Public Sector Transformation | Fostering an Innovation Culture | A Guide for Changemakers

PUBLIC SECTOR TRANSFORMATION Fostering an Innovation Culture A Guide for Changemakers

By Eleanor Kelly, Head of Strategy and Partnerships UCD Innovation Academy Eleanor.Kelly@ucd.ie

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November 2025

Introduction Ireland faces a daunting set of challenges in the years ahead. An aging population, ongoing housing crisis and geopolitical turmoil to name a few.

The next decade is a window of critical opportunity to boost economic growth potential, address structural challenges and avail of the opportunities that lie ahead according to ‘Future Forty’, a long-term fiscal and economic assessment of Ireland’s needs to 2065.

The next ten years, according to ‘Future Forty’ will be crucial for implementing reforms.

Key priorities in this window should include: Encouraging continued and efficient capital investment, both public and private, to address infrastructure deficits and increase the supply of housing.

Improving cost-efficiencies in the healthcare and aged care systems, before the impacts of population ageing increase pressure on these services.

Accelerating the green transition and upgrading national infrastructure to deal with the worst potential impacts of climate change.

Continue to enhance the management of migration, to prioritise the attraction and retention of skilled migrants.

How can Ireland’s public and civil servants be supported and empowered during this period of historic change to ensure Ireland is ready to meet the moment?

The challenges that lie ahead require courage, creativity, and new ways of thinking and working together within our public service.

We need, among other supports, to build innovation capacity and capabilities at scale inside public sector institutions.

Fostering cultures of innovation in our public service will help us achieve our ambitious goals while creating more meaningful and engaging work environments for the people within them.

This guide is for changemakers at all levels across the public and civil service who seek to embrace new ways of working, to deliver human centric solutions to complex issues and to scale their impact through cultures of innovation.

It equips public sector innovators with a clear, actionable guide bridging theory and practice. It looks at common challenges in public sector innovation and proposes practical solutions. It includes real world examples of public sector innovation and the insights drawn from those experiences. It is intended to inform, encourage and celebrate public sector innovators.

This publication is based on in-depth interviews with public sector innovation practitioners and champions combined with desk research. It also includes insights and expertise from the UCD Innovation Academy team who have worked with public sector innovators for 15 years.

Innovation is iterative and rarely linear. The best way to learn about it is to do it.

What is Public Sector Innovation?

Public sector innovation serves the common good. It aims to create public value rather than financial profit and operates with its own unique criteria for success. It is often incremental rather than revolutionary.

Public sector innovation contends with its own unique constraints.

Public sector innovators juggle diverse and sometimes conflicting interests of different stakeholders, including citizens, politicians, government agencies and media, among others. Public and political scrutiny can lower the appetite for risk. Sudden changes in political leadership can upturn plans overnight.

Despite these constraints, the scope of public sector innovation is ambitious and complex. It is deployed to address our world’s most entrenched and wicked problems. Public sector transformation includes innovation, collective leadership and systems thinking all needed to accomplish change at scale.

Innovation is the impulse with which we have constantly improved our institutions and our policies. We’ve invited some different players to join us and now got designers and anthropologists and tech people and that means we can now work in a different way, but actually this is the enduring role of government

Brenton Caffin, Co-founder, States of Change

For leaders, it’s about creating the conditions for innovation to flourish.

Una Cunningham, Head of Mater Transformation & Executive Lead, Strategic Projects, Mater Misericordiae University Hospital

There's a bright constellation of people across healthcare willing to make changes, but layers of bureaucracy and competing priorities often dim that light, making it challenging to get innovations off the ground.

Maire Gilmartin, St Vincents Hospital Orthopedics

Mark Fowler, Innovation Capability Manager, ESB

I think the perception of innovation in the early days was that it was for the big tech companies. People didn’t really identify the work they were doing and the problems they were solving with being innovative.

We had work to do so that people understood that innovation wasn’t just about technology and creating the next iPhone.

How to Foster a Culture of Innovation The Lippitt Knoster Model for Managing Change serves as a useful introductory diagnostic tool when starting a journey in building a culture of innovation in your organisation.

Vision Consensus Skills Incentives Resources Action Plan Missing one or more of these elements risks a negative outcome.

For innovators seeking to foster a culture of innovation in their team and organisation, it provides a useful starting point. There are other models, for example Kotter’s 8-Step Process, that can also be used. This guide shares insights and recommendations on how to foster a culture of innovation broken down into each component of the Lippitt Knoster Model.

