Disrupt the Public Sector

What

As part of the Victorian Government’s Innovation Month 2016, Collective Campus is hosting a conference called Disrupt the Public Sector.

Why

We’ve grown accustomed to steadily falling prices and/or a better quality of products in many aspects of our lives. Be it transport (Uber, GoGet), accommodation (Airbnb), telecommunications (smartphones, Skype, call costs), music consumption (Spotify, iTunes), movie and television consumption (Netflix) and air travel (Jetstar) to name just a few examples.

Most other business and consumer goods have followed suit - this comes down to a focus on truly disruptive innovation.

However, in Government, prices have kept increasing and it is debatable as to whether performance has increased with it.

The public sector is not incapable of innovation – it innovates every day. However, most of its innovation tends to be focused on sustaining, incremental innovations, the types of innovation that drives prices upward.

Without embracing truly disruptive innovation, which by its nature is essentially cheaper and better performing over time, the cost of Government’s provision of services is likely to keep rising.

How

Government can not only engage in disruptive innovation, but it can benefit the broader entrepreneurial and innovation ecosystem by doing so, ultimately benefiting society at large through a cheaper, better and more plentiful provision of services.

How?

• Value innovation: stepping away from value pricing and a resource constraint-based mentality towards doing more with less by leveraging disruptive business models and/or innovations. Disruptive innovations tend to be cheaper than the incremental innovations that Government is well versed in and as such drive costs down, not up, as has been the case in Government contrary to most other industries.
• Catalytic innovation / low end disruption: making services more affordable for the general population by unbundling and offering basic variations of much needed services without the overheads of premium offerings
• Procurement systems which support the engagement of disruptive innovations and emerging companies (ie. current vendor onboarding processes are lengthy offering too many hoops to jump through and resulting in Government dealing with the usual suspects when it comes to the provision of tech or services)
• Effectively leveraging PPPs, particularly with emerging startups, to support disruptive innovation and deliver greater value to the community

We’ll be exploring these topics throughout the day through a number of lenses, as follows:

Identifying the Customer Job To Be Done using Design Thinking

If we start with what is, we come out with ordinary solutions. If we, as hotel operators, tried to redesign accommodation, we would start with buildings, beds, room service etc. But if we identify the job to be done as short term accommodation we come out with Airbnb – an asset free, value innovation accommodation play.

Using human-centred design, you can help to identify the job to be done underlying any investment and unlock opportunities for value innovation.

The Value of Being Agile in Government

We'll be exploring case studies of how a move away from waterfall project management towards agile development methodologies has had a significant impact on the operations of Government agencies and the benefits realised by their investments in technology.

Using Rapid Prototyping to Quickly Test Key Assumptions Underlying Investments using Lean Startup

Most new ventures fail or get a bad rap because people build what nobody wants, this includes Government (myki anyone?). Learn how to use lean startup principles to quickly validate assumptions underlying an investment such as value proposition, customer appetite to buy, marketing messages and desired feature sets amongst a plethora of other things.

Co-opting the People and the Powers That Be

Co-creation of policy in the public sector. Principles and trends of citizen centric deliberation and engagement in public sector.

Disruptive Value Innovation – What it means for Government

Government has long held a view that bigger is better – the more resources you have, the more you can deliver. But what if we could do more with less? How would this re-shape our investment decisions and our provision of services such as education, healthcare, defence and justice?

Digital Marketing and Social Media in Government

Government, just like any private company, needs to develop and maintain an open dialogue and culture of ongoing engagement with society. Social media provides for an ideal platform for reaching out to Gen X, Y and the emerging Gen Z and helping to host conversations that can facilitate valuable conversations with the community going forward and help to shape policy.

Design Thinking & Rapid Prototyping Session

We'll be running a workshop session to demonstrate how design thinking can be applied to prototyping new ideas within the Public Sector. The Session will be co-faciliated with Code for Australia. RSVP above for the session - limited spots!

Networking Drinks (5pm-6:30pm)

Finally, we'll cap the conference off with some drinks, food and good old fashioned networking.

There will also be light snacks and refreshments available throughout the day.

Spots are limited so RSVP now!