Abstract:
In the fall of 2016, the Government of the UAE launched the Government Accelerators, an innovative tool to accelerate change and enhance performance across government agencies. The government was willing to make progress in several areas such as health or traffic safety, but many programs in these areas were lagging behind. The Government Accelerators sought to address those bