Looking back on the last six weeks, a central theme for me has been
~innovation~
aka one of my least favourite, super broad policy buzzwords
More specifically, what gets defined as innovative? Who gets to decide an innovation is needed in the first place? And if you know a different & innovative solution is needed, how do you make it happen?
Throughout the course, we were presented with different ideas of what innovation in the policy sphere was, from human centred design to laneway housing to a mobile food bus. Usually these innovations were about “flipping the orthodoxy” and doing something different, like letting kids design their own playground. In general, the stories and ideas discussed excited me and made me feel hopeful about the future of policymaking. However, in the case of Sidewalk Labs these innovations made me feel uneasy and wonder, who are these really for? Are we just innovating for the sake of innovating? The word innovation is so nebulous and broad that it can be used in service of pretty much anything, and not all innovations are beneficial or needed.
Something that I don’t think gets talked about enough in “policy innovation” is how sometimes the most innovative ideas are the most simple and self-evident. Of course the people who use playgrounds everyday would have the best ideas on how they are used!
This idea often came up in my summer internship at TruePoint Centre, whose work was highlighted by employee Jasmine Lam in class last week. The organization is focused on supporting the scaling of early childhood development innovations internationally. Often the innovations that are really effective are the ones returning to long-held knowledge and keeping it simple. Somewhere in the bureaucratic policy process, the importance of teaching something like skin-to-skin care postpartum has been lost, and now it’s an innovation to bring it back on a large scale!
I still feel skeptical when I hear something described as innovative with no real definition of what that means. I think I’d feel more comfortable if we all were more specific about what change we were making. Also, we should talk about how an “innovation” might not be as groundbreaking or new to the people on the ground, it just means you’ve finally started listening to what they’ve been saying all along.
