Public Innovation is needed to jumpstart Partner State approaches

how do public services change if they are conceived as platforms to trigger, enable and support active and collaborative citizens? How can we promote the necessary mutual support between public and social innovations?

Excerpted from Ezio Manzini, Eduardo Staszowski, of the DESIS Network of innovation design labs:

“In the face of current economic and social challenges, the public sector in general and the public services in particular are changing and, in the future will have to change even more radically in order to cope with pressing societal demands. This transformation, which we commonly refer to as public innovation, could move in different directions.

One promising direction is based on the idea of people-as-assets: where citizens become active and collaborative and can be considered partners in the design and delivery of public services (service co-design and co-production).

This vision, in turn, raises two main questions: how do public services change if they are conceived as platforms to trigger, enable and support active and collaborative citizens? How can we promote the necessary mutual support between public and social innovations?

These same questions had been the starting point for the Public and Collaborative (P&C) Project, a design research initiative started in October 2011 promoted by the DESIS Network involving 11 different DESIS Labs in Europe and North America.

In practical terms, what these DESIS Labs have been doing is to experiment with the people-as-assets approach in their on-going research activities, design classes, open lectures applied to several fields of inquiry such as collaborative housing, cultural diversity, neighborhood improvement, healthcare and, more in general, public sector innovation policies. The P&C Project is still in its early stages, but some of the initial proposals developed by the labs can be already shared and discussed. Below are some of the ideas and lessons learnt so far. These ideas will be further discussed in two initiatives conceived and organized during RECIPROCITYDesign Liège, the international design biennial which will take place from 5 – 28 October 2012 in Belgium: the P&C/Seminar and the P&C/Philosophy Talk.”

For the examples and lessons learned, see here.

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