Tackling Policy Challenges Through Public Sector Innovation

This report discusses how steering innovation investment in public sector organisations through a portfolio approach can help governments respond to the multi-faceted challenges they face. Portfolio management is a well-known device in the financial sector, allowing for dynamic decision-making processes involving regular reviews of activity and ensuring a coherent distribution of resources among strategic options. The report illustrates how this approach can be applied by public sector organisations to reap a variety of benefits, including avoiding innovation fragmentation and single-point solutionism tackling risk aversion and learning at the portfolio level identifying synergies among projects and activities building value chains among projects and programmes and layering activities connected to complex reforms. The report also discusses the type of innovation investments or facets a portfolio can help to steer and what these look like in practice. 

OECD Public Governance Reviews

Tackling Policy Challenges Through Public Sector Innovation

A Strategic Portfolio Approach