Scholars and practitioners alike have praised the benefits of decentralized innovation systems. Innovation in public policy is no exception: everyone can and should be a source of new ideas. And public policy is much too important to be left exclusively to policy makers. The main purpose of the Public Policy Idea Lab is to foster innovation in public policy by engaging members of the Nova SBE community — and other individuals as well — in the process of developing and applying new ideas to solve old and current problems.
Faced with a societal problem (e.g., housing in large urban areas or access to health services in sparsely-populated rural areas), most people have some idea of what can and should be done. Some of these ideas are good and original. There are however multiple barriers to going from innovative ideas to actual public policy. First, the barrier of turning a generic concept into a specific, well-thought-out plan. Second, the barrier of moving past a plan on paper and testing it as a pilot program. Third, the barrier of translating an idea — even a well-tested-idea — into actual public policy.
The purpose of the Public Policy Idea Lab, housed at the Nova SBE Public Policy Institute (NPPI), is to help teams engaged in social innovation projects get over the multiple barriers to going from point A (an idea) to point B (actual public policy impact). The lab offers a variety of resources:
- Our researchers in specific fields of public policy can help understand what the state of the art is, what research methods are best used, and so on
- Our entrepreneurship mentors can help organize a plan, so that the project moves at the right pace
- Our network of policy fellows can help link with actual policymakers, so that, at a minimum, the team’s work is heard and evaluated by its intended audience.
- Whenever needed and justified, the institute may also provide (limited) seed money to provide for travel and other expenses related to the project.
The Public Policy Idea Lab is related to other initiatives housed at Nova SBE, including the Nova SBE Haddad Entrepreneurship Institute, the Leadership for Impact Knowledge Center, and Nova SBE’s Role to Play (a “space that will provide the know-how so that the best and most innovative talent [...] can play its role”). While there is overlap between these different organizations and programs, we see our roles largely as complementary. In particular, the differentiating feature of the Policy Idea Lab is precisely the institutionalization step, that is, the scaling up of pilot social entrepreneurship programs into wider public policy (at the local, national, European, or global level).