(by Davide D'Amico, engineer, member of the AIDR Board of Directors and MIUR executive) COVID 19 has favored an acceleration in the innovation of public administrations and businesses and more generally of society at a global level. In some respects, the "virus" was the killer application of various processes: from smartworking, to the online purchase of goods and the use of web services provided not only by companies but also by public administrations.
Part of the country has understood that digital can be a disruptive tool for improving the quality of life, even in crisis situations. The demand for digital services is therefore growing by citizens who have understood, in many cases, how often it is better to stay at home (with positive returns also for the environment and pollution), save time on the move and use digital. , which also thanks to the SPID system (Public Digital Identity System), today has its own unique way of accessing procedures, and this is certainly not a trivial matter, considering that the number of users is growing. If we combine this with the Pago PA digital infrastructure and the IO app, we can say that citizens will have a strong simplification in their relations with public administrations from now on. Obviously, on the condition of re-engineering a series of processes that in the back office still suffer different degrees of complexity, in some cases thanks to the management which by nature has an "institutional aversion" to innovation, as the more disruptive it is, the more it presents risks high bankruptcy. So introducing innovation into processes is often seen as a potential problem as the public sector uses taxpayers' resources (largely coming from taxation) to create and manage services and therefore, changing processes, intimidates politicians, administrators and managers, who they see in possible bankruptcies, an improper use of public money.
Therefore, innovating the PA is a mainly cultural problem, with a legal and administrative impact, which can also be correlated with liability profiles for damage to the treasury. In practice, the system of rules and regulations does not bear the risk of innovation, indeed we can say that it is built, in general to avoid it. In order to mitigate these "antibodies" to innovation, one hypothesis is to introduce in public administrations, innovation offices and laboratories that can be directly or indirectly connected with the RTD (responsible for the digital transition), in which rules , processes and technologies are support tools for experimenting with new ideas, which can improve existing services and processes or introduce new ones. Introducing, on a structural level, offices that can “experiment freely” means giving the manager the possibility of failing and therefore of taking risks on ideas that otherwise would never be put into practice in the public sector. It means opening the PA to the outside world, giving the possibility to deal with private sector service models (also looking at startups) that could be studied and adapted to the public sector.
It means promoting the "culture of experimentation" and being able to give voice to internal staff, activating training processes aimed at making the leadership communicate and emerge innovative ideas, in order to favor the experimentation of hypotheses for improving processes from below. And again it means activating, in a structured and not "one-off" way, partnerships with the private sector to create an innovation ecosystem, in which external actors can contribute, also through rewarding mechanisms, to the realization of innovation projects and contamination of the PA with new models and paradigms. Finally, it would be important to create a network of these offices in order to strengthen the exchange of experiences and bring out those implicit knowledge which, as a result of internal PA projects, can constitute a common value and "innovation outposts" for the whole country.