Public sector organisations in the NPA area acknowledge the importance of introducing innovations to meet the increasing demand from their communities to get quality and sustainable services. However, these areas are in a disadvantageous position due to the challenges identified in the Programme area such as increasing demand of an ageing population, the unit cost of service provision to small and diminishing populations over large distances and the skills gap in the shift to digital solutions.
Feedback received from public sector staff states that an effective way to overcome these challenges could be to specify, select and implement quick win initiatives by testing disruptive innovations that address repeating problems in public sector service areas.
INNOCAP’s overall objective is to provide enhanced quality and sustainable public services by enabling public sector organisations to lead the adoption of disruptive innovations and digital technologies. A key output will be a capacity building programme that will prepare public sector organizations from the 3 NPA geographical zones to pilot and further adopt 4 disruptive public services – the other main outputs of the project- in key areas such as climate change action, environmental management or the digital and green transition. This will benefit at least 120 users from the main target groups of the project, who are the public sector staff in charge of the management and delivery of public services in their territories and the final users of these services.
The utilised approach combines ambitiously very different dimensions. This integral and pragmatic approach, combined with disruptive innovation characteristics, requires transnational cooperation to meet the project’s ambitions that otherwise would be impossible for an individual organisation or a region to address them sufficiently and in the extent planned in INNOCAP.
INNOCAP is funded by the Interreg Northern Periphery and Arctic programme.