Executive Summary

The following is a proposal for a big, hairy, audacious goal (to borrow Collins' phrase) to make innovation systemic in the federal public service. It begins with fundamental questions: What is innovation? What is our current context and what are the wicked problems? And how can innovation help us solve these problems?

To achieve this, the proposal recommends establishing a central Learning and Innovation Hub, housed at the Treasury Board Secretariat of Canada and modelled in stature and function after the Office of the Comptroller General. The Hub would serve as the system's backbone for public-sector innovation:

• Convening innovators and connecting existing labs, hubs, and communities across government
• Crowdsourcing solutions to the government's most pressing and complex challenges
• Turning these crowdsourced ideas into experiments and innovation pilots
• Documenting and using pilots as rigorous case studies
• Centralizing knowledge, tools, and evidence into a shared, searchable innovation library
• Creatively translating and mobilizing learning so innovations can scale across departments

The result: a federal public service capable of learning, adapting, and innovating continuously — becoming a true Learning Organization, fit for purpose, and ready to meet the profound complexity and expectations of the 21st century.

This is the first draft, and it relies on the collective insight and intelligence of innovators, practitioners, researchers, academics, and current and former public servants — to help shape, strengthen, and evolve it from a good idea into a great one ready to be tested.

The Question: How Can We Supercharge Innovation and Make It Systemic?

What would it take for the federal public service to move beyond ad hoc, department-level innovations and create a central mechanism that convenes innovators, transforms crowd-sourced ideas into experiments, and mobilizes the resulting knowledge so innovation, learning, and adaptability spread system-wide?

A definition of innovation

Innovation is the creative generation and application of new ideas that achieve a significant improvement in a product, program, process, service, structure or policy. Simply put, innovation is about transformative ideas that work.
— CCMD Roundtable on the Innovative Public Service, 2002

The Problem

Duplicated efforts, pockets of innovation, a lack of investment in innovation, and a public service that is risk-averse, under pressure, and struggling to adapt.

It's a Brave New World — And We Must Adapt or Die

Canada is operating in a VUCA world — volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous — and increasingly marked by polycrisis: “a cluster of distinct crises that interact in ways that they and/or their effects tend to reinforce each other.” Climate change, demographic pressures, polarization, productivity stagnation, aging infrastructure, debt and deficit constraints, rapid advances in AI, geopolitical instability, and declining trust in institutions are placing unprecedented stress on the federal system.

Historically, major public-sector innovation in Canada has been mission-led or crisis-driven. But we can no longer rely on crises to catalyze change: they are becoming more frequent, more interdependent, and harder to contain. Innovation cannot remain episodic or crisis-triggered — it must be embedded as a sustained, system-wide capability.

Yet even as the need for continuous innovation grows, our institutions were not designed for this pace of change. Canada's Westminster system — built for stability, hierarchy, and ministerial accountability — struggles to support the kind of horizontal coordination, rapid learning, and iterative problem-solving that a polycrisis era requires.

As Alasdair Roberts argues in The Adaptable Country, Canada struggles to anticipate danger, redesign strategy to address long-term challenges, build political support for the proposed strategy, and execute strategy by renovating institutions. The reality is: we have not built the adaptive capacity we need to navigate 21st-century complexity.

Fragmented and Fragile Innovation Efforts That Don't Break Out of Their Silos

In 2018, the OECD and Canada's Impact and Innovation Unit (Privy Council Office) released The Innovation System of the Public Service of Canada — the first-ever country review of our federal innovation ecosystem.

The report found that innovation across the federal government remains fragmented, uneven, and overly reliant on individual champions rather than embedded and treated as core business. The report concluded that unless the system strengthens four conditions — clarity, parity, suitability, and normality — innovation will continue to be sporadic and vulnerable to circumstance.

Central efforts have not produced systemic innovation

Impact Canada: Powerful tools, but project-based and not systemic. It operates on a cost-recovery model, making it a service provider rather than a systemic steward. It does not identify cross-government wicked problems or crowdsource public-service-generated ideas.

CSPS: Critical for capacity-building, but not designed for experimentation. Its mandate centres on learning and training, not translating learning into experiments or tackling organizational challenges.

The 2016 Experimentation Directive: A noble effort without the scaffolding. There was no shared definition of experimentation, no roadmap, limited shared infrastructure, and inconsistent reporting.

Experimentation Works (TBS): Demonstrated that public servants can experiment effectively — but capability alone is not enough without governance, continuity, and system-level integration.

Departmental efforts show strong demand but weak system supports

CRA Innovation Program: Generated strong engagement and promising experiments but was constrained by IT bottlenecks, uneven buy-in, and limited knowledge mobilization. Wound down when central funding ended.

Health Canada's Solutions Fund: Provided seed funding for employee-led innovation but had limited mechanisms to share lessons or scale successful projects.

ESDC: One of the most active innovators — advancing AI, change management, digital transformation, behavioural science, and more. Yet even ESDC's ecosystem is decentralized with no central repository or shared definition for innovation.

