Developments and articles of interest from the past week:
- This piece from John Steen at the University of Queensland looks at the recent mega-trends work of the CSIRO and the value of scenario thinking for innovation.
- In this post, Dr Nicholas Gruen (who was Chair of last year’s Gov 2.0 Taskforce) urges public servants to engage online – for instance, on blogs.
- This article looks at public sector innovation in the UK at the local government level and some recent research by NESTA (the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) on how local bodies can best encourage innovation.
- The US Army recently held a competition for those in the Army for the development of digital applications – the Apps for Army contest.
- In this post on GovLoop, Jenn Gustetic looks at the US Department of Education’s innovative approach to creating a secondary market for innovative education solutions – ideas that might have been unsuccessful for grant money (due to limited available funds) but that scored well on the grant program application criteria and that other groups might be interested in funding.
- In this piece Warren Berger looks at the four phases of design thinking – question, care, connect and commit – and how it helps innovation.
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Just read the Nicholas Gruen Blog,-haven’t had much time for reading last week, interesting take with Public Servants and it does tend to tie back to the fear factor that it seems people have.
I, as a professional public service can put forward a view about which I beleive. I tend to qualify my views on how in depth my knowledge is on the subject. If arguing a position I attempt to try and find out what I’m on about before typing. Ethically, if I truely opposed a position taken by the department, what would I do. I remember about eight-ten years ago the Canberra Hospital Emergency Department was going through a hard time staff truely thought they were under so much pressure that people would die in their care, and one person created a web page and posted his thoughts veiws etc. At that time ...
... people thought him crazy how could he speak out like that.
I wonder would I have the ethical courage to speak out on issues that were important to me. Not so much about innovation today just more of a comment on the article.
As a blog adopter (hey I’m here) I do think that this forum can be useful in a professional public service/academic environment and secondly I also think it can be a way of the government communicating ideas in a radical way. Allow citizens to comment as we go. I also believe that at times a government has to make decisions based on the need of the country and not based on popular opinion. The balance of course is that unlike children we as citizens will end up voting out those we don’t think are providing appropriately.
Lastly, I sent the article out to those I thought would read and make use of the article. Generate the interest so to speak.
Thanks Alex!
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