[Originally published on the Australian Government Public Sector Innovation Network under a Creative Commons 3.0 BY AU licence]
Today we announce the launch of the Public Sector Innovation Toolkit, a major new development in our ongoing work to support innovation in the public sector.
Empowering Change: Fostering Innovation in the Australian Public Service identified that a priority area for action was the establishment and maintenance of an Innovation Toolkit website to support innovative agencies and public servants. The innovation process can be difficult to navigate and this toolkit will provide practical guidance on how to foster innovation in your workplace.
This has been affirmed in the APS Innovation Action Plan which notes that the Toolkit is “a package of practical innovation resources to support the APS at all levels to generate innovative solutions.”
Some of the features of the Toolkit are:
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- A calendar of upcoming events relating to public sector innovation
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- Guidance on how to assess your ideas through the IDEAS for the Public Sector methodology
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- Tips on putting together a business case for an innovative idea
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- An exploration of some of the tools, approaches and systems that can be used to support the innovation process or achieve innovative outcomes
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- Discussion of some of the barriers that may be encountered during the innovation process.
There is also a diagnostic feature which my colleague Channy Cornell has written about in a separate post.
As the Action Plan acknowledges, the Toolkit resources will be evolutionary, recognising that we still have much to learn about the various approaches and how they can best be used in developing better services and policy. And as Empowering Change discussed, that learning process will need to be guided by the practical experience of agencies.
Some of the tools are more fleshed out than others, and we will be adding further content to them over the coming weeks. We also need to hear from those who have used or experimented with the different approaches. If you have experience with any of them and have some insights to share, then we want to hear from you.
We hope the Toolkit can help bring together the distributed knowledge and experience of innovation in the public sector and forge that into practical guidance for public servants. While it is has been developed for members of the Australian Public Service, we hope that it can be of use to our State, Territory and Local government counterparts.
I encourage you to have a look through the site and let us know what you think in the comments below.