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CONSENSUS

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SUCCESSFUL CHANGE

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RESISTANCE

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The Lippitt Knoster Model for Managing Change

INCENTIVES

Vision Start With Why The work of the public sector matters profoundly. It transforms people’s lives, our society and economy. Innovation offers the potential to unlock the public sector’s full potential to shape Ireland’s future for the better. The daily reality for many public sector employees can feel distant from these ideals. People are often time poor, constrained in ways unique to the public sector, and working within structures that can feel restrictive and hierarchical.

How can you motivate your team or organisation to engage in innovative thinking and practices against this backdrop? Start with the why. Why is innovation important and how does it align with your team’s mission and goals?

Remember that innovation terminology developed for commercial contexts often does not translate well to the public sector. ‘Fail fast, succeed sooner’, an axiom from the fast moving world of product design, is likely to alienate a public servant mindful of political and public scrutiny.

Effective public sector innovation sometimes requires adapting the language to acknowledge the specific context public and civil servants operate in, including public accountability, sometimes adversarial political systems, and media scrutiny.

Gradually, you can, and should, introduce fundamental terms such as ‘design’ once people have built a degree of familiarity and confidence with innovation and transformation, and how it is relevant to them.

Everybody designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.

Herbert Simon, American Social Scientist, Nobel Prize and Turing Award Winner

In understanding innovation in ESB we drew on the story of Ardnacrusha which happened nearly 100 years ago. The project transformed the nation and so we drew on that story to explain how ESB has always been innovative. All of this helped us to understand that actually innovation wasn’t new in ESB. We’ve always been problem solvers.

Mark Fowler, Innovation Capability Manager, ESB

I've observed that we often fall into the trap of designing innovations that are person-dependent. We can implement quick fixes that work well until the person who created them leaves, and then everything falls apart.

I have to be mindful that many staff members have seen this cycle repeat over twenty years – they've seen people come in with change initiatives that ultimately collapsed when that person moved on. It is not surprising to encounter scepticism towards new innovations if the system doesn’t support innovation sustainability.

Maire Gilmartin, Process Improvement Manager in Orthopaedics, St Vincents University Hospital

Brenton Caffin, Co-Founder States of Change

Most public servants are in the business of design - moving things from their current state to a preferred state according to the quote by Herbert Simon - but they may not think of themselves as capital ‘D’ designers

Innovation in the public sector isn’t about failing fast. A public sector organisation can’t afford that level of non-success. But learning fast is important.

Mark Fowler, Innovation Capability Manager, ESB

Consensus Consensus does not mean achieving unanimous agreement.

Neither is it about surrounding yourself with people who agree with you. On the contrary, diversity of thought is essential. Instead, it’s about accomplishing sufficient support from enough people to move forward effectively.

Find Allies Great vision without great people won’t go far. Find your allies first when beginning to build a culture of innovation within your team or organisation.

Use this group to pilot innovation exercises like workshops which you can then use to build wider consensus. Design Sprints and other ‘showpiece’ innovation events that engage a broader audience can serve as powerful catalytic experiences that start to positively change thinking patterns and surface other allies.

More generally, find allies outside of your team or organisation.

Innovation in the public service can be a lonely endeavour. It’s important to have others you can lean on for support, inspiration and motivation.

Picking the right problem is one step, picking the right team is another. You need people who have fire in their belly about doing something about this. Team composition is really important.

Una Cunningham, Head of Mater Transformation, Mater Misericordiae University Hospital

Consensus Work With Leadership Innovation initiatives will not scale without the support of leadership. Innovation initiatives will not succeed if they are imposed top-down. Involve your leadership early. Invite them to sponsor a challenge for a design sprint or to share feedback on pitches. Spend time with leadership to understand the problems they are trying to solve and explore how innovative approaches and interventions can help.

How do you create greater buy-in for an innovation initiative? You need to get senior leaders in your organisation involved. The initiative has to be something that they see a strategic alignment with. There may be a problem that's coming up repeatedly for them. Somebody comes and says, I might be able to help, I have an idea.

Una Cunningham, Head of Mater Transformation, Mater Misericordiae University Hospital

Choosing the right problem matters for its relevance to leadership which will also relate to the likelihood of follow-through.

Insufficient follow-through is repeatedly cited as a demotivating feature of some innovation interventions.

