Test-tube government
Governments are borrowing ideas about innovation from the private sector
INCUBATORS, accelerators, garages, laboratories: the best big companies have had them for years. Whatever the moniker (The Economist once had one called “Project Red Stripe”), in most cases a select few workers are liberated from the daily grind and encouraged to invent the future. Now such innovation units are becoming de rigueur in the public sector too: Boston has an Office of New Urban Mechanics; Denmark has a MindLab; and Singapore has the more prosaically named PS21 Office.
This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Test-tube government”
From the December 6th 2014 edition
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