The Innovation Area of Management is innovative because it shifts the dialogue on public sector innovation from the periphery to the mainstream, by focusing on the following elements:

• Innovation management excellence: Innovation can take place spontaneously and at a small scale, but a mature innovation function requires organizational capacity (e.g., resources, executive buy-in, embedding innovation in core processes).
• High-impact innovations: Instead of focusing on the innovation itself or testing, the framework considers the potential impact of the innovation in terms of improvements to the public service or to services to Canadians. Irrespective of results, innovations need to be designed with the potential to solve significant problems.
• High-quality monitoring information: The framework improves the data collection capacity on what is taking place across the system. This allows progress monitoring and sharing innovation management best practices across organizations.

The Innovation Area of Management has been implemented for the 2022-2023 Management Accountability Framework reporting cycle.

The Management Accountability Framework (MAF) is a process managed by the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat. A directorate is responsible for coordinating all aspects of the process. As part of the development of the Area of Management, extensive consultations and engagement sessions were led with federal departments and agencies who must submit evidence through the MAF process.

Federal departments and agencies are the primary users of the Innovation Area of Management. The new framework pushes users to collaborate with more groups and processes within their department. This helps to breakdown silos and ensure innovation isn’t just happening in one isolated or peripheral part of a department. The framework also helps to increase the incentives for executives to support innovation within the Government of Canada which ultimately benefits the Canadian public.

The Innovation Area of Management is helping to shape the dialogue on innovation both across and within federal departments. Through our consultation work with users, we have already started to see the benefits of this renewed dialogue (e.g., renewed enthusiasm for the Management Accountability Framework, relationships formed with new stakeholders, strategic long-term planning, etc.).

Because our innovation is inherently a model for measuring progress, we will have a strong capacity to measure results. The assessment questions are designed to capture when departments have reached high performance in innovation management. In the first year of assessment, we do not expect departments to reach the top of our scale as we are pushing for growth over the coming years.

We expect the following trends to emerge over time:

• More resources committed to innovation and rigorous testing.
• More high-impact projects.
• More decisions informed by rigorous evidence.
• More innovation embedded into core planning and government.

A previous MAF framework saw departments reaching the top of the scale, therefore limiting their incentive to expand their capacity to innovate. Further, in the past, the distinction between innovation and experimentation was a struggle. Our new framing better incentivizes the use of rigorous methodologies by placing them within the broader context of innovation management.

Testing innovations is not new within government, especially within science departments. Our goal is not to create unnecessary oversight of science departments doing science. Instead, we needed to figure out how to distinguish policy experiments from science experiments so that we support innovation across the board: from human resources to program implementation to digital services.

We have also faced the challenge of how to best promote experimental methods. In sensitive contexts (e.g., Indigenous contexts), employing these methods or using particular terminology may not be appropriate.

The Innovation Area of Management requires federal department heads to pay attention to their organization’s innovation maturity and be willing to adjust the organization’s culture in response to standards embedded in the framework. It further requires organizations to put in place various components to build their innovation maturity, such as resources, expertise, governance structures, etc.

The Innovation Area of Management is part of a yearly reporting cycle, meaning that results will be compared year over year. By replicating the process every year, the Framework maintains an expectation that departments should continue to build their innovation organizational maturity and continue to explore new ways support innovation across the organization.

The Innovation Area of Management is a novel framework designed to encourage federal departments and agencies to pursue innovation and rigorous testing and in turn transform their organisational structure where needed. The framework has been developed by a central agency team following consultations with users from a range of departments. This co-development process was essential to consider various perspectives, validate terminology, and ensure that the approach was in line with how departments operate. Engaging with departmental users has been a key part of the process and generated valuable insights.

To ensure that innovation is not done in isolation or in peripheral parts of organizations, the Innovation AoM conveys an expectation that innovation and rigorous testing take place through core government processes. Mainstreaming innovation by tying it to existing processes is key to making sure testing, learning, iterating and improving become part of the common ways of working.