Follow through matters. If people engage in an innovation project, those ideas should not just get filed away. It happens when we don’t have the space, the time, or the energy to implement them; this can lead to disillusionment from staff who have put in the effort to make a difference.

Helen Moylan, Head of Business Transformation and Design, National Shared Services Office

Consensus Manage Risk Aversion Risk aversion can make it difficult to implement innovative approaches. Public and civil servants often cite fear of censure as a reason for not ‘putting their neck on the line’.

To build consensus, it’s important to tackle the misconception that risk, as we typically understand it, is a major part of innovation in the public and civil sector. It’s more accurate to say that public sector innovation is about trying new approaches and new ways of working and solving problems. In today’s political and social climate, the greater risk is continuing with business as usual.

Frame Innovation as “Incremental Pilots" Many public sector innovations don’t need to be big, radical changes—small improvements can be just as impactful.

Position Risk as a Choice Between Action and Inaction Emphasise that maintaining the status quo is often the biggest risk—it can lead to inefficiency, public dissatisfaction, and lost opportunities. Instead of “We can’t afford to take risks,” consider "We can’t afford NOT to evolve, given the changing needs of society."

Innovation demands creative and talented people who are disruptors, unafraid to to take measured risks and challenge the status quo. But the system tends to draw, retain and reward individuals who follow the rules and protect the status quo. The system needs to recognise and support public entrepreneurs.

Malcolm Beattie, Former Head of Northern Ireland Public Sector Innovation Lab

Skills First Mindset, Then Skills It is not possible to transform a team, department or organisation through new skills and ways of working only. Fostering an innovation culture requires mindset change. An innovation mindset includes learning, experimentation, curiosity, and empathy.

Fostering an innovation culture also involves ‘rewiring’ and ‘unlearning’ existing practices as part of the learning process and mindset change.

An Innovation Mindset Adaptability: Comfort with ambiguity and changing circumstances Resilience: Perseverance in the face of institutional barriers Calculated Risk-Taking: Willingness to experiment while managing potential downsides Opportunity Recognition: Actively perceiving and seeking out opportunities

You're not going to have the right application of methods if you don't have the right mindset around learning, experimentation and an attitude that is more humble and curious.

Jesper Christiansen, Co-Founder States of Change

Skills Fostering an innovation mindset is an essential part of creating a culture of innovation.

An innovation mindset is developed through action and new behaviours, applied to real challenges, and sustained through practices, artefacts and mantras.

Innovation Mindset 1.Practices - What You Do

What day to day innovation practices do you incorporate into your ways of working? How does your team respond to a new issue, challenge or request? Review your ways of working and examine where you can incorporate practices that will bring your innovation culture to life.

These practices might include the application of skills you learned on a dedicated innovation programme such as conducting a brainwriting exercise to tackle a new challenge or dedicating a specific block of time to interrogate a problem and hold back from solutions, or a more thorough design led problem solving process.

People and managers need to be ready for change and they need to do it often in order to facilitate change within the wider organization. They need to be able to do it at team level in order to be able to be open to it at organization level.

Helen Moylan, Head of Business Transformation,National Shared Services Office

Skills Innovation Mindset 2. Artefacts - What You See Innovation artefacts are tangible or digital outputs that help capture, communicate and promote innovative ideas. They are a record of a specific innovation and also a reminder to promote further creativity and innovative ways of thinking. They can range from basic paper sketches to more sophisticated digital prototypes.

Innovation Mindset 3. Mantras - What You Say Mantras are concise, memorable phrases that capture the ethos of an organisation’s innovation culture. They are easy to use and repeated over time can build confidence and support for innovative ways of working. They can be used to inspire, encourage and guide.

The most effective mantras are authentic to the organisation, simple enough to remember easily, and specific enough to guide actual behaviour. They work best when leadership consistently references them, incorporates them into decision processes, and recognises efforts that embody them.

There is more than one solution

Adopt a Beginners Mindset Insights drive innovation

Skills Innovative thinking and ways of working require a specific set of skills that can be divided into three categories: Foundational Skills; Technical Skills and Transversal Skills.

People can be given permission to explore a new idea but they lack the skills. And they plough ahead and they do business cases and look for project managers and actually what’s needed is design thinking.

