This opinion piece was written by Benjamin Seibel, the head of ideation and prototyping at Technologiestiftung Berlin. The content is taken from a live talk at GIZ's Technology Forum for Sustainable Development Forum. It also appears in our government innovation newsfeed.

In an attempt to keep up with the pace of technological change, many governments and other public organisations have set up their own digital innovation labs. These labs promise the best of two worlds: the creativity, speed and agility of a startup backed by the experience, money and power of an established institution.

If this sounds too good to be true, that’s because it probably is. A growing amount of research shows that most governmental innovation labs fail, and they do so for surprisingly obvious reasons. Let’s have a look at three of the most common mistakes — and how to avoid them.

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1. Your lab is not focused on delivery

Let’s face it: most traditional organisations are bad at delivering digital products. If you work in government and want to launch a new website, you are in for a long and tedious planning process: written proposals, long meetings, followed by more proposals and even more meetings. At the end, you will usually hand your money to some external supplier to build whatever you came up with.

This process is slow and expensive. It also does not lead to good results. One of the main tasks of your innovation lab will be to demonstrate that you can build digital products better, faster and cheaper if you take care of digital delivery yourself. That is why it is essential that your lab does not only focus on the ideation part, but is able to produce actual working prototypes that can be tested and improved upon.

The old writer’s rule of "show, don’t tell" is even more true for innovation labs

Many failed labs have held endless strategy meetings, ideation sessions and design thinking workshops, but never reached the point of actually building something useful. Real innovation only starts to happen once you put real things in front of real people. The old writer’s rule of "show, don’t tell" is even more true for innovation labs.

2. You hire the wrong people

Traditional organisations often have a rather narrow idea of who they can hire. Some innovation labs fail because they are staffed only with business or marketing people who lack the necessary technical skills to quickly spin out a quick app or website prototype.

Others fall for the other extreme, relying exclusively on IT wizards with computer science PhDs, who might be good at writing highly complex algorithms but have a hard time grasping the simple needs of an average user.

Building digital prototypes is an art in itself that relies on a range of different roles and disciplines. You will not only need excellent developers, but also interaction designers, user researchers and copywriters.

To build products that appeal to lots of people, make sure to include many different perspectives

Maybe most importantly, you need people who are able to translate the ideas from your lab into the larger context of you parent organisation and vice versa. As many of the roles surrounding digital development are rather new, some of the best people on the market are self-taught and will easily fall through the grid of an over-formalised hiring process.

Successful innovation labs do not only have a broad range of different roles, but also of disciplinary and cultural backgrounds. If you want to build products that appeal to a lot of people, make sure to include a lot of different perspectives in your production process.

3. Your organisational rules get in the way

Even with the right focus and a highly motivated team, an innovation lab is set to run into barriers constantly. It’s not uncommon to see other parts of your organisation actively resisting the kind of change you are eager to achieve through your lab. In the end, many labs fall victim to the stubbornness of their own organisation.

Many labs fall victim to the stubbornness of their own organisation

Two departments are especially notorious for this kind of stubbornness. First, there is IT: while on the surface it might seem like IT admins share a lot of common ground with your innovation lab — they both deal with digital technology after all — nothing could be further from the truth.

It’s your IT department’s responsibility to make sure your employees don’t break things with their computers, and lab employees are almost certain to push the boundaries in this regard. Whether they demand root access to their laptop or just want to quickly set up a testing server on your internal network, your IT will hate them for it and do everything in its power to stop them.

Second, there is accounting: while experimenting with digital possibilities, labs like to spend small amounts of money here and there: a new font or icon set, a software license, a cloud service subscription. Accountants do not like this, especially when money is spent on things they have never heard of before.

Every time your lab hits a wall, take a closer look and ask yourself why that wall is in place

Insisting that every time your lab wants to spend $10 they need to fill out a 10-page form is a sure way to kill all of their productivity. Maybe the best indicator of your organisation’s overall agility is the amount of work that goes into spending ten bucks.

Conflicts like these are meant to happen. If you set up an innovation team, you want them to do things differently. And once they do, they will run into all kinds of trouble. The real challenge is to turn this trouble into a learning opportunity for your whole organisation. Every time your lab hits a wall, take a closer look and ask yourself why that wall is in place. Chances are you are going to bang your head against it a lot more in the future. — _Benjamin Seibel
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(Picture credit: Flickr/Chris O'Sullivan)