Anticipatory Innovation

In these days of profound social and economic change, it is more important than ever to ensure that the public sector is able to respond to the challenges of the future, whether they are unforeseen or foreseeable today. In order to help public entities in this endeavour, LabX, in collaboration with OPSI – Observatory for Public Sector Innovation of OECD, has developed an Anticipatory Innovation Starter Kit that allows operationalizing, in a structured way, a practical intervention to explore, experiment and anticipate future action scenarios.

OBJECTIVES:
To engage public organisations in the practice of the future, with the introduction of tools and in the development of skills that can lead, ideally, and by default, to a sustainable, responsible and proactive approach to the future.

METHODOLOGY:
For the development of the project, and with a close collaboration between the entities, through the organisation of sessions, participation in specialised working groups and compilation of instruments, a first version of an instrument package was managed to stabilise, a prototype that was developed through a process of incremental improvement through iterative test cycles.

After this validation and iteration work, we stabilised a second version composed of an accessible, easily actionable and suitable instrument package for the specificity of the public cause, in order to constitute a means of dissemination and promotion of these approaches to the future.

ABOUT THE USE OF THE KIT:
The end result was a kit that aims to connect theory and practice in a simple and easy to implement way.

Users start by identifying the problem they want to solve, reflect on the change they want to achieve and its implications and, according to this initial assessment, select the instrument that is most suitable to achieve their objectives.