The meeting of the Public Sector Innovation Units took place on November 12-13, 2019, at the Innovation Lab recently launched by the French public administration and is an innovative venue for producing new ideas and designing original projects. The meeting presented the latest developments in each OECD country on how to disseminate and implement the five dimensions of the Public Sector Innovation Declaration, issued in May 2019 by the OECD Council of Ministers and officially adopted in Greece by the Minister of Interior Mr. Panagiotis Theodorikakos in September 2019.
It is noted that the Declaration is the product of joint work of the OECD Innovation Units, including Innovation and Best Practices Unit, Ministry of Interior. To implement the Declaration at the level of Greek public administration, a roadmap of actions was presented at the meeting in the OECD countries.
The meeting focused on countries' initiatives to develop mechanisms for measuring the capacity of public organizations to innovate. Initially, the interest of several countries to cooperate in developing a common methodology as an auxiliary tool in the measurement approach and in comparable areas of interest such as questionnaire surveys, innovation catalysts, etc. was confirmed.
In this context, the countries' initiative for joint cooperation in the "Copenhagen Manual" project with the participation of Innovation and Best Practices Unit together with the National Innovation Center of Denmark, the European Commission's Joint Research Center, the OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation, the Ministry of the Interior of the Netherlands, the Ministry of Finance and Public Administration of Spain etc. The "Copenhagen Manual" will be the most internationally recognized guide to measuring public sector innovation.
The meeting also discussed the development of a governance framework for the creation of proactive innovation capability for national public administrations as technology is expected to greatly change the characteristics of the problems that governments are managing today, and therefore new and more effective strategies are needed as well as preventive management of challenges faced by public organizations. The Preventive Innovation Framework is expected to be a key pillar in the OECD's ongoing innovation strategy and has attracted the interest of large organizations, research centers and universities to participate in its creation.