From: Yona Maro

One Laptop Per Child Trials as of mid 2008 View OLPC Trial Schools as of mid 2008 in a larger map

Truly innovative companies, according to Roger Martin, author of ?The Design of Business?, are those that have managed to balance the ?reliability? of analytical thinking with the ?validity? of abductive thinking. Basically, these two concepts try to differentiate two ways to deal with innovation. We can either: (a) use statistics, trends, quantitative surveys, and historical data to produce reliable results; or (b) develop a deep understanding of the basic needs of end users for the specific problem that needs to be tackled and propose a valid solution that would satisfy these needs. The author makes a very good case for validity, which is usually forgotten by companies that prefer reliable results that keep most companies? top executives and stock analysts at ease.

This call for a change on how to tackle innovation has originally been directed to businesses1, and takes the concept of design thinking (that is, borrowing the thinking process of designers) to services and companies in general. However, I believe it should also be applied to governments, more specifically on how governments should take advantage of ICTs to improve service provision internally (within government entities) and to citizens.

Most governments that introduce ICTs in their service delivery structure have basically applied technology to the exact same workflow they had before, replacing papers with emails and signatures with digital certificates. But ICTs in general ? and broadband in particular ? do not just improve the efficiency of governments. They have the potential to transform how governments work, redefining their relationship with citizens and expanding the array of services and transactions that could be provided and implemented.

This, however, is a very risky proposition for governments. And if most private companies rely on analytical thinking due to their overall aversion to risk, governments in most developing countries have a much less functional innovation system (in many cases, equivalent to a ?copy-paste? function to be applied to ?best practices? in other countries).

So what is design thinking for governments anyway? It is not that much different than its private sector equivalent. It is about going back to the basics. And I mean the basics, trying to understand what citizens need from their governments (yes, that far back) and then answering the question: how could governments (hopefully, leveraging the new set of technologies and devices that exist today ? and their spread among the general population) be able to satisfy these needs? Then, it is all about building prototypes, testing, trial and error, and of course a good set of evaluation and feedback mechanisms2.

For governments, as well as for companies, the main challenge is twofold: on one hand, governments watching their public expenses are generally risk averse, and consequently they hardly take any risk to implement services that could fail, more so services that are not requested explicitly by citizens, without any case study, previous experience, and/or statistical analysis to rely on. In some countries, such an adventurous enterprise could even get people in jail.

On the other hand, those governments where new services (truly new services) are allowed to be tried out don?t necessarily know when to stop. Fear to admit failure or lack of supervision lead to an unnecessary draining of public resources that create a bad precedent, funding initiatives that never take off.

In both cases, most governments do not have the right internal mechanisms to allow for the testing of new services and ideas. They either don?t allow any innovative project to be implemented, or don?t provide any incentives (usually by punishing all failures), or allow failures to continue endlessly. Failures should be acknowledged rapidly, and then changed based on feedback from end users to be tried again ? and again.

There are only a handful of examples I can think of (Mr. Martin?s book brings several from the private sector) where design thinking is making a break-through. The first one that comes to mind is of course the idea of giving laptops to all school-aged students. Not a very innovative idea nowadays, huh? Try proposing it before Nicholas Negroponte did, back in January 2005. The concept has now multiple projects around the world (see map above). Is it in experimental stage? It should be indeed. No one can claim (yet) that there is a successful ?best practice? that could be applied to every country. Moreover, governments that are implementing such programs should be ready to detect needs for improvement and not be afraid of changing the approach if they believe it is not working.

Another example, Desdecantera.com, is a brand new way of approaching citizens launched on June 2010 and championed by the Governor of the State of Nuevo Leon in Mexico. DesdeCantera.com is based
Link:
http://blogs.worldbank.org/ic4d/design-thinking-for-government-services-what-happens-when-the-past-limits-our-vision-of-the-future

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