Talent and lab models briefly worked but were not structurally embedded

Blueprint 2020: Sparked enthusiasm across 110,000+ participants but lacked the governance, authority, incentives, and infrastructure needed to produce lasting change.

Free Agent Program: Broke through rigid HR rules and enabled cross-government mobility — but was discontinued in 2025, losing one of the most promising models.

Innovation labs and hubs across the GoC have repeatedly been established, celebrated, quietly defunded, and dissolved. As one former ADM observed, great ideas often “percolated up and then evaporated.”

The result is a system that reinvents ineffective solutions, loses hard-won knowledge when teams dissolve, and struggles to connect innovation work to senior decision-making.

A Public Service Under Pressure

As Lynch and Mitchell argue: “What Canadians need today is a public service that is highly skilled, adaptable, and efficient. Instead, what they are getting is an institution that increasingly seems out of touch and bureaucratic to a fault.”

The federal public service faces: a Cost Expenditure Review with an estimated 40,000-position downsizing by 2029; major policy and legislative changes; modernizing outdated systems; adapting to AI; and serving Canadians whose expectations are shaped by the private sector. Canada has fallen from 3rd (2010) to 47th (2024) in global e-government rankings.

We Don't Invest in Innovation

The 2025 Federal Budget mentions innovation 134 times, but almost exclusively in relation to external investment — “crowding in hundreds of billions of dollars” for the private sector. There is no coordinated investment in internal public-sector innovation capacity, no system-wide approach to upskilling, and little focus on protecting the innovation capabilities of existing public servants.

If R&D, experimentation, and innovation drive performance for firms, why don't we apply the same principles to the public service itself?

A Workforce and Institutional Capacity Gap

56.1% of employers have staff not fully proficient for their jobs (Statistics Canada, 2021). Of these, the skills needing most improvement were technical/job-specific skills (57.5%) and problem-solving (46.2%). The public service lacks structured mechanisms to mobilize skills, diagnose systemic barriers, and translate frontline insights into organizational improvements.

A System That Does Not Learn

Individual organizations learn — to a point. But the federal public service as a whole does not. It lacks:

• A shared, government-wide definition of innovation and a unifying vision
• A cross-government mechanism that crowdsources ideas and surfaces solutions
• A central wayfinding mechanism for locating innovation support and expertise
• A repository of projects, experiments, case studies, tools, and lessons learned
• An engine for evidence synthesis and creative knowledge mobilization
• Innovation governance that spans departments rather than reinforcing silos

Why This Matters

Without systemic, enterprise-enabled learning and innovation, the federal public service faces: slower adaptation to crises, fragmented modernization efforts, inefficient use of public resources, duplicated work across departments, missed opportunities for better service delivery, declining trust when government cannot keep pace, and a widening gap between policy ambition and institutional capability.

In short: the federal public service lacks the innovation governance that could make innovation systemic.

The Vision: A Central Learning and Innovation Hub

A central mechanism for capturing solutions from one part of the system and transferring them to another — leveraging multi-level engagement (individual, organizational, system-wide) and collective stewardship rather than isolated efforts.

Imagine: a deputy minister identifies a persistent problem — fragmented service delivery for vulnerable Canadians. Instead of convening a small task force behind closed doors, the challenge is opened to the whole system. Ideas flow from policy shops, regional offices, data teams, digital units. Academics and community organizations contribute insights. Cross-disciplinary teams form around the most promising ideas. The Hub provides methods, coaching, sandbox environments, funding, and light governance. Pilots are documented in real time. Learning is translated into guides, podcasts, and playbooks. Other departments can find and reuse what works.

The public service becomes more connected, more confident, and more capable of learning and adapting together. And Canadians feel the difference.

How It Works

The Learning and Innovation Hub is designed as an adaptive system: it will evolve based on evidence gleaned from research, learning, and feedback.

1. Convene Innovators

Connect existing labs, hubs, communities of practice, and innovation champions through a shared network. Host annual events. Build a cross-sector community of practice starting with academia and federal public servants, expandable to other levels of government and civil society.

2. Gather Ideas

Use an online platform leveraging crowdsourcing, digital tools, and AI/ML. Combine top-down (senior leadership defines wicked problems) and bottom-up (public servants propose solutions). Use inclusive voting and decision-making tools that incentivize collaboration.

3. Turn Ideas into Pilots

Form cross-disciplinary, interdepartmental teams — including the original ideators. Use a “bullets then cannonballs” approach. The Hub provides: a central source of knowledge, functional authority, expert guidance, shared infrastructure, procurement flexibilities, and experimentation funding.

4. Document & Build Knowledge Library

Document pilots as they unfold in short case studies. Design meaningful performance measures. Create a searchable resource library housing case studies, tools, templates, protocols, and evaluation summaries.

5. Translate & Mobilize Knowledge

Run Innovation Awards. Produce creative formats: shortcasts, podcasts, blog posts, visual explainers, playbooks. Partner with CSPS for learning paths and micro-credentials.

