POLICY EXPERIMENTATION BY DESIGN

POLICY EXPERIMENTATION BY DESIGN

Sustainable growth through experimental policy methods
Danish Design Centre, Copenhagen, December 12th, 2016

The CBS Public-Private Platform is in collaboration with Danish Design Centre inviting a selected group of policy makers, public managers and academics for a one-day symposium on the art and practice of systematic policy experimentation.

At a time when societies are becoming increasingly complex and interdependent, and where emerging technological innovations accelerate the pace of change, strong and sustained growth can seem an evasive objective. Businesses, and thus policy makers, are struggling to keep pace with the changes in market and in consumer behavior, and are facing increased competition from new quarters. Meanwhile, both from a research and practice perspective we see how the field of design has been expanding in application, beyond industrial design to service design and to design for policy. As an approach to working systematically with change, design methods are now offering a different way of policy making: Usercentred,
experimental, iterative and visual by nature.

At the Danish Design Centre, we have taken inspiration from our own field of design to build a strategy and an organizational model for powering business innovation through systematic experimentation. Our model rests on three pillars: Experiment, Learn, and Scale. Essentially, this means 1) bringing a social technology (design) into play among societal actors (businesses); 2) observing and documenting what then happens; 3) sharing the insights with all relevant users and policy actors, working with them to create more systemic change at scale.

From a research perspective, the CBS Public-Private Platform has during the last years examined the need for new ways of thinking collaboration and models for dealing with wicked problems and societal challenges in public management and growth policies: How might we unleash the potential of public-private and third sector collaborations, and how could research in society be conducted to provide a more clear impact?

Currently, however, the very notion of experimental policy design is really only a hypothesis; at best a prototype. We are at the beginning of creating a portfolio of methodologies, ranging from how to best co-design relevant business policy challenges; how to shape experimental programme design; how to run meaningful performance measurement; and how to scale up what we find to work. Likewise, the questions of how to design for real-world research impact calls for shared efforts.

While we at the Design Centre and the CBS Public-Private Platform think we are on to something important, we recognize that we are by no means the only pioneers in this field. We are aware of many organizations doing impressive work in related areas, and believe that by engaging with others who are looking to a similar philosophy for driving sustainable innovation and growth in business, we can all learn to be better experimenters.

Therefore, we want to co-create this new model of systematic experimentation with leading policy makers, public managers and academics and we now invite you to join us in leading the experimental policy revolution for a full day in Copenhagen. The aim is twofold: To contribute to the emerging practice of systematic policy experimentation; and to identify the key research agendas that can take the field even further.

Throughout the day we will explore case studies and insights from our own work and globally from a range of leading organizations and academics, in order to shape a future agenda for design-driven policy experimentation.

We look forward to hearing from you and hope to see you in Copenhagen on December 12th 2016.

Read more about the event at Danish Design Centre's website [In Danish]