2019•10•02     London

Judy Backhouse, Senior Academic Fellow at UNU-EGOV, attended the 1st NESTA Government Innovation Summit in London last week to look for new ways to support government employees in becoming more innovative. Innovation plays a key role in harnessing the benefits of information and communications technologies (ICTs) to create smarter, more sustainable cities.

One of the sessions that Judy attended looked at the skills that public servants need to cultivate in order to be able to work more innovatively. NESTA has developed a competency framework of skills, attitudes and behaviours that fuel public innovation. This framework can be used in different ways – to initiate a discussion about an innovation mindset, to help managers to identify gaps in their organisations, or to figure out what needs to change in the organisational culture to support innovation and how to bring about those changes.

This is just one of the tools that were explored at the Summit. UNU-EGOV are constantly looking for interesting approaches and practices that can enhance our own work and we will be incorporating some of the NESTA tools into our Smart City capacity development programs. For more information about these programs, contact us at egov@unu.edu.