Blog by Jack Strachan: “Over the last two decades, governments across the world have built hundreds of innovation labs, policy labs, behavioural insights teams and multidisciplinary transformation units. They emerged from a growing recognition that traditional institutional structures were struggling to respond to complexity, digital transformation and increasingly interconnected public problems. Labs offered a different organisational form: protected spaces within existing systems where smaller multidisciplinary teams could experiment outside normal bureaucratic logic.
And for a while, they worked remarkably well.
The early generation of public sector innovation labs genuinely changed government. Denmark’s MindLab helped bring ethnographic and participatory approaches into policymaking long before most governments were seriously talking about user-centred design. Helsinki Design Lab explored how strategic design could help states work across interconnected systems rather than departmental silos. Policy Lab UK experimented with multidisciplinary approaches inside Whitehall, while the early GDS movement in 2011 fundamentally reshaped expectations about what public digital services could be.
These were not vanity projects or post-it-note theatres. They produced rigorous work, brought new professions into government, changed the legitimacy of user-centred design inside the state and created new ways of understanding public problems. More importantly, they created conditions most institutions struggle to sustain – protected authority, proximity to decision-making, permission to experiment and the ability to generate evidence through building rather than reporting…
But over time, many of these environments lost the conditions that had made them effective in the first place…(More)”.
