MindLab 2002-2018: How the legacy lives on

This article was written by Christian Bason, Ph.D. in management, CEO at the Danish Design Centre and former head of MindLab.

By the end of 2018, MindLab — the Danish government’s innovation team — closed after a more than 16-year long run.

For nearly eight years, from January 2007 to November 2014, I had the privilege of first reimagining and then leading the organisation together with an incredible team of engaged colleagues.

In recognition that Mindlab has run its course, I would like to offer my reflections on the changing role for public sector innovation labs in general by sharing some of the insights and experiences from the process leading up to the closure of Mindlab and how we are drawing on Mindlab’s work to design the new era of public sector innovation in the Danish Design Centre today.

First, how can we understand the closing of MindLab and other publicly funded innovation teams? Second, what are we at the Danish Design Centre doing now to carry on the MindLab legacy in new emerging arenas across government, business and society?

Why close MindLab?

There are many possible narratives and explanations why MindLab was shuttered, which are not very different from what has characterised other closures of innovation teams like Finland’s Helsinki Design Lab and Australia’s DesignGov.

The first explanation is “mission accomplished”. Arguably, the approaches and practices advocated by MindLab over the years have today spread nationally and internationally. The Danish ministries which have now suspended their funding, say that they themselves have adopted many of the practices it espoused over the years like co-creation, design-led innovation and systems thinking.

There is a need, a demand even, for someone to keep pushing the agenda for citizen-centred innovation, creativity and experimentation in government

In Denmark today, there are multiple labs elsewhere, not least at the local (city) level such as the CFIA (Centre for Innovation in Aarhus) in Denmark’s second largest city; and the Local Government Association runs a service design programme for municipalities. And at the national level, in the Danish Business Authority for instance, several ex-MindLab project managers now deploy design thinking approaches in pursuit of more agile business regulation.

Even in philanthropy, Danish foundations like Realdania and the Rockwool Foundation are embracing concepts like co-creation and service design. Internationally, labs have become a widespread global movement with leading organisations setting new standards.

All this said, I do hear public sector actors in Denmark and abroad, who recognise that, ultimately, the mission is never really accomplished.

There is a need, a demand even, for someone to keep pushing the agenda for citizen-centred innovation, creativity and experimentation in government. It is too easy to fall back to the more traditional, system-centric ways of developing services and policies.

Another explanation is the “pivot to digital”.

Today it would be hard if not impossible to speak of government innovation without speaking of digitisation. Digital government was never at the heart of MindLab’s work, even if most, if not all, of its project over the years had clear digital components.

The Danish Ministry of Business has now established a “Disruption Task Force” which has folded a number of MindLab staff into its current team. However, the Task Force focuses more on tech, regulation and digital skills, and less on the human-centred policy and service design approaches espoused by MindLab. Time will tell how the new task force chooses to work in practice in the complex space between policymaking and digitisation of services inside and outside government.

Third, relying too heavily on only a few sponsors is vulnerable for any unit. Over the course of my own work at MindLab we also experienced setbacks, including the withdrawal of our partnership with the Ministry of Taxation, around 2012. This was a consequence of a change in senior leadership in the ministry. In a politically volatile environment, longevity cannot be taken for granted and resilience is dependent on the ability to constantly reinvent oneself and stay ahead of the curve (whatever the curve might be at the time in question).

The future of public sector innovation

Last June I published the thoroughly revised 2nd edition of my book Leading Public Sector Innovation: Co-creating for a Better Society. That book was, when it was published in 2010, an attempt to chart the evolution and state of the art in the public sector innovation field. Since then, the field has accelerated and developed in so many ways that it felt nearly impossible to capture it all in the revised edition. I did make an attempt anyway, and it led to renewed insights in ways the public sector innovation can be shaped in the years to come.

First of all, I think it is far too early to see the global “labs movement” as having reached its zenith.

Rather, government organisations will likely keep proliferating various attempts to embed innovation in structures and processes, with labs and teams as a key part of the innovation ecosystem. The work done by especially Nesta, Bloomberg Philanthropies and the OECD‘s Observatory for Public Sector Innovation to power networks of labs and underpin their practices with comprehensive research and knowledge sharing is likely to contribute to the further professionalisation and, indeed, spread of lab practices globally.

We will continue to leverage MindLab’s tools and methods to take public sector innovation to the next level

Another reason is the emergence of a new generation of labs in large corporate organisations. These have often inspired government practices; in fact, in the late 1990s Skandia’s Future Centre, the lab of a private financial firm, was the blueprint for MindLab.

In Denmark, we are seeing new forms of such corporate units dedicated to designing transformative digital products and services. We call these teams “X Labs”, and at the Danish Design Centre we run a community network for some of the most ambitious ones. I believe much is to be learned if we could bring the two worlds of government and corporate labs closer together.

Filling the void

Training in public sector innovation is also expanding. With the States of Change initiative, Nesta and other players have built a strong international faculty which, to my mind, represents an extension of some of the approaches and practices espoused not only by MindLab but by many other organisations in the lab community. As member of the faculty, I am gratified at seeing how there is robust demand for professional and executive development in themes like systems innovation, design thinking, and innovative leadership.

At the Danish Design Centre, we offer a range of executive training programmes in our design academy where we train leaders and innovators in design methodology for service innovation, business development and policy making. Our alumni and partners include States of Change (with Nesta), Oxford Saïd Business School, the European School of Administration and Copenhagen Business School.

We will continue to leverage MindLab’s tools and methods to take public sector innovation to the next level. Already we are advising government actors globally on how to build effective and sustainable innovation labs. As a next step, we have put together a curated set of methods and tools both from MindLab and from our current work — available here.

At the same time, we are launching a new platform, Future Welfare, to capture the maximum bandwidth of private and public innovation, building on everything we have learnt to date.

We believe that although important work and results have been made, not only at MindLab but globally, there is an urgent need to continue and accelerate the work from a systemic approach across sectors: health, social issues, and education and learning. This means including private stakeholders and NGOs, to truly release the potential of co-creating a welfare system that produces new value to citizens, to our society as well as to our companies. Our Future Welfare platform will work in this cross-section — and do it with a long-term and ambitious time horizon.

Thus, with the legacy, experience and tools from MindLab, the journey will continue as we will experiment, design and co-create the future of welfare.

(Picture credit: Unsplash)