Shaun Illingworth, co-founder, DFFRNT
Public sector innovation is crucial for improving government services and addressing the evolving needs of society. By fostering innovation, governments can enhance efficiency, reduce costs, and improve the quality of public services.
As citizens’ expectations rise, and traditional approaches become outdated, governments must keep pace. Innovation programs are crucial to effective and efficient citizen-centric services.
By creating environments that encourage experimentation, learning, and the use of digital tools, innovation can bridge gaps in service delivery and foster more inclusive growth. Ultimately, a dynamic and innovative public sector strengthens the overall social contract, ensuring that governments remain relevant and effective in addressing the needs of their citizens and businesses.
Ultimately, the challenge is not just about creating new systems, but ensuring these systems resonate with the people who use them. By embedding behavioural sciences and human-centred principles into the innovation process, governments can create solutions that are not only effective and sustainable but also more compassionate, intuitive, and truly aligned with human needs.
“Public sector innovation is equal parts hard and different from traditional service delivery. It diverges when every impulse wants to converge. It challenges the status quo and crosses boundaries. It experiments, takes risks and fails. But it’s importance to the business and the culture of government cannot be underestimated.”
Drawing from decades of experience in developing new products and services through private sector innovation labs, incubators, and government innovation programs, we have developed this visual guide to illustrate the most common challenges, pitfalls and errors made when public sector organizations launch innovation programs.
Coming from a human-centered, behavioral science approach. It offers valuable insights into the challenges faced by public sector leaders when faced with the mandate of services innovation and the most common pitfalls.
The document “The Seven Deadly Sins of Government Innovation” outlines common pitfalls that government departments and agencies encounter when planning or auditing their innovation initiatives. It highlights seven critical challenges—referred to as “sins”—that hinder effective innovation. These include a lack of project diversification, unskilled innovation teams, prolonged timelines for results, inadequate consideration of human needs, improper success metrics, solution-focused approaches instead of problem-solving, and confusion between innovation and mere iteration.
By understanding the uniqueness of innovation teams, the distinct challenges and threats, governments can better navigate the complexities of innovation, ultimately driving progress and achieving greater success in their initiatives.
Explore this guide to gain a deeper understanding and improve your approach to government-led innovation. Be aware of the seven deadly sins of public sector innovation.
Contact us to learn more about our Innovation program.
Download the "Seven Deadly Sins" Poster
A checklist for government departments and agencies planning or auditing their innovation initiatives
