Designing an Innovative Municipal Organisation Using service design to enable city-wide innovation A quick Google search for ‘innovation’ pulls up thousands of results: leading-edge technology, business school case studies, how-to guides for innovation in corporate environments, and more. ‘Innovation’ is a big, ambiguous term that often looks very different depending on where and how it is applied. Different Katie Monteith is a Director in PwC Canada’s Experience Practice. She’s worked in both the public and private sector, using service design to redefine a national defence organisation’s approach to service delivery, re-design a bank’s mortgage experience and imagine the future of telecommunications billing.
contexts for innovation include: sector (private or public), service delivery innovation versus business model innovation, a focus on innovation tools or on innovation outcomes, and evolutionary-scale innovation versus revolutionary-scale innovation. Each of these circumstances offer unique aspects and perspectives of innovation, and deliver different values.
In the summer of 2018, as PwC embarked on an innovation initiative with the City of Ottawa, there were two dimensions that focused our journey: service delivery innovation and the public sector. But what kind of innovation is possible in this heavilyregulated environment, where traditional private sector market forces aren’t present? What is innovation? For the City of Ottawa, Canada’s national capital, it started with a single (but far from simple) question: How do we embed innovation into the organisation, across every department? What’s interesting about this particular question is its perspective. So much of 50 Touchpoint 11-1
what we see in municipal innovation tends to be focused on external initiatives, such as creating better places for people to live, work, play and visit. These initiatives include research and investment in Smart Cities activities, policies and programmes to attract government and private sector investment, building start-up communities and public/private partnerships. These are all critical initiatives, but they often require significant investment and partnerships. Rarely do we see cities reflect on what’s required to build an innovative city from the inside out, looking internally at what’s required as an organisation to enable employees to create those external innovation initiatives at the grassroots level.
