Building public sector innovation capacity towards digital-driven NPA communities

Public sector organisations in the NPA area acknowledge the importance of introducing new innovations to meet the increasing demand for quality and sustainable services addressing shared characteristics like long distances, limited resources and skills and low critical mass of consumers for successful market-led operations.

Work carried out in projects like DISTINCT shows that, when addressing these challenges, the main factor is not the availability of innovative services, products or processes in the area, where SMEs, higher education institutions (HEIs) and research centres present a significant pool of expertise and enough potential to assist public sector in this task, but the lack of awareness by
public sector organisations on these innovative solutions.

INNOCAP tackles the challenges and leverages the opportunities of the public sector from a new approach: it covers both the demand and the supply sides of public service provision and assesses not only its role as provider but also as promoter and early-adopter of digital innovations available. Public service providers are turned into facilitators that co-create value and take advantage of the current supply capacity in the NPA area.

In doing so, focus will be put on how to build the capacity of the public sector and prepare it to play this important role.

The main outcome of the project will be the Capacity Building Programme for Innovative Digital Public Services in the NPA regions, including the main aspects identified with key stakeholders from public sector, SMEs and HEIs and using previous experience from partners.

The work will be utilised as a main project idea to run and test the effectiveness of the Capacity Building Programme in the coming NPA Programme 2021-2027.