Public sector innovation needs more than just experiments – CityLAB Berlin

Nimble innovation units are emerging in governments worldwide, aiming to inject experimentation into public sector bureaucracy.

These units may range from Singapore’s digital startup team RSAF Agile innovation Digital (RAiD) in the Air Force, the now-defunct US’ 18F, to CityLAB Berlin which is one of the many public innovation labs in Germany. 

Whether these units are centralised or spread across departments, their core mission remains the same: To spur public sector innovation and reform through tangible, practical initiatives. 

Speaking to GovInsider, CityLAB Berlin’s Head of Smart City and Government Innovation, Dr Niklas Kossow, shares a key lesson from his team’s experience of not only experimenting, but sustaining innovations in Germany’s public sector known to be famously bureaucratic. 

While he acknowledges that innovation labs are vital for experimentation, he argues that they must be more deeply integrated into the wider public sector, connecting with the entire lifecycle from initial innovation and development to long-term operation. 

It has been slightly more than half a decade since Berlin’s first public sector innovation lab was set up. 

The lab is run by the non-profit foundation Technologiestiftung Berlin and funded by the Senate Chancellery under the office of the Governing Mayor of Berlin.  

It draws on agile, co-creative, and user-centric methods to bring together different stakeholders to work on urban development projects with a digital focus. 

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Consider handover and long-term plan at the onset  

Dr Kossow shares that his team would try as much as possible to involve the key stakeholders from the public sector administration from the outset of the project.

"When developing prototypes, we try to plan early for a potential handover.

"So that, if successful, the project can be continued and maintained by our partners,” he says, adding that the project owners could range from the administration, private sector or civil society.  

He highlights a significant challenge of digital initiatives as being its short-term funding model, despite these initiatives requiring ongoing financing for maintenance and future improvements. 

Over time, the team learned to address this challenge by establishing a clear plan for funding and managing the stakeholders who are responsible for maintaining the initiative in the long-term. 

“Otherwise, prototypes oftentimes do not have the impact they could have,” he notes from experience.  

He shares about a successful project involving a check-in system at a citizen service’s office in a particular district, which moved from innovating to handing over and will be implemented city-wide in the medium term.  

The testing of the check-in system showed increased appointment efficiency as well as positive user feedback from both citizens and staff. 

This project successfully transitioned from a pilot to a sustainable solution, with the Senate Chancellery now exploring integrating a check-in system into the citizens' office’s existing IT infrastructure. 

The Mayor's office is also partnering the Federal Ministry of Interior and Home Affairs to secure long-term financial support to develop a citizens’ office of the future.  

Data Hub Berlin in the works  

In the last six years, CityLAB Berlin has seen some success, particularly for its open data initiatives that have roped citizens to co-govern urban spaces. 

One such initiative is Water the Neighborhood (Gieß den Kiez) to tackle the impact of climate crisis on green infrastructure in Berlin. 

In slightly more than a year after the platform was launched, Goethe Institute reported that over 1,000 citizen caretakers were registered and over 7,000 trees were being cared for. 

Currently, more than 10,000 citizen caretakers are registered on the platform. 

The platform connected the open data from various public and private sources, and allowed citizens to find out the water needs of the trees in their neighborhood, adopt trees and mark them as “watered” within the platform. 

Dr Kossow shares that the upcoming plans for the lab include making artificial intelligence (AI) available for public servants to use and introducing Data Hub Berlin. 

Concurrently, the foundation Technologiestiftung Berlin is working on a prototype for a data hub to eventually enable the exchange of data, he said.   

The new Data Hub builds on the foundation’s experience running Berlin’s Open Data Information Centre (ODIS), the central point of contact for the Berlin administration to go to for all things related to open data. 

Public officers would go to ODIS for support to develop open data applications and prototypes. 

Data Hub Berlin’s official website highlighted that the public sector struggled with initiating and sustaining its own data projects, often relying on external service providers. 

By keeping Data Hub Berlin open and interoperable, this allows the public agency to maintain ownership, enabling them to update data and customise dashboards directly. 

The problem is not the lack of data, but how usable and easily discoverable the data is. 

To make it more efficient for municipal administrations to collect, process, share and present data, Data Hub Berlin would be looking at a modular system of open-source components.