On the 28th of April, the 3rd Progress Sharing Day of Dubai We Learn was held. For those new to the initiative, this initiative is led by the Dubai Government Excellence Programme and the Centre of Organisational Excellence Research (COER), New Zealand. The initiative aims to empower a culture of institutional learning and the transfer and exchange of knowledge within Dubai’s government sector.

The initiative consists of the mentoring of 13 benchmarking projects, training in organisational learning and benchmarking, and the provision of a best practice resource, http://www.BPIR.com, for all 37 government entities.

To assist in the sharing of best practices, 3 progress sharing days for the 13 benchmarking projects have been held. During these days, each team describes the progress they have made with their projects. As all project teams are using the TRADE benchmarking methodology it is easy to compare progress. Some teams have recorded video clips to showcase their work and the benefits they are obtaining, such as the example below from Dubai Municipality.

To add interest to the day, each team is given 10 minutes to present and the audience vote on which projects have made most progress. At the 3rd Progress Sharing Day, 4 teams were selected as achieving the most progress with Dubai Statistics Centre (DSC) achieving the most votes. The four projects were:

• Shams Dubai Initiative (Customer awareness & engagement) – Dubai Electricity & Water Authority
• Improving Purchasing Channels – Dubai Municipality
• People Happiness – Knowledge & Human Development Authority
• Innovative Statistics – Dubai Statistics Center (DSC)

The aim of DSC’s project is to “identify best practices in Innovation to enable DSC to develop and implement a strategy for innovation to improve its processes and services”.

DSC started its project by undertaking a number of innovation self-assessments. The self-assessment tools they used were from the BPIR.com. Of the 5 Innovation Self-assessment Tools, DSC found the self-assessment titled “Innovation Maturity (organisation-wide)” the most comprehensive and useful. The self-assessments enabled DSC to identify its current level of Innovation Maturity and identify specifically what needed to be improved. In particular, they identified the need to improve in: innovation strategies, innovation measurement, innovation labs, suggestion schemes and innovative statistical information delivery.
During the search for potential benchmarking partners, DSC used the identified areas of improvement as criteria for selecting benchmarking partners. For example, DSC searched for organisations with an innovation strategy that resulted in an innovative culture.

By the 3rd Progress Sharing Day, DSC had finished benchmarking visits to four organisations locally and obtained many best practices through internet research. Some examples of the practices that they are considering implementing are:

• Innovation Management Standard: The European Innovation Management Standard CEN/TS 16555 has been underway since 2008, and as such it incorporates a lot of the elements which are believed to constitute current best practices on innovation management. The Standard consists of 7 documents:
  • Innovation management system (16555-1:2013)
  • Strategic intelligence management (16555-2:2014)
  • Innovation thinking (16555-2:2014)
  • Intellectual property management (16555-4:2014)
  • Collaboration management (16555-5:2014)
  • Creativity management (16555-6:2014)
  • Innovation management assessment (16555-7, 2015)
• e-Cap System: An electronic system to follow-up corrective actions, analyse risks, prioritize actions and raise status reports as they consider any corrective action as a creative idea.
• Government Innovation Lab Manual: A manual designed to provide tools and techniques on how to implement an innovation lab from brainstorming workshop to idea implementation.
• Customer Pain Point: A system to find the problems faced by the customer in order to come up with innovative solutions, in other word it is a customer inspired innovation.

For more information about this initiative download the attached article and sign-up up to COER’s newsletter to receive the latest updates.