UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) Feed Items

By Anna Goulden

Structural autonomy, political support, and a balance of skills have been key for cultivating the transformative capabilities required to solve public policy problems in Brazilian city governments. This blog explores lessons learned from our research with three city governments in Brazil and what other governments looking to strengthen their capabilities can learn.

São Paulo City Hall, Recife City Hall and Niterói City Hall were studied to help identify how Brazilian city governments conceptualise and deploy their transformative capabilities. The research forms part of developing the Public Sector Capabilities Index which aims to create a first-of-its-kind global tool for measuring and developing city government capabilities.

By Ruth Puttick and Fernando Monge

Cities’ capabilities don’t exist in isolation. To truly understand what enables cities to tackle complex challenges, we must consider the broader context in which they operate. Our recent research in Finland highlights the importance of these factors, revealing how cities leverage not just their internal strengths but also the support of national institutions, private foundations, and global initiatives.

Studying the Finish Country Context

Over the past six months, we conducted 28 in-depth interviews with officials from Finnish city, regional, and national governments, as well as urban experts from philanthropy, academia, and the private sector. While our full findings will be detailed in an upcoming report, here we share some key takeaways.

By Lorenza Monaco

In the past few decades, the global pharmaceutical industry has seen a strong concentration of R&D and innovation centres in the Global North, and a progressive shift of generic drugs manufacturing towards low-cost developing regions. At the same time, there’s been the emergence of a few ‘excellence centres’, like Puerto Rico and Singapore, and the consolidation of giant hubs like India. Within this global scenario, South Africa was chosen to lead the WHO-sponsored mRNA Vaccine Technology Transfer Programme, a promising and innovative collaboration that may work as a pilot to boost pharma manufacturing in the Global South and facilitate access to vaccines. An example to follow, and to possibly extend?

No Just Transition without Green Industrial Strategy — South Africa between the JET IP and the next G20

By Lorenza Monaco

In the past few years, South Africa has moved significant steps to put the question of a Just Transition at the centre stage. Government plans have been accompanied by widespread debates within progressive academia, think tanks and the civil society. While we observe a generalised perception of the grand issues at stake and the urgency of the matter, initiatives taken are still not enough. Here, some thoughts on the limitations of the current approach and some suggestions for future pathways.

By Fernanda Torres Alam and Josefina Mas

Discover why the Master of Public Administration stands out for aspiring changemakers from alumni Fernanda Torres Alam and Josefina Mas.

Hola! We’re Fernanda and Josefina, or Feña and Jose for short.

By Manuel Maldonado

The world’s most urgent challenges — such as climate change, health crisis, and rising inequality — are rooted in the way our economies are structured. Addressing these issues effectively requires a fundamental shift in the way we do public policy. A shift that promotes sustainable, inclusive growth while encouraging the emergence of grassroots solutions. This approach underpins the notion of missions. Missions are concrete goals that, if achieved, will help to tackle a grand challenge. They set a clear direction for the different actors and sectors whose investment, innovation and effort is required to develop solutions.

By Sarosh Nagar and David Eaves

Interest in artificial intelligence (AI) is perhaps one of the few things growing more quickly than the size of new AI models from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. Central to this boom is “compute” — the processing power, memory, and resources needed to perform the computations underlying AI systems. The world’s compute is mostly concentrated within three American giants — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, while in China, Tencent and Alibaba are formidable players.

By Ruth Puttick

The Public Sector Capabilities Index explores if and how dynamic capabilities can be measured in a city government context. While the concept of dynamic capabilities has some history in private organizations, it is relatively nascent in the public sector, particularly at the urban level. Consequently, few individuals within city governments are familiar with the concept of dynamic capabilities. This unfamiliarity presents a dual challenge: it complicates the identification and measurement of dynamic capabilities in city government and makes it difficult to translate these findings into actionable insights for officials and practitioners.

The Problem

We know that some public sector activities are difficult to measure, or as Mintzberg put it:

By Ruth Puttick and Fernando Monge

The Public Sector Capabilities Index is focused on identifying where city governments are strong and where certain capabilities need to be built up. Although it has a city government focus, we are keen to learn from parallel sectors and historical examples. Following our recent interview with Shaun Hazeldine, Head of the IFRC Solferino Academy, in this blog we explore lessons from its work to enable humanitarians to find creative solutions to complex challenges.