Des O’Toole, Former HSE Transformation and Innovation Team

(i) Foundational Skills Systems thinking: Understanding how different parts of the public sector interconnect and how changes in one area affect others; move away from linear problem solving Problem reframing: Ability to look at challenges from multiple perspectives to identify root causes rather than symptoms Change management: Guiding teams and organisations through transitions while minimising disruption Political astuteness: Navigating complex stakeholder environments and understanding policy implications

There’s an increasing awareness of the fact that you are innovating within systems, and that you have to work across silos, to work across policy areas, and you have to be able to steward, broader, change coalitions.

Jesper Christiansen, Co-Founder States of Change

Skills (ii) Technical Skills Design thinking: A human centred problem solving methodology. The ‘Action Plan for Designing Better Public Services’ includes useful guides on how to practice a design led approach to problem solving in the public sector.

I’ve seen how effective the design thinking process is in generating good ideas but also stopping bad ones. I’ve seen people come in and say I have this idea for an app and it’s going to save us millions. And then we start bringing it through the design thinking process and we realise, actually no, that’s not going to work. Or perhaps we’re going to pivot and do something very different Jim McGrane, Data Governance Lead Chief Data & Analytics Office, HSE

General Challenge

Find the right problem to solve Discover

Define

Specific Challenge

Solve the problem the right way Develop

Specific Solutions

Deliver

Following a Design Process from the ‘Action Plan for Designing Better Public Services’

There is a tendency sometimes in the public sector to think we know what people need. We are often guilty of prescribing solutions for lives we have never lived. And then we are amazed that those solutions end up being suboptimal or even fail.

I was told that whenever you're doing innovation don't rely on what you've been told or even assume. Go and hear for yourself from the people whose lives you are trying to help.

Empathetic user centred design is more likely to find solutions that have a greater likelihood of success.

Malcolm Beattie, Former Head of Innovation Lab, Northern Ireland

Skills (iii) Transversal Skills Collaborative leadership: Building coalitions across departments and hierarchies Stakeholder engagement: Effectively involving citizens, businesses, and other government entities Persuasive communication and influencing: Articulating the value of innovation to diverse audiences.

Authorisation Skills - the ability to create an "authorising environment" by engaging both organisational leadership and the political class to provide space for experimentation.

Facilitation: Creating psychologically safe environments where diverse groups can generate and refine ideas.

Coalition building: Stewarding broader change coalitions when working on systemic issues.

Peer to peer influence is crucial when trying to create a culture of innovation. It’s that cultural shift that needs to take place to allow someone to ask a peer, why are you doing that and how do you do that?

Des O’Toole, Former HSE Transformation and Innovation Team

Innovation craft is about mastering those methods, putting them into practice, into your own context, your own work environment, your function and your role.

Jesper Christiansen, Co-Founder States of Change

We have introduced a design-led approach to change and building new ways of working. Our reform teams go out and conduct design sprints, they identify their key stakeholders and key users, they go out into the community, they get the data, they analyze it, they come back in and they develop new services, new processes around that design-led approach.

Maura Howe, The Courts Service

Skills Integrate the Application of Skills with Core Work Recognize that fostering an innovation culture requires sustained engagement. Sufficient time is needed for learning and embedding new approaches.

Ensure innovation activities are connected to prioritised projects that participants are responsible for, rather than treating innovation as separate from their main responsibilities.

Learning must be connected to people’s actual work and responsibilities.

You have to facilitate practical learning environments and allow the space to actually rehearse new ways of doing things and embed or translate new methods and approaches into your own context.

Jesper Christiansen, Co-Founder States of Change

Leaders might think they create the culture by just supporting people to go on courses. It's not enough. It’s what happens after the course that matters. It's when the first people go back to organisations and now, what do we do with them?

Una Cunningham, Head of Mater Transformation

Incentives

What incentives can you offer your team or organisation for practising and promoting innovation within the public sector?

Professional Development The Civil and Public Service has launched a capability framework designed to support the Civil and Public Service in building the workforce of the future and to continue to build an innovative, professional, and agile Civil Service.

Under the competency, Building Future Readiness, innovation is listed as a sub-competency for grade levels CO-PO. Examples of key skills include innovation, design thinking, process improvement and systems thinking.

By learning and applying innovation skills and practices, team members will be strengthening their professional development and opening new career pathways.

The involvement of senior leadership in innovation programmes is also a useful incentive for people to get involved.

There’s about 8 - 9,000 people in ESB so lots of people wouldn’t normally get in front of an executive director. So when they’re on an innovation programme and there’s an executive director there, that’s very encouraging.

