Innovation and Learning Journey of PA Awards 2022 Winning teams: EU trends and hands-on training for their consistent improvements in delivering public services
ReSPA and OECD/SIGMA organised the “Innovation and Learning Journeys” - three innovation and learning capacity-building units for the Public Administration Awards in the Western Balkans 2022 winning teams. The Journey aimed to provide insights to representatives of awarded teams into the major trends in public management and new methodologies for expanding the services through innovative action plans, supported by hands-on experiences from similar practices from Catalonia, Spain, as the awarded WB ones.
First - Public Management Day was devoted to Public management in the European context: Frameworks, policies and practices, from strategy to the operational level and Public sector innovation practices, with particular attention to the telling/winning stories from the other international award schemes. With their colleagues from Administració Oberta de Catalunya, Catalan Agency for Consumers and Catalan Ministry of Business and Labor, the winners learned and exchanged about an innovative approach from reducing and eliminating paper in the administration’s daily work to numerous insights on how to improve efficiency in the delivering public services.
On the second - Practices Day, the Winners visited various authorities in Barcelona, met their colleagues, and shared experiences with winners from other awards schemes putting in the spotlight the best practice examples and structured peer-to-peer dialogue.
At the third - Innovation Action Day, eight special recognitions joined the winners. Through 3 group breakouts, they interactively participated in the workshop “How to define and build an Innovation Action Plan for the public sector for a specific challenge”.
In Foundation Interarts, Mr Xavier Sisternas from OECD/SIGMA and Mercedes Giovinazzo, Director of Interarts welcomed guests, while 17 winners and special recognition representatives, guided by Mr Joan Miquel Pique, worked in groups and practised how to define and build an Innovation Action Plan for the public sector, focusing on design thinking, insights and solutions and prototyping.
ReSPA will continue to support the PA Awards winners through a Community of inspirational practices in acquiring the knowledge, building capacities and skills to design better services continuously and initiate innovation in their public administration.
One of the fundamental ideas of the PA Awards 2022 edition was to identify and promote the front runners across the Western Balkans public administration institutions able to serve their citizens better and to be an inspiration for others to follow. ReSPA and the OECD/SIGMA are paying particular attention to sharing and exchanging of good practices within the region and other parts of Europe, primarily from the EU PA Awards schemes. One of the areas of facing challenges in public administration is to reach out to each other, identify (other) best practices, learn from each other, make use of others’ expertise and create economies of scale across a network of partners.
