Whole-of-government innovation efforts must focus on redirecting power and money, not organograms, says Geoff Mulgan
How should governments organise innovation for cross-cutting goals such as net zero? A current European Commission project, which I chair, is looking for answers.
To guide us, we’re drawing on historical government attempts to achieve coherence. The most dramatic examples are from wartime, when countries have reorganised industrial production and innovation to meet the urgent need for weapons and accelerate the invention of atomic bombs, radar systems and rockets.
There are also peacetime equivalents, from the vast expansion of science and technology funding in the US prompted by the Cold War, to France’s strategy for digitisation in the 1980s and Japan’s acceleration of energy-efficiency technologies in the 1970s amid sharply rising oil prices.
Covid-19 is the most striking recent example. The pandemic prompted a dramatic shift in global research activity, accounting for 8.6 per cent of all research outputs in 2021, as well as concerted action on vaccines and the streamlining of decision-making processes.
In every case, a severe threat prompted political leaders to set a clear direction for government that was enforced across multiple departments, usually with the close engagement of business. But which tools should be used when crises are slower-paced, such as climate change or adaptation to artificial intelligence?
The default option is a neat set of coordinating committees. But all of the successful examples went further, redirecting the key currencies of government: power and money. For example, you can organise structures and budgets around strategic priorities.
Cities often have vice or deputy mayors sitting above the classic line departments; the European Commission adopted this approach in the mid-2010s, creating vice-presidents responsible for topics such as digitisation and the green deal.
Other governments have experimented with giving officials dual accountability, vertically (for example, to an education department) and horizontally (such as to a digital team).
Some countries use central units to coordinate science and technology policy, such as the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, which has expert staff, although limited influence over departmental budgets. Another approach, adopted by New Zealand, creates ‘system leads’ within the bureaucracy to weave the threads together.
Other options redirect the many everyday tools of government organisation to align with a cross-cutting goal: designated budgets, roles, targets, strategy, implementation and more.
Culture and process
Perhaps the biggest challenge in designing new structures is to avoid the ‘organogram illusion’—the belief that a neat organogram represents reality. In practice, just as much depends on processes and cultures.
Moreover, any arrangement is only as good as the people in key roles and their relationships. This is even more true when business is involved, as with the Netherlands’ ‘top sector’ innovation policy, which targets efforts in nine priority sectors, or Japan’s longstanding approach to industrial policy and technology missions.
There are also crucial choices about the relationship between strategy, missions and moonshots. Some governments like the language of moonshots, echoing US strategy in the 1960s, when a bold commitment and extraordinary investment put Neil Armstrong on the moon.
These methods are most relevant when both the objective and its potential technological solution are clearly defined. However, in most fields needing whole-of-government innovation, the objectives are much broader, require a range of complementary solutions rather than a single technology, and have implications, some threatening, for existing interests. In this respect, we can learn just as much from complex strategies around cancer as from the Apollo space missions.
Few governments are able to really galvanise all of their parts. More realistic is to create constellations connecting a small number of ministries and regulators focused around a shared approach to, for example, energy, transport or public health. Real engagement from a small cluster is preferable to a rhetorical commitment from a broader group.
The temptation for governments and advisers is to seek a standardised approach, such as cascading hierarchies of coordinating committees. However, arrangements need to be tailored to specific tasks and contexts to allow them to tap into pools of knowledge and concentrations of power and money.
Over the next few months, the Commission project will work with governments across the EU to discuss how to operationalise new methods—and how governments can avoid becoming prisoners to their own structures.
Geoff Mulgan is professor of collective intelligence, social innovation and public policy at University College London, and chair of the European Commission’s mutual learning exercise on the whole-of-government approach to research and innovation
This article also appeared in Research Europe