LabX Progress Report

At the end of 2020, LabX celebrated 4 years of existence and 3 years of effective work, marking the date with the publication of a Progress Report.

In this report, it is possible to verify which projects LabX has worked on, understand the results of this work and the impact we have generated for users of the services, whether citizens or employees in public functions.

LabX was born to be a safe space for experimentation to investigate, co-create and test innovative solutions to improve public services, focusing on the needs and expectations of citizens and companies. This role allows the Public Administration to go as far as the obvious solutions do not reach, controlling costs and risks and learning from successive attempts at improvement.

For the purpose of “normalizing” experimentation in Public Administration, it was crucial that the solutions developed were oriented to the real needs of citizens and companies. The intervention had to go through concrete and exemplary examples rather than merely rhetorical responses to those needs. When placed before the limits of its intervention capacity, without an infinite budget and without an unlimited team, LabX’s option was to place these challenges at the center of its strategy. To meet these constraints, the option was to work in a network, through collaborations that favored the connection with civil society organizations, the research centers of the national scientific system or with the community of entrepreneurs. Boldness, citizen participation, demonstration of results and collaboration have thus become the vectors of these last two years of continuous activity of LabX as a team of the Agency for Administrative Modernization.

The experience accumulated in these last three years now serves to define a field for future action, opening possible ways of working from the accumulated evidence of the activity developed, the skills acquired through practice and a willingness to explore the unknown.