Dáil Éireann Debate, Thursday - 28 April 2022
100. Deputy James Lawless asked the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform the way his Department is improving citizen support innovation in the public service; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [20330/22]
Amharc ar fhreagraThank you Deputy for the question. I am pleased to report that my Department has made significant progress to enable our public service to drive innovation in order to support our citizens.
Since I launched the Public Service Innovation Strategy, ‘Making Innovation Real’ in November 2020, my Department has assisted Public Service organisations in setting their own innovation goals and actions and to incorporate these activities into their own corporate plans through the development of toolkits, guidance documents and the facilitation of workshops.
That strategy is now being implemented with a focus around four key priority areas:
- Citizen Centric Innovation
- Culture of Innovation
- Scale up Innovation
- Transformative Innovation
Some examples of initiatives currently under way to drive innovation include:
- DPER’s Public Service Innovation Fund, which has supported approximately 90 projects from across the public sector since 2019 (€2.8m in funding). These projects demonstrate new ways of working and provide an enhanced user experience to the citizen.
- The Public Service Innovation Network, which has over 2,000 members from across the public sector. The Network meets monthly to showcase projects and examples of innovation across the civil and public service to encourage scaling of innovations.
- The creation of a range of learning & development interventions, including innovation programmes for people managers and senior leaders as well as programmes to upskill our public service in areas like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other intelligent automation technologies.
- Ongoing work to include innovation in competencies and role descriptions at appropriate grades in the public service.
- The Future Tech Challenge, which encourages the adoption of emerging technologies in public bodies using a collaborative model between Ireland’s Public Service and private sector actors.
In order to monitor the effective implementation of the Public Service Innovation Strategy, and to provide recommendation on best practice, I have also established the Public Service Innovation Advisory Board, which is comprised of senior leaders from academia as well as the public and private sector and I expect that this will help Government to further enhance our public service's growing innovation capacity into the future.
