PSI: why?
By: Serena Chillè
Tags: Public Sector Innovation, Innovation, Public Sector, Design, Service Design

PSI: why?

Public sector innovation is a journey and, as every journey, in order to understand what’s happening in the present, we should go back to find the trigger points in the past.

Increasing expectations and demand for better services by citizens and communities are continually pressing public sector organizations to provide services with increased user focus and lower costs. In order to cope with these challenges, innovation and transformation have become fundamental for local governments to overcome organizational and cultural limits.

As the Service Design Network’s 2016 Final report found out, today the public sector is already the largest client for service design, and the demand is growing.

98 responses. Source: Service design client sectors, Scoping Study on Service Design: Arts&Humanities Research Council, Design Council, ESRC, Final Report 2012.

So some questions automatically arise:

What pushes the Government to innovate its public sector? What are the main reasons for change? And why does it decide to work together with the design discipline to do so?

Giving a univocal and clear answer – as for everything linked to the public ambit – is not easy. But, analyzing the ongoing situation, we can list four main reasons why administrations are changing and adapting their offer:

a period of crisis;

citizens request for better services;

the advent of new technologies and faster changes;

good examples from others.

Reason 1 - a period of crisis

If we think about the past we can notice that, somehow, we are living, again and again, similar situations since a long time: many historic events seem to be a kind of cycle. For example, we know that many countries – no matter how big or powerful they were – have faced periods of crisis which have often been overcome thanks to changes.

Nowadays, many countries are living a new period of crisis, not merely economic in nature. To fight against all of this, a lot of public administrations are putting their trust in the power of innovation, and they are trying to change the public sector as a first step.

Innovate the public sector means a lot of things: it means to enhance better public services, as well as improving policy making and the government organization itself. A better public sector is, of course, a synonym of fewer costs for administrations, so, together with the crisis, we can state that also money is a great push for innovation.

Reason 2 – citizens request for better services

More and more communities are demonstrating for their public rights, asking for faster and more accessible services. Governments are forced not to ignore this important voice, and many pioneer administrations are including in the innovation process citizens and other associations.

In this way, they act a sort of co-design, working with users and other relevant actors to consider opinions and ideas from different perspectives, in order to create a more successful system that tries to satisfy all the stakeholders’ needs.

Reason 3 – the advent of new technologies and faster change

We are living in a world in continuous development, where classic models and standard structures are not suitable anymore to answer the present requests.

This general statement perfectly fits also the public sector fields: slow bureaucracy, paper-based documents, old processes and so on, are all obsolete elements that are not working in today’s scenarios. Administrations are trying to change and improve their current offer to go hand in hand with the developing technologies, also to take advantages from their huge potential in the public field.

This will also allow governments to better face the future requests, trying to anticipate scenarios and possible situations to provide solutions also for hidden public needs.

Reason 4 – good examples from others

Last but not least, an other reason why governments are trying to innovate their offer is that they look at what the «neighbors» are doing.

Pioneer countries such as the UK, Finland, Netherlands and Singapore, represent nowadays sources of inspiration for many other cities all over the world. With their good practice in innovating the public sector, they constitute successful examples of how a country can really improve «just» renewing its public sector, and they provide useful instances about right methods, processes, and approaches to use.

« And why does it decide to work together with the design discipline to do so?»

Design – particularly service design – can provide all the methods and tools for effective and successful innovation. Innovating the public sector assets requires time and good strategies, but most of all it requires a radical cultural and mindset change inside and outside the public administrations, objectives that service design can help to achieve. How?

Too many questions for this article! 😎 Keep reading PSJ and we will tell you more stories.

Serena.