Natalie Leal at Global Government Forum: “A new initiative by two US think tanks aims to help public bodies explore innovative ways of consulting and engaging with communities, finding new answers to public policy challenges.
The People-Led Innovation project was launched on Tuesday by GovLab and the Bertelsmann Foundation. Noting that citizens’ knowledge, insights and ideas often hold the key to the problems faced by governments, GovLab co-founder Stefaan Verhulst said the new tools will help officials consider “the most effective ways to engage the right people for the right task at the right time.”
Verhulst explained that the initiative, ‘People-Led Innovation: Toward a Methodology for Solving Urban Problems in the 21st Century’, is “built on the idea that, as governments increasingly experiment with new means for drawing on the public’s knowledge and skills to address common challenges, one-size-fits-all citizen engagement efforts are often too broad and unwieldy to surface useful insights.”
A fresh methodology
The new site aims to provide leaders with a toolkit and “a set of steps that enable them to tap into their potentially most important – but underutilized – asset: people.” While the project’s main audience is US city governments, the skills and methodology are transferable and the researchers have drawn on case studies from around the world.
The methodology breaks the process down into four distinct stages: defining the problem; curating possible solutions using people and data; experimenting and testing what works in practice; and reviewing and ‘expanding’ – incorporating feedback and transferring lessons learned to a wider audience. At each stage, leaders are encouraged to identify stakeholders to consult or co-create with.
At the heart of the initiative is the idea that everyone – from local residents, small businesses and community bodies through to government agencies, corporate giants and international
“People’s expertise comes in a range of flavours – from interests and experiences to skills and credentialed knowledge – yet all are equally valuable to engage when solving problems,” say the creators in a report on the website.
Four types of engagement methods are suggested as ways to best “tap into the diverse expertise distributed among people outside of government. These are: commenting, for