The Question
What if the Government of Canada had a single, permanent mechanism to learn from its own innovations — and scale what works?
Not another taskforce. Not another lab that disappears after three years. Not another report that sits on a shelf.
But a living system — one that connects innovators across departments, captures what they learn, and turns isolated breakthroughs into system-wide improvements.
“Innovation is the process of translating ideas or inventions into goods and services that create value.”
— Broadly accepted definition in public sector innovation literature
Right now, public servants across Canada are running experiments, testing new approaches, and solving hard problems. But their work is invisible to the rest of the system. There is no registry of what's been tried, no library of what's been learned, and no mechanism for scaling what works.
The question isn't whether innovation is happening. It is. The question is: why can't the system learn from itself?
And more importantly: what would it take to change that?