which describe the work of the design school:

#1: Design is a social and technical activity
#2: Preserve ambiguity
#3: All designers redesign.

What is the significance of the three laws? From MindLab’s perspective they also make sense when you apply them to the public sector’s development processes. Let’s try to reinterpret them:

#1: Public sector innovation involves the generation of a deep understanding of the social reality we want to modify, as well as finding solutions – including technological ones – that are capable of bringing about positive change. Only a minority of public-sector innovators would disagree with that assertion. Maybe we are just not good enough at being at the leading edge with regard to the latest technological advances. For instance, how many public organizations have fully exploited the potential that mobile technology offers?

#2: Public sector innovation requires being willing to stick with uncertainty and ambiguity well into the development process. In our experience, this kind of divergence is essential for sparking off the understanding of a problem, as well as for generating novel solutions. Sometimes you have to take a detour in order to reach your goal. However, this is an area where public development officials, and their bosses especially, begin to lose their nerve. “When will we reach our target?” “Now is the time for us to bring this to a conclusion.” “Precisely how does this activity help us to solve the problem?” Such doubts are understandable, but sterile. The innovation process requires having confidence that it will hit its mark even when it doesn’t seem as though it will.

#3: Public sector innovation requires iteration: being willing not only to design a possible solution, but also to test and redesign it. At MindLab we believe that the learning process that unfolds through experimenting with partial solutions, obtaining feedback from citizens and businesses, and then refining the solutions, is extremely valuable. It merely requires a willingness to get involved with incomplete measures or initiatives, plus the courage to accept the consequences of the feedback we receive.

So where do the prototypes fit into this picture? Well, a prototype – whether of a dashboard or a public sector service process – makes a solution tangible. And unless it has been made tangible it cannot be tested or developed further. At the same time, the prototype is a tool that demonstrates how it is possible to turn ambiguity into something concrete and turn it into a solution that combines social processes with technological opportunities. It is therefore quite reasonable to be dogmatic about using prototypes. Without them we would be breaking all three of Larry’s laws.

Larry Leifer talks about design research
Larry Leifer talks about design research
Christian Bason

Leadership. The secret formula of a successful public sector?

By Christian Bason April 7th 2009

On the afternoon of Monday, April 6th, in a small and rather dark auditorium at the Copenhagen Business School, Alexander Kroll from the University of Potsdam concluded that the term “leadership” is quite rare in public management. That theme came back to haunt me three times over the rest of that day.

First, it haunted me at the workshop. More precisely, a review Mr. Kroll conducted of more than 1.200 academic articles about New Public Management shows that only six percent of them mentions the word “leadership” at all. Now, that might, or might not, be a problem. As a British professor commented, perhaps the reason leadership didn’t pop up more often is that the review was limited to New Public Management — and many, if not all, academics in fact distinguish between leadership and management. If that was the explanation, we wouldn’t have much of a problem. Leadership could still be a central feature of public administration research.

Fun aside, I did get the feeling that we were dealing with a serious question. The workshop participants spent some time debating the leadership theme, and a Brasilian participant asked whether leadership didn’t have to do with a notion of moral authority rather than (administrative) position. For exactly that reason, leadership in the public sector might be suspect in itself. It is not the role of public employees to lead. Moral authority is the sole domain of politicians, not administrators. A scary thought, I believe. But true?

The second time leadership showed up was during my own presentation in the late afternoon. A U.S. professor asked about MindLab’s experience with successful cross-ministerial collaboration and innovation. What does it take? I humbly apologised for not being able to come up with a better suggestion than … leadership. He agreed and said he couldn’t come up with a better suggestion himself. So, perhaps leadership isn’t dangerous, but rather critical to the success of the public sector?

The third time leadership emerged as a theme that Monday was in the late evening, when I visited the blog of the newly established NESTA Lab, an organization focused on public sector innovation, much like MindLab. On their blog, director Rowena Young describes a lunchtime conversation with her new team about innovation leadership in the public sector, and what it would take to switch more managers on to public sector innovation. They decided on the following recommendation:

Start somewhere. Better to have lost in innovation than never have innovated before.

I couldn’t agree more. And maybe the same applies to leadership. Let’s get the secret out.

MindLab at the IRSPM conference at the Copenhagen Business School.
MindLab at the IRSPM conference at the Copenhagen Business School.
Christian Bason

Towards the risk-free society? The shape of government and accountability after the financial crisis

By Christian Bason April 6th 2009

“Public enemy number one”. This was the title of the first slide of political science professor Donald Kettls keynote speech at the IRSPM public management conference in Copenhagen today. The public enemy in question was Sir Fred Goodwin, former head of Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), and target of public outrage since he decided to keep his pension in spite of the bank’s receiving £45 billion in public bail-out money.

Broken window at former RBS head Fred Goodwin's home: Public outrage manifesting the new shape of accountability?
Broken window at former RBS head Fred Goodwin’s home: Public outrage manifesting the new shape of accountability?

RBS is but one of a string of private companies that are now owned partly or fully by government. That puts many companies into the type of public scrutiny that government is used to – and these days, many of them don’t look too pretty in the eyes of the masses. So, while government has been increasingly privatized, private companies are now being governmentalized. The key question then is: If the boundary between public and private is blurring, what is accountability in the post-financial crisis world? Kettl’s short answer was: We don’t know. He then offered several ways forward, only to conclude again: We don’t really know.

