SONNETS project: Identifying the major societal challenges and needs of the public sector

The present report illustrates the final findings of the activities conducted in work package 2 (WP2) on “Societal and Public Sector Needs”. The document offers an overview of the WP objectives, discusses the empirical sources and methods, and summarises the main findings.
The main aim of WP2 is to identify current and emerging societal challenges and trends that will have to be tackled by the public sector (PS) and subsequently analyze and map these challenges to different policy domains in order to identify public sector innovation requirements. Within SONNETS, WP2 represents a demand-driven and need-based approach to public sector innovation.
This report starts with an overview of the state of the art on needs identification, which includes a definition and explanation of the terms “need” and “demand” as well as an outline of high-level needs of society and public sector in the EU on the basis of academic publications. This introduction further describes the focus of EU projects similar to SONNETS and points out possible areas in which SONNETS could complement these other research findings.
From a methodological standpoint, WP2 is based on various data sources: (i) desk based research, which includes 232 individual papers, docs and reports; (ii) interviews with 34 privileged informants; (iii) a focus group with SONNETS experts committee composed of 4 experts; (iv) validation activities conducted through offline and online means. During the selection of data sources and interview partners, good care has been taken to include representatives of all three stakeholder groups: individuals/citizens, businesses and the public sector itself.
The research methodology comprises of four key phases: Phase 1 (desk-based research), Phase 2 (interviews with privileged informants), Phase 3 (a focus group with the SONNETS expert committee) and Phase 4 (offline and online validation activities). In the first phase, a review of the relevant documents present in both the academic and grey literature was carried out. During this phase, the needs of society, businesses and the public sector have been identified and summarized to a long list of needs, which subsequently has been clustered, revised and refined. The first phase also aimed to highlight the current societal trends and challenges relevant for each stakeholder group. In the second phase, interviews with privileged informants were used to validate and filter the long list of needs as well as highlight an number of dimensions along which the process of public sector innovation should unfold. The third phase consisted of a focus group to fine-tune and refine the results and develop possible innovation actions that could be employed to meet those needs. Finally, the forth phase was vital to further prioritize needs, validate the innovation dimensions and to single out potential barriers and success factors.
The application of such methodology allowed to identify a number of relevant trends and needs for the different stakeholders considered. To exemplify, for public agencies the following challenges have been identified: resources optimization; digitization; recruitment and training; appropriate remuneration and incentives. For the stakeholder group “businesses”, instead, the promotion of a more business friendly environment stimulating a start-up and entrepreneurial culture and an agile public sector emerged as important. Finally for the group of the individuals the key priorities elicited were: inclusive well-being and health; equal employment opportunities; experiential education and training as well as the adoption of a transparent and participative approach.
Two perspectives on public sector innovation were highlighted by the investigation activities. The first one may be situated outside the public sector and combines the standpoints of citizens, businesses and NGOs. Such stakeholders would like to see the process of public sector innovation unfold along three main dimensions:

• Simplicity: of laws and regulations, of interfaces for the interaction with the different public agencies.
• Accountability: in terms of response times (a key factor in mission and life critical processes) and of allocation of scarce public resources.
• Inclusiveness: to balance social inequality and for the engagement of local stakeholder in the definition of policy priorities.

The second point of view, instead, may be positioned within the public sector and proposes the following key dimensions as a compass to orient the process of public sector reform:

1. Meritocracy: through the creation of incentive systems for employees to shoulder the risk connected with innovation activities as well as through the implementation of performance-based reward systems.
2. Agility: promoted through an injection of fresh energies in the form of new and young personnel as well as through an ambitious training program for older workers.
3. Coordination: with the private sector that, due to the shrinking of public budgets, is playing an increasing important role in the provision of services of public utility.

As situation depicted above shows, the complexity of the issues to be solved goes well beyond what a technological solution may offer. In this respect, technology should be considered as one ingredient of a more elaborated recipe. At the same time, some opportunities have been identified for the implementation of emerging technologies such as block chain, IoT, semantic web and linked data, artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality. In parallel, a number of more mature technologies still seem not to have exhausted their potential, among these it is worth to mention: social media, cloud, mobile and eID.
Finally, human capital was clearly identified as a core and cross-country issue for a successful implementation from both the demand and the supply side of public sector innovation. In this respect, any technological implementation should aim at being transparent to stakeholders both inside and outside the public sector. In other words, the innovative solutions should try to hide their complexity in order to reduce internal resistance to change and to promote an easier and widespread adoption among potential external users.