Towards a User-Centered, Data-Driven Entrepreneurial Approach to Civic Innovation

Guest post by Namrata Mehta, Director, Innovation, Center for Knowledge Societies

Based in New Delhi, the Civic Innovation Lab envisions an approach to civic innovation that brings together user-centered systems design, open and crowd sourced data technology, citizen participation and start-up entrepreneurship. In March this year, at the Design Public conclave, we brought together various experts from each of these approaches to help us define in greater detail the purpose, potential and working model of the Lab. In June, we traveled to Canada to participate in a convening of global social and public innovation labs hosted by MaRS Solutions Lab, to learn from and share with colleagues and peers from around the world. Conversations at both these events have allowed us to think more deeply about the work we are embarking upon, helping us strategize to a greater extent our plan moving forward. A publication – Towards a Civic Innovation Lab – presents a series of arguments about the need for civic innovation, outlines various efforts we have undertaken towards setting up the Lab, and presents a vision for the Lab over the next year. In light of recent conversations with the GovLab, presented here are two mandates of the Lab – each pertaining to it’s proposed use of open data – (i) decisionmaking and (ii) enabling entrepreneurship, but before that, a brief history.

There appears to be a new kind of sensibility that is rising among (largely urban) citizens of India, calling out for an improvement in the quality of governance and public service delivery in the country. This is made apparent by rising civic activism, sparked by countrywide protests in December 2012, the rise of the Aam Aadmi Party in 2013, the sweeping electoral mandate only five months ago, and not least of all the widespread adoption of mobile and social media technologies coupled with a growing demand for open data. Given that by 2039, 50% of the Indian population will live in cities, we can only imagine that this sensibility will continue to proliferate in the coming years. It is against this backdrop that the envisioning of a new entity – the Civic Innovation Lab – channels together these energies and pivoting between stakeholders, thereby bringing them into a systemic process of governance innovation is realized.

Structurally the Civic Innovation Lab is part of a network of innovation organisations that together form the Vihara Innovation Network, located together at the Vihara Innovation Campus in New Delhi. The Center for Knowledge Societies is an innovation consulting firm, which focuses on user research, user experience design, design strategy and systems innovation. The Bihar Innovation Lab (BIL), supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, works with the Bihar state government to promote innovation in health and other developmental areas. The Adianta School for Leadership provides a professional post-graduate diploma through a unique learning-by-doing pedagogic approach, delivered through a network of working professionals. The Startup Tunnel (STun) is a new kind of incubator-accelerator focused on social impact challenges in health, education, financial services and governance. Drawing on the knowledge, resources and networks of each of the above listed organisations, the Lab occupies a unique position to carry forward its mandates.

I. Decisionmaking: Envisioning New Areas of Public Need and Opportunity

The Lab aims to define and address the public service delivery challenges of India, while seeking to iteratively overcome them by opening out the solutioneering process; a first step towards this is to identify and prioritize areas of public need and opportunity. Over the years, CKS has pioneered this kind of opportunity mapping, relying on ethnographic research methodologies, systems mapping and visualizations and a proprietary tool known as Failure Case Analysis (FCA). FCA involves the disaggregation of field findings into atomized elements of failure which are indivisible, mutually exclusive, non-overlapping and collectively comprehensible. This allows for the construction of a large series of micro-propositions which must then be assembled together to create new and innovative redesigns of the delivery system. FCA makes it is possible to not only identify failures of information and data flows through a given system but also where the blind spots exist, indicating where data can improve the system.

Much has been said about the potential of big and open data to tackle developmental challenges, however, data serves a more important, complementary, function in relation to FCA, one more suited to the process of prioritizing and decision making. Using the combined approach of data analysis and FCA, the Lab, will work with civic groups, government agencies, and new-growth private sector, to develop decisionmaking tools in order to identify the real and the right areas of need, opportunity and intervention. The Lab’s first attempt at putting this process together and testing it out might unfold over the next few months, on a project the Lab will undertake in collaboration with the Bihar Innovation Lab and an Indonesian based development agency, where we hope to use this approach to tackle the high rates of maternal mortality experienced in both India and Indonesia.

II. Enabling Entrepreneurship: Mediating between New-Growth Enterprises and the Public sector

Considering much of the excellence in service delivery in India has been on account of the private sector, they are an essential stakeholder in unleashing the potential of open, mobile and social data to improve public service delivery. While corporations continue to dominate private-public-partnerships, there is a breed of dynamic and promising new-growth private sector enterprises that are emerging. The Lab will serve as a pivot between the state and startup enterprises, translating the language of the state to the startup ecology, while taking solutions developed by the startups back to the government. Given the Labs understanding of and experience with government structures and functioning through the Bihar Innovation Lab, as well as the expertise it has accrued on startup entrepreneurship through the Adianta School for Leadership and Innovation, it is well placed to not only recognize the need for this kind of mediating body, but also to serve as it. Moreover, through this mediation, the Lab will discover new modalities within which the private and public sector partner with one another. An early proposition towards a new modality of PPPs is the possibility of opening up government tendering processes as challenges put forth to entrepreneurs. Learning from its network organizations, the Lab understands the need to bring new ideas to existing institutions and markets, especially to the state, to overcome both questions of scale as well as impact.

NextDrop and Social Cops serve as prime examples for the possibilities of partnerships between new-growth enterprises and government agencies. While both enterprises have created data-based services, the former to make decisions on the release of water across city areas and the latter to audit waste pick-ups in a neighborhood, they rely on user-generated crowdsourced data. A key research question at the Lab is how can one use open data sets to create new entrepreneurial ventures. The Lab will provide thought leadership around the use of technology to bring about social change. It will, through online and offline platforms, critically engage with the issues of citizen privacy, transparency, accountability and power. Through these conversations it will develop a robust framework of solutioneering that serves the interests of both the state as well as citizens.

Over the next months the Lab will be meeting with decision makers in government and the development sectors to attract funders. It will engage with the startup community to identify and foster new business and enterprise ideas. It will host the next Open Data Camp to explore the potential of open data in the Indian context. Through these efforts, the Lab looks to collaborate and partner with global social and public labs, including the GovLab, to learn from, share with, and together create this new approach to civic innovation.