In the past decennia cities are increasingly facing complex societal challenges such as rapid urbanisation, climate change and the mobility transition. Public organizations are experiencing a lot of difficulties when trying to cope with these complex societal challenges, therefore we argue that addressing them demands new ways of working, the capacity to engage manifold stakeholders and favourable institutional frameworks. For municipalities to be able to implement these new ways of working and facilitate innovation requires the organizations themselves to innovate and transform their capacities, to improve the organizational structure and its services.
In this course you will learn more about the concept of innovation capacity and how it can help your organization to facilitate innovation within and with the city. According to the OECD, innovation capacity refers to the human, financial and institutional resources and skills that can catalyse, implement and promote innovative, collaborative, long-term bottom-up solutions. Additionally, innovation capacity can be defined as a set of conditions that support innovation or provide a supportive infrastructure that either allows for innovation to happen or hinders it. The need for innovation in the public sector is recognized more and more to improve services, products and policies to create public value. As a result of increasing complexity in handling (sustainability) transitions and challenges, the innovation capacity of cities needs to increase.
Based on various research projects TNO Vector has developed a framework for innovation capacity in public organizations. The elements that emerge in that framework are: leadership, organization, knowledge management, network and learning. We believe that this framework helps with offering an insight in strengths and bottlenecks regarding your city’s innovation capacity and therefore also identifying opportunities for improvement. Based on our experience with various cities we provide you with this online course that offers theoretical background into the concept, insight in commonly found challenges and strategies to address those, and guidance towards formulating and setting the first steps in improving your city’s innovation capacity.
The learning objective of this course is to understand the concept of Innovation Capacity and its elements and to create a sense of awareness of the state of innovation capacity in the participants own organization. Additionally, by discussing challenges and working on strategies, the course is aimed at developing an action plan on how to increase an organization’s innovation capacity and/or to deal with specific barriers and challenges. This all to enable organizations to develop new ways of working in order to be better able to deal with complex societal challenges and facilitate innovation within or with the city.
The e-course will run from October 14th to December 9th and you can register here.