Dutch Societal Innovation Hub

Public sector organisations face societal challenges and lack digital maturity to solve these effectively. While looking for innovations created by public-private ecosystems issues such as a lack of interoperability and working in silos, lead to suboptimal solutions that do not create enough impact. This calls for a closer cooperation between ecosystems and public entities to develop new ways of working.

The Dutch Societal Innovation Hub (DSIH) is set up with 2 umbrella organisations representing all local & regional public actors and 5 hubs focusing on public service needs. The goal of DSIH is to solve societal challenges by intensifying cross-ecosystem cooperation, ensuring interoperability, and create mission projects that connect to the DSIH’s overall mission, to add to a sustainable, heathy and safe quality of life in city & region. DSIH hereby builds upon an existing fundament, e.g., public centric values & citizen engagement, used by public entities in the Netherlands. Existing innovations within the ecosystems are shared through a transfer of learnings, testing & validation between the ecosystems. With public service experience and methodology at its core, DSIH will create a learning environment for the digital and green transition.

DSIH will:

1. Develop a cross-sectoral, mission-driven way of working for the public sector to support digital transformation,
2. Enhance the accessibility of the ecosystem’s innovation facilities,
3. Organise DSIH activities that reinforce each other in bringing solutions to public services demands,
4. Creating knowledge transfer among the partnership and the wider network of European Digital Innovation Hubs (EDIH).

It will hereby provide a brokerage and knowledge transfer role between public entities and ecosystems. Ultimately DSIH works towards a solid cross-ecosystem & public service innovation infrastructure in Europe, opening room for knowledge exchange on mission projects, building a strong interconnected hub with the help of the Digital Transformation Accelerator (DTA) & EDIH network.

The specific objectives of the project are:

• Objective 1: Developing a cross-sectoral, mission-driven way of working for the public sector, in order to support the digital transformation and activate systemic change for societal impact.
  Within the DSIH, the partners will translate the overall DSIH mission and EC missions into a concrete approach with guidance towards mission projects in the form of a roadmap.
• Objective 2: Enhance the accessibility of the ecosystem’s innovation facilities (such as lab and test environments) & best practices (such as methodologies) to facilitate test before invest activities and mature the way innovation is carried out. To support the mission, the core of the DSIH is formed by the innovation ecosystem infrastructure. This is defined in modular ecosystem services. The different services and methodologies are already developed on local-regional-national level. Within this project we standardise the products and test or validate them within the ecosystems.
• Objective 3: Organize activities of the consortium partners that reinforce each other so that they can bring validated solutions to public services’ demands on a more efficient manner. During the project all deliverables of the project are developed, tested and validated within the different ecosystems. The approach we follow is through iterations to assure fast development and validation.
• Objective 4: Creating knowledge transfer (capturing, exchanging, disseminating) and incorporating learnings, based on proven knowledge and methodologies for public services, in order to create synergies in the upscaling of innovation in our consortium and in cooperation with other EDIHs. DSIH will share best practices and scalable solutions from the conducted experiments from the Dutch ecosystems to the European network of EDIHs and vice versa. A close cooperation with the DTA (as facilitator of EU-level networks) is of high importance.

The expected results of the project are:

Result 1: the development of a common approach and mission projects will help to create a shared language between all partners and create synergies between them. The service to find additional funding (Funding Lane an overview of funding instruments on local/national/European level) will help to focus on mission projects and activate a network to develop and scale projects per specific topic.

Result 2: the development of an innovation infrastructure that will deliver EDIH services to support the individual innovation uptakers. The services will be developed and validated in co-creation between all partners; this will facilitate networking between the innovation uptakers (EU and NL) and creators (see 2.1), and skill development and training for innovation uptakers.

Result 3: the development, standardisation and validation of mission projects (test before invest). By working through regular peer review sessions, the DSIH makes sure that solutions are validated and replicable.

Result 4: enlarge the European network of the DSIH to learn from other EDIHs and propagate mature solutions.