The Solferino Academy is the “Think and Do Tank” that supports the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). Specializing in Innovation, Leadership and Strategic Foresight, the Solferino Academy supports the IFRC’s network of National Societies “to transform and be fit for the challenges and opportunities of the future”.

By David Eaves, Krisstina Rao and Kassim Vera

Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) is an emerging term that describes a number of foundational capabilities that enable individuals to participate in society and markets as a citizen, entrepreneur, and consumer in a digital era. At the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP), we define DPI as including digital payment systems, digital ID, and data exchange system(s) (DES). Each component plays a distinct role: digital payment systems facilitate financial transactions, digital IDs verify personal identity, and data exchange systems manage the secure flow of information across multiple platforms.

By David Eaves

A central dilemma for anyone interested in government is the dual nature of the state. On the one hand, the state can be a powerful force for good — harnessing and collectivising resources to create, or enforcing rules and norms that support, public goods. In this role, states have created miraculous outcomes — sewage systems, public health and education, courts… public goods that have radically improved people’s lives. On the other hand, the same Leviathan-like power that can make the state critical to creating public value also make it terrifying. The world is sadly filled with examples of states power used to displace, punish and terrorize marginalized communities, pursue wars of aggression, or simply eliminate dissent.

By Ruth Puttick

The UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) and Bloomberg Philanthropies are developing a Public Sector Capabilities Index. The aspiration is to measure where city government capabilities are strong and where skills must be built up. It will focus on city governments, but as part of its development, we are keen to learn from parallel sectors and historical attempts at capability building. This blog explores the public sector reforms and restructuring of government carried out by New Labour in the UK.

What happened?

Civil service reform was a core component of “New Labour” during Tony Blair’s leadership from 1997 to 2007. During this time there were various initiatives, including the 1999 Modernising Government white paper, which aspired to create a ‘joined up’ government and ‘learning labs’ to promote public service innovation.

By Nora Clinton, Head of the Mission-Oriented Innovation Network (MOIN), Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP)

At IIPP’s 2024 Rethinking the State Forum in June, many of our external guests from policy and academia commented on the dynamism of the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose and its deep commitment to putting public value, how it is imagined and practiced, at the center of government and democratic discourse.

This dynamism emanates naturally from our highly committed researchers and academics; but increasingly it is IIPP students in our Masters in Public Administration (MPA) in Innovation, Public Policy and Public Value who are outstanding in their work.

Developing a Public Sector Capabilities Index: Lessons from Bogotá, Barcelona, Freetown, Seattle and Seoul

By Rainer Kattel, Ruth Puttick, Mariana Mazzucato, Anna Goulden, Iacopo Gronchi, Fernando Monge, Mia Tarp, Kwame Baafi, Bec Chau, Anjum Dhamija, and Manuel De Feria

By David Eaves and Krisstina Rao

Last month (June of 2024), we launched the DPI Map — the first comprehensive view of the state of digital identity, digital payments and data exchanges across the world.

This work started — in part — because there was little understanding of how many countries had adopted Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) around the world. Given the growing interest by policymakers, multilateral funders, public officials and public interests advocates, we hypothesized that a “map” of DPI could help create a baseline understanding of what is happening, and more importantly, help serve as a foundation for both future research and community on this topic.

And while early successes suggest that that hypothesis has been validated we’ve been so busy with outreach that we’ve not had much chance to share any emerging insights from the initial DPI map we’ve published. This blog post seeks to change that!

Caveats

Before we begin sharing the exciting insights we’ve gleaned so far, there are two important pieces of information to share.

By Krisstina Rao and Michael Chapman

The G20 Digital Economy Working Group and New Delhi declaration have drawn significant attention to the concept of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) and made it a critical topic of discussion in international fora. Here at University College London’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP), David Eaves and Jordan Sandman defined DPI as a set of digital capabilities that are essential for participation in modern society. Prominent examples of DPI include the Central Bank of Brazil’s Pix (instant payments), India’s Aadhaar (digital ID), and the Estonia-led X-Road (data exchange layer). Others, such as the UNDP, have adopted similar or even broader definitions, often grounded in Brett Frischmann’s view of infrastructure as a “shared means to many ends.”