One interesting approach, though, is the Obama governments’ pledge to show citizens exactly how the US financial stimulus package is being spent, thus cutting through the accountability issue by aiming at full transparency. At the website www.recovery.gov it is in principle going to be possible to trace every federal dollar spent. According to Donald Kettl, the Obama administration has even considered using Google Earth to allow citizens to see how the government spending trickles all the way down to their neighbourhood.

One pattern that emerged from Kettls tour de force of the future of accountability became strikingly clear, however: Government action seems to be directed at eliminating or at least heavily minimizing risk. Through government interventions around the globe to curb the financial crisis, administrators are trying to shape a new public order which is, if not risk-free, then at least risk-averse. Citizens and businesses should never again be so vulnerable to the whims of financial markets and economic forces. Government should be our friend in times of crisis (and prevent crises from recurring). Such a new order will, however, require a much deeper understanding of risk by government administrators. And even if we upgrade our risk management skills considerably, the risk-free society is likely to be impossible to attain. Because, with Kettls words: “We only know what we want after we see what we get”. In today’s complex world order, we may not know what the risk was before it’s too late. Perhaps the post-financial crisis world will look quite similar to the old one, after all?

Easter sunlight hits participants at the IRSPM conference in Copenhagen
Easter sunlight hits participants at the IRSPM conference in Copenhagen
Christian Bason

Rethinking government. Can anthropological research hold the key to public sector transformation?

By Christian Bason April 5th 2009

On April 6th, 7th and 8th MindLab is participating in the annual conference of the International Research Society for Public Management, IRSPM. The conference takes place in Denmark at the Copenhagen Business School, and is thus an obvious opportunity to share our perspectives on the future of the public sector and, not least, our current Ph.D. research.

MindLab is now hosting a total of three Ph.D. students – all of them with a background in anthropology and ethnology. Their fields of interest are quite different, however, ranging from sick leave reform to tax compliance, to public-private innovation processes.

Why do we believe that anthropological research can improve our understanding of what it takes to create more effective public services and policies? Let me just offer a single but powerful reason:

Anthropology can offer an outside-in perspective on the public sector. Anthropologists have a highly developed ability to immerse themselves in the subjective reality of life as it is lived. Not least, they go behind immediate attitudes, and examine actual practices, for instance through observation. Viewing the world of public sector interventions through the lens of citizens and enterprises holds a promise of showing us a different reality – a reality we need to understand if we want public policies to be sufficiently relevant to the groups they target. Although our projects are far from finished, I’ll try to share a taste of the themes they might address:

How does a major public sector reform unfold from top to bottom of the implementation chain, and how are the political objectives translated into concrete interactions between citizens and front line staff?

What are the concrete practices that shape tax compliance in small and medium sized enterprises, and how are they created?

Under what circumstances can cooperation between public and private actors unleash new social innovations?

I hope and expect that, in due course, you can read about the answers (and new questions) that this research raises. So stay tuned.

Christian Bason

Welcome to MindBlog

By Christian Bason February 28th 2009

Today MindLab powers up the dialogue on innovation in the public sector – and you’re invited to take part in the conversation. We will actively use this blog to share experiences, case examples, research results and methods from our collaboration on innovation projects in the three ministries MindLab is a part of: The Ministry of Economic and Business Affairs, the Ministry of Taxation and the Ministry of Employment. In addition we will look far beyond the Danish state administration to gather new perspectives  on innovation: From other public sector practitioners, from academia, from the private and third sectors and of course, from Denmark and abroad.

We are launching this English variety of the blog in the hope that MindBlog will prove relevant not only for our colleagues in the three ministries, but for everyone with a passion for transforming the public sector and creating value for society.

No matter where you are, we hope you will let yourself be engaged with us and the themes we address.

In short, it is our ambition that MindBlog will be the most valuable place to harvest inspiration and knowledge when you work with public sector innovation. As far as we can see, that place is missing today, even as innovation has become nearly as much of a buzzword in public organisations as it has been for decades in the private sector. Exactly because the term is pretty much everywhere, and thus in risk of losing both content and meaning, we believe it is essential to stimulate a more nuanced and deeper conversation about how to create better social solutions, and turn them into reality.

Meanwhile, two particular perspectives characterise the prism through which we at MindLab see the world – and those two perspectives will also influence this blog:

The first perspective is user-centered innovation: How can we best involve citizens and businesses directly in the innovation process, and what kind of value can it generate? How can users, civil servants and other stakeholders participate in a fruitful interplay, that can trigger new ways of thinking about public services and public policy?

The second perspective is cross-cutting collaboration and alliances: How to promote a sound process for cooperation across departments, sectors, and across public, private and social domains? It is our experience, that to place citizens and businesses at the center of the innovation process automatically forces us to think beyond the traditional “silo” organisation of the public sector we know. That places the two perspectives in a natural relationship to each other.

All of MindLabs staff contributes to the blog. That means that you can expect a broad palette of angles and approaches to innovation, which also represents our different professional backgrounds – from design to anthropology, and from media to political science. We experience it as a strength in our daily work that we hold different perspectives and interests – we hope that you will experience the same. Enjoy your reading. We look forward to hearing from you!