Monthly Archives: July 2010

Different Types of Innovation in the Public Sector

A question that public servants often face is ‘What is the right response to this problem?’ In the public service there are frameworks, guides, tools, policies and previous experiences to help public servants answer that question. Sometimes the answer will be ‘an innovative response’ – possibly a significant, ongoing shift […]

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Weekly bits of Interest – 26 July 2010

Developments and articles of interest from the past week: In this interview Dave Gray, an author of upcoming book Gamestorming,  explains the value of a game approach for collaborating and innovating. “Gamestorming is a set of collaboration practices that originated in Silicon Valley in the 1970s and has been evolving ever […]

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Weekly bits of interest – 19 July 2010

Last week’s picks of interesting articles: In this post, MindLab’s Innovation Director Christian Bason looks at the word innovation, what it really means and why it is both needed and overused. “But to place the practice of innovation more squarely at the heart of government, we need to continue to […]

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An Innovations Gallery: What should we include?

One of the issues we had in preparing Empowering Change: Fostering Innovation in the Australian Public Service was that it was not always easy to find examples of innovation. We certainly knew innovation was happening, and there are examples in Empowering Change and the Australian National Audit Office’s report Innovation […]

Posted in General, Innovation Showcase | Tagged , | 7 Comments

Ideas to actions: DAFF’s innovation experience

Hi everyone We’re the I-Gen team from the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry. I-Gen stands for ‘innovation generation’ and is our department’s innovation initiative that was launched on 7 May 2010, after extensive trials. I-Gen encourages staff to come up with ideas that improve the way the department works […]

Posted in Innovation in Practice, Innovation Toolkit | Tagged , | 22 Comments

Weekly bits of interest – 12 July 2010

Some interesting articles from the past week: In this post Dr Tim Kastelle from the University of Queensland looks at the need for organisations to concentrate on an overall innovation system, rather than just a single solution. “Don’t look for the silver bullet, one-size-fits-all solution to create innovation within your […]

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Horizon Scanning and the AJASN

One of the things we aim to do with the Innovation Blog is to discuss tools, strategies and approaches that can assist or supplement the innovation process in public sector organisations. In this post we give a brief look at horizon or environmental scanning. Recently a colleague and I had […]

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Weekly bits of interest – 5 July 2010

Some interesting articles from the past week. Dr John Steen wrote a piece about the challenge of idea selection being a universal problem for the public sector. John also discusses the report Empowering Change: Fostering Innovation in the Australian Public Service. In this article, John D. Donahue argues that in the […]

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Options Thinking and Innovation in the Public Sector

One of the things we aim to do with the blog is to share insights and information that help us understand the process and nature of public sector innovation. This week members of the Public Sector Innovation Network in Canberra had the opportunity to hear Dr John Steen from the […]

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