6. Continuously Learn & Scale

Review the portfolio. Use behavioural science, systems thinking, and design methods to refine. Engage academics and practitioners. Report annually to TBS/PCO and Parliament.

Key Ingredients

Governance, Mandate & Resourcing

• Shared definitions and vision
• Functional authority for public-sector innovation (situated at TBS)
• Permanent, protected funding (hybrid model: endowment-style + departmental top-slice)
• Clear mission alignment; good governance; systems thinking
• Intergovernmental and cross-sector collaboration

People, Culture & Incentives

• Communityship — engaged and distributed management
• Psychological safety and genuine permission space for innovators
• Incentivized collaboration; dedicated resources and time
• Talent and mobility mechanisms; outside-in perspectives
• Leadership that fosters adaptability, creativity, and evidence-based decision-making

Infrastructure & Capability Supports

• Shared digital and data infrastructure
• Centralized resource library / knowledge bank
• Integrated measurement and learning infrastructure
• Pathways for scaling; strong connection to academia

Methods, Tools & Practices

• Systems thinking, design thinking, behavioural science
• Applied research and experimentation
• AI and machine learning as enablers
• Knowledge creation, translation, and mobilization
• Continuous learning loops

How We Get There

This roadmap starts small, learns quickly, builds on what exists, and scales only once the foundations are strong.

Phase 1 — Get the Right People on Board

Create a standing working group (10-15 people) from federal public servants and academic experts. Guide research priorities, ensure rigor and credibility, champion system-wide learning.

Phase 2 — Gather Evidence and Take Stock

Continue and deepen the OECD-PCO 2018 work. Map the innovation ecosystem. Create the first knowledge library. Diagnose structural, cultural, and operational barriers. Develop a shared definition and vision of innovation.

Phase 3 — Strengthen and Connect What Exists

Connect innovation spaces into a coordinated network. Strengthen links to senior decision-makers. Convene innovators nationally to identify shared challenges and accelerate learning.

Phase 4 — Prototype, Test, Iterate, Scale

Prototype the crowdsourcing platform on a small scale. Collect ideas, deploy cross-disciplinary teams, run small safe-to-fail tests, use central resources, iterate based on evidence, and provide pathways for scaling.

Why Now?

The federal government is entering a period of profound fiscal, operational, and policy transformation. PM Carney's May 2025 mandate letter outlines seven priorities. Innovation is essential to all of them.

Priority 7 — “Spending less on government operations to invest in the future” — makes the case unmistakable: simply cutting will not deliver results for Canadians. Only by transforming how we work can we protect essential programs and services.

The public service is navigating multiple concurrent reforms: the TBS Policy on Service and Digital reset, Privacy Act modernization, ATIP reform, AI and Data Strategy updates, and the Cost Expenditure Review. These represent a once-in-a-generation realignment.

Every current government priority becomes more achievable, less costly, and more citizen-centred when supported by a coordinated system for learning, experimentation, and innovation.

Next Steps

• January 30, 2026: Provide feedback on this proposal — What's missing? What does it still need? Is the phased approach realistic? Is “Learning and Innovation Hub” even the right name?
• Mid-February 2026: Virtual meeting of contributors to discuss ideas and next steps
• February — April 2026: Refine the written proposal and expand the contributor base
• After written proposal is in good shape: Develop an engagement strategy that builds champion support

Who Is Involved

Over 25 contributors have been consulted so far, spanning federal public servants across functions, academics, and practitioners from organizations including CHRC, IRCC, CRA, ESDC, CSPS, TBS, PSPC, SSC, MIT, University of Massachusetts Amherst, University of Toronto, University of Waterloo, Carleton University, and ENAP.

Potential champions include Ima Okonny (CDO/ADM at ESDC), Jocelyn Bourgon (former Privy Council Clerk), Shafqat Ali (TBS President), Christiane Fox (Privy Council Deputy Clerk), Taki Sarantakis (CSPS President), and Peter Senge (MIT systems thinker and author of The Fifth Discipline).

Sources Consulted

Key sources include:

• Borins, Sandford. Innovating with Integrity (1998) and The Persistence of Innovation in Government (2014)
• Collins, Jim. From Good to Great (2001) and Great by Choice (2011)
• Lynch & Mitchell. A New Blueprint for Government (2025)
• Roberts, Alasdair. The Adaptable Country (2024)
• OECD & PCO. The Innovation System of the Public Service of Canada (2018)
• Council of Canadian Academies. The State of Science, Technology and Innovation in Canada 2025
• Canada Budget 2025, Department of Finance Canada
• Government of Canada. 31st Annual Report to the Prime Minister on the Public Service of Canada (2025)
• UN E-Government Knowledge Base (rankings data)
• Statistics Canada. Determinants of Skill Gaps in the Workplace (2022)

AI use disclaimer: AI (ChatGPT) was used as an assistive tool for clarifying language, enhancing flow, and testing ideas. The substantive thinking, research, analysis, and conclusions are the author's own, informed by 25+ hours of conversations with contributors.