Announcing the Impact and Innovation Unit and the Launch of the Impact Canada Initiative

Today I announced the renaming of the Innovation Hub at the Privy Council Office to the Impact and Innovation Unit (IIU). The name change reflects the unit’s evolving mandate as part of the upcoming launch of the Impact Canada Initiative, first announced in Budget 2017 and now housed in the IIU. The IIU will act as a Centre of Expertise to support departments’ use of outcomes-based funding mechanisms like challenges, new partnership models, innovative financing approaches, impact measurement techniques and behavioural insights to get better results for Canadians in priority areas.

I developed a personal and professional interest in outcomes-based approaches and programs co-developed with partners outside government over a decade ago and wrote about them and taught about them when at the Mowat Centre. They struck me as plausible responses to a couple of well-established public policy problems: a tendency for governments to measure inputs like the amount of money spent rather than the actual impact on people’s lives, and a tendency for governments to cocoon during the program design phase and stop getting real-world input from civil society, stakeholders and those who use or deliver programs.

Around the world, governments are experimenting with new, more open ways of delivering programs in partnership with other partners and applying rigorous methodologies to test and evaluate whether new programs are delivering better outcomes over the short and long-term. The Impact Canada Initiative will help departments develop and use these approaches to see whether they can have greater impact with their programming and bring to scale those experiments that work.

The obstacles to experimenting with new approaches are often self-imposed in government. We have built up layers of rules over decades that make innovation very difficult. Individually, these rules all make sense and respond to real risks, but as they multiply, innovation simply becomes too time- consuming or difficult and many give up trying. With the creation of Impact Canada, and the statement from Clerks and Cabinet Secretaries representing all federal, provincial and territorial governments in Canada, the federal government is signalling that it wants the public service to be inventive. Yes, there are risks, and the incentive structure within the public sector still encourages risk aversion. However, there is now greater licence to experiment and innovate with new program designs and partners, so long as prudence is exercised.

There is no doubt that governments around the world are facing enormous challenges and that new technologies are disrupting traditional organizations, institutions and business models. Government is not immune. Having more impact for the dollars we spend, rapidly iterating based on experience and evidence, and aligning efforts with other governments and outside partners can all improve long-term outcomes and increase the relevance of the public sector during the period of rapid social and technological disruption in which we find ourselves.

The work of the IIU will align closely with the on-going work of the Results & Delivery Unit to support a focus on outcomes and evidence. Together, these two relatively new Secretariats within PCO are trying to drive culture change across the federal government that spends more time explicitly clarifying program or policy goals, and then relentlessly focuses on implementation and rigorous assessment of results. Together, these two new units are supporting the many departments and individual public servants that are innovating within the public sector and driving toward a culture of on-going experimentation and openness to partnership and co-design.

On a very personal note, I am very proud to work with the talented and entrepreneurial team at the IIU who understand that a relentless focus on outcomes, rigorously assessing what is working and co-designing solutions with outside partners toward common goals will have a positive impact on the lives of Canadians. Their efforts are strengthening our democratic institutions and a decade from now I believe we will look back on their work as having had a transformative impact on how government works and the positive impact it can have working with Canadians.

Matthew