Over the past seven years, the OECD has been collecting and analysing thousands of case studies to detect new global trends in public sector innovation. With its annual Calls for Government Innovations and research initiatives, the OECD has amassed one of the largest collections of public sector innovation case studies worldwide: the OPSI Case Study Library.

Since 2017, the OECD has published 12 reports that offer comprehensive insights into the evolving landscape of government innovation, identifying emerging trends and delving into specific themes, with reports including Innovative Responses to the COVID-19 Crisis and Cross-Border Government Innovation (OECD, 2021[51]). Building on this extensive experience, this report presents the results of the 2024 Call for Government Innovations, which focused on public service innovations, and the associated research.

The 2024 Call for Government Innovations received 650 submissions, which the OECD complemented with 150 cases collected through desktop research. This wealth of information – from 83 countries, encompassing all levels of government and most of its functions – was framed and analysed through a specific framework for innovation in public services. This framework builds on the OECD definition of public sector innovation — “implementing something novel to the context in order to achieve impact” (OECD, 2017[52]) — to assess the quality of government efforts. This framework sheds light on four dimensions of each case:

• Novelty: How is the innovation a departure from existing practices? How does it address a challenge (e.g. mobility, air pollution, etc.) with a new solution? Does it cope with uncertainty and complex problems for which a ready-made solution does not exist yet or needs to be revamped or adapted?

• Value-creation: How does innovation create public value? Does it boost people’s satisfaction with a public service (e.g. making it more accessible, less costly, etc.) or improve the perception of government responsiveness and reliability? What are the overall benefits to society (e.g. reduced traffic congestions)?

• People-centricity: Are people (citizens, businesses or organisations) involved in the innovation’s design, delivery, implementation or evaluation? How are their needs and expectations accounted for and integrated?

• Applicability: How is the innovation implemented, iterated and scaled up? How is the innovation’s sustainability ensured? How will it be improved upon and adapted over time?

By collecting case studies and analysing them through these four dimensions, this paper intends to identify the most significant directions governments are taking to innovate public services. Data patterns among the cases were identified using both iterative clustering and qualitative analysis:

• Case studies were aggregated around significant, emerging themes adopting a bottom-up procedure close to data clustering. This started with 82 tags and evolved towards alternative sets of 8-12 clusters that were contrasted and consolidated iteratively.

• As a complementary approach (and a controlling procedure), case studies were classified and verified in accordance with guiding topics, using a top-down procedure close to axial coding. The first step was to define key concepts, such as the pillars of the recently adopted OECD Recommendation on Human-Centred Public Administrative Services.

This dynamic process involved identifying and verifying potential trends through successive iterations, providing analysts the necessary flexibility to explore, validate and consolidate the results while keeping them anchored in a robust empirical base. By cross-checking potential trends against the Recommendation, the OECD was able to explore how governments are translating its principles into action through innovative practices. To further detail the methodological aspects of trend identification and analysis, a dedicated paper is under development (Monteiro & Parazzoli, forthcoming).

In addition to the comprehensive data collection and analysis, interviews were conducted to obtain more detailed accounts and additional information related to the four dimensions of the framework. The 10 interviews, including two written responses — from Norway, Korea (2), Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the United States, France, Italy and Ireland — provided valuable context and nuanced understanding, enhancing the robustness of the findings.