Lab Notes - August edition

The August edition of Lab Notes brings together inspiring blogs, articles and video content for public sector and social innovators around the world, including ten ideas helping governments to innovate, an open call for energy innovations, insights for designing inclusive cities, and more...

This month's key lab picks

1. What are the ten ideas helping government to incubate, accelerate and de-risk public sector innovation?

2. Chile’s Laboratorio de Gobierno has just launched Impacta Energy, a public challenge prize looking to uncover the energy innovations of the future. Innovators from around the world can submit their ideas until August 23rd.

3. A simple post code innovation being rolled out in Mongolia could help create huge social benefits by improving the accuracy of addresses for four billion people.

4. The OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation is crowdsourcing below the radar innovations that are improving how governments work, to drive the agenda for the 2017 World Government Summit.

5. Want to know more about how social innovation labs approach complex challenges? Innoweave and MaRS have produced a webinar and other useful learning content on social innovation labs.

6. The design of cities has often embedded racism and exclusion. Fastcodesign asked a handful of architects, scholars, urbanists and planners what can be done about it.

7. Who are the Local Datavores and how are they using data to make better decisions and be more innovative? Read this Nesta blog for practical advice on how councils can get better use out of data, big or small.

8. Treating alcoholics with wine: a counterintuitive approach to tackling chronic alcoholism in Ottowa is bringing stability back into homeless people’s lives.

9. Ernest Radal, founder of Mobilearn - a mobile-based service that supports newly arrived immigrants in Sweden - is interviewed about the value of working with government.

10. Can an entrepreneurial mindset adequately address a systemic challenge? This story of a social venture dedicated to bringing internet access to every US public classroom makes the case for systems thinking.

11. Social Labs Revolution offers valuable tips and tools for network and systems mapping - a useful method to support Lab teams to better understand the context of a given challenge.

12. Giulio Quaggiotto et al. consider why public sector innovators should fall in love with the solution, not the problem.

13. This EPIC article describes how human-centred policy-making can better support the urban innovation and Smart Cities agenda.