Mark Fowler, Innovation Capability Manager, ESB

Incentives Looking In Before Looking Out You need to make innovation work for your team before they can make innovation work for others. Otherwise, innovation risks being seen as a burden.

By using innovative practices to support problem solving for internal challenges, you incentivize your team to adopt them more fully. Look for the ‘pebbles in your shoes’ - problems that you’ve normalised into your day to day routine but that solving will make a significant difference.

This approach has the dual benefit of incentivising your team to participate in further innovation and also freeing up their time to work on outward looking innovations.

Innovation as Energiser In our efforts to do innovation and transformation ‘right’, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that innovation is fun. Events like Design Sprints take us out of our day to day, offer fresh new ways of working together and can energise and motivate participants.

There's a time when innovation is actually energising, because it helps people come out of their shells and really think about things differently and relax some of their professional assumptions about what is and isn't possible, and that can be really helpful. And there are other times where people's instinctive skepticism kicks in and it's too easy to dismiss it as a fad or not as greater relevance in a public sector context.

Brenton Caffin, Co-Founder States of Change

Incentives Solving Problems that Matter Public sector innovation solves problems that matter at an individual, societal and global level. Whether it’s making a passport application process more streamlined or working towards Ireland’s climate change targets, public sector innovators are accomplishing life changing positive outcomes every day.

For many public sector innovators, this is a significant incentive.

Finding opportunities to connect with like-minded changemakers, nationally and internationally, is both energising and helpful.

After years of underinvestment, governments around the world are struggling to keep pace with growing demands. The consequences are now widely evident, as underfunded and unprepared public agencies falter whenever crises strike.

The problem is not “slimming” government down, but rather rendering it more capable, strategic, outcomes-oriented, and a good partner in solving the greatest problems of our time: providing adequate housing for all, strengthening climate resilience, and ensuring that technology makes our lives better, not just a few “bros” richer.

Marianna Mazzucato, Founding Director of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. Project Syndicate, October 2025

Resources

Time The number one challenge to fostering a culture of innovation within teams and organisations is how time poor most public servants feel. Dedicated time is needed to help teams foster and practice innovation skills and mindset. It’s important that team members feel they have permission to immerse themselves in an innovation programme or session.

We run a dual organisation model where people can spend a portion of their time working on an innovation project. They work on a challenge and take it from an idea to a concept that's pitched back to the organization, they can trial it and pilot it. The opposite is a lab with dedicated resources but then it's detached from the core organisation, and that can be a problem.

We're getting 10 times more people engaged in innovation but we're not taking them out of their day jobs. That greatly expands our innovation network as a result.

Mark Fowler, Innovation Capability Manager, ESB

I believe that staff dealing with day-to-day operations should have the opportunity to implement their idea directly and be part of the transformation and innovation .

Helen Moylan, Head of Business and Transformation, NSSO

Resources Senior Sponsorship Senior sponsorship or engagement in some form is a key resource for innovation. This offers a greater chance for innovative proposals to progress to implementation and mainstreaming. It opens an avenue for strategic priorities to be addressed. It also incentivises other staff to get involved in the initiative if they see it has a better chance of being supported and implemented.

Engaging leadership is really important because otherwise you end up with individuals doing small little bits and you don't have any breakthroughs. What we're learning over time is that it's really valuable to work with both groups, to empower the individuals and that gives you the scale across the organization, but you also have to tackle problems that will make the executive sit up and go, okay, this is really interesting.

Siobhan Manning, Service Innovation and Design Lead

Place An appropriate space to host a collaborative innovation session or even hang posters and post-its on a wall can be hard to come by in the public sector.

Spend some time researching possible venues. Look for allies in other parts of the public and civil service who might provide a space. Online collaboration is also an option when done correctly and there are a number of online tools to aid this process.

Resources Innovation Repository Innovation sometimes suffers from an implementation gap. Great ideas are produced but they struggle to progress for different reasons. This can be demotivating for staff involved.

External factors like government legislation changes or elections can also disrupt innovation initiatives, causing projects to be dropped for months at a time, making it difficult to restart momentum. Follow through and implementation are always preferred but not always possible.

An innovation repository is a useful resource in these situations.

This can be a basic Mural Board where you capture ideas and associated thinking. There are also paid online tools available.

We need a central repository for innovative ideas and better ways to capture and implement them. There are plenty of good ideas out there; we just need better systems to nurture and develop them.

Helen Moylan, Head of Business and Transformation, NSSO

So when you finish the pilot, you prove, yes, this is successful. So now how do we scale it up? Who's going to take the ownership? Who's going to pay the money? How do we get it in? That's something we've grappled with for years trying to get a structure in place.

Jim McGrane, Data Governance Lead, HSE

Action Plan

Balance Small Wins & Strategic Impact Effective innovation requires both empowering individuals with small projects that scale across the organisation and tackling high-profile problems that capture executive attention. To foster a culture of innovation within your organisation you need to do both.

This dual engagement model requires different engagement strategies for each.

Success Begets Success The path to building support for innovation is through demonstrated success on difficult, long-standing problems that build credibility within the organisation. Be strategic about the problems that you select and what audience they resonate with.

Our experience has been that the road to success is case examples. The credibility of seeing long-standing, difficult to solve problems solved.

That builds the wave of support and that’s the route we took.

Siobhan Manning, Service Innovation & Design Lead

I've observed that we have often fallen into the trap of designing innovations that are person-dependent. We can implement quick fixes that work well until the person who created them leaves, and then everything falls apart.

Máire Gilmartin, Process Improvement Manager in Orthopaedics

Action Plan From Individual to Institutional While innovation is supported at the individual level through professional development, there can be a significant challenge in scaling individual innovations to an institutional or system-wide approach.

Work out a plan for how to bridge this gap. This can include engaging senior leadership to assign and / or mentor innovation challenges. Finding a challenge that is relevant to senior leadership and solving it is also a good way to bridge this gap. Put yourself in the shoes of senior leadership and consider what are the problems they are trying to solve. Can innovation approaches and methods be help here?

You need senior leaders involved in any part of the public sector if you want to scale innovation, that means engaged meaningfully. How do we reach those senior leaders and support senior leaders to create the conditions for the more junior staff to flourish.

Una Cunningham, Head of Mater Transformation

My journey into design thinking has reshaped my approach to quality improvement, teaching me to embrace the perpetual space of iteration and uncertainty that comes with innovation. It has also helped me to become more flexible in my approach, recognising that the first solution is often a stepping stone to a more impactful end result.

Máire Gilmartin, Process Improvement Manager in Orthopaedics

Action Plan Reframe Success The vast majority of innovation practiced by organisations lead to evolutionary innovations, incremental changes to a process, service or way of working. Most innovations make gradual improvements, combine existing elements in new ways, or adapt established solutions to new contexts. This evolutionary process is how most progress happens—through persistent refinement and extension of what already exists.

Revolutionary innovations—those that fundamentally disrupt existing paradigms and create entirely new categories—are comparatively rare.

Do not hinge your innovation interventions on the immediate success or failure of an idea. Socialise and educate within your organisation that the evolutionary nature of innovation is not a limitation.

Instead, each small advancement allows progress to compound over time.

Cultures of innovation allow that progress to endure and grow.

This is public sector transformation.

Organisations of Interest Nesta UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose States of Change Danish Design Centre

Further Reading Collington, R., Mazzucato, M., et al. (March 2024). Public sector capacity matters, but what is it? UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/publications/2024/mar/public-sectorcapacity-matters-what-it Danish Design Centre. Design Centred Case Studies. https://danskdesigncenter.dk/ Department of Finance (November 2025). Future Forty: A Fiscal and Economic Outlook to 2065. Government of Ireland. https://www.gov.ie/en/department-offinance/publications/future-forty-an-economic-and-fiscal-outlook-to-2065/ Government of Ireland (last updated November 2025). Better Public Services: Service Design Resources. https://www.gov.ie/en/campaigns/better-public-services/ Government of Ireland (last updated June 2024). Life Events Programme. https://www.gov.ie/en/campaigns/life-events-programme/ Hiscock, A (August 2025) How is design enabling us to do policy differently at Nesta? https://www.nesta.org.uk/blog/how-is-design-enabling-us-to-do-policy-differently-atnesta Mazzucato, M. (2013). The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths.

Mazzucato, M., et al. (2024). Mission Critical : Statecraft for the 21st Century. Available at: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/publications/2024/may/mission-criticalstatecraft-21st-century.

UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. Public Sector Capabilities Index (PSCI).

Funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/publicpurpose/research/public-sector-capabilities-index

Published November 2025