Citizen-Driven Innovation

1. Set the Rules

We have repeatedly underlined the importance of working in an open and transparent manner, ensuring mutual respect. As your core team of external and internal innovators gains different experiences, you will generally find that it is useful to translate some of these principles into an operational framework. You don't at first need to establish a department or any formalized structure, but you do have to agree on the common, minimum rules that each stakeholder should follow, expecting others to do the same. This way, new players who join your collaborative processes can get a clear idea of the values you share and immediately see if they are coherent with their expectations. These rules should primarily ensure openness, transparency, inclusiveness, and shared ownership, but they can also define general principles for dealing with privacy, intellectual property rights, and other such matters.

What is most important is that these rules are taken seriously, using the partnership's own governance structure to monitor compliance. A good test is to ask an external third party to evaluate your governance principles: do they seem sincere, do they engender trust, do they encourage engagement and empowerment? Another test is to ask those who you are representing or working on behalf of: do they guarantee transparency, do they provide for accountability, and allow 'outsiders' to intervene when necessary?

Finally, while it is important to set down the rules it is equally important to make provisions for modifying and updating them on the basis of your experience in working together. Try not to focus too much on predicting and preventing possible future problems; put the emphasis rather on establishing a shared identity for your group, with reciprocal trust as the best antidote for creating problems and open and transparent mechanisms for addressing problems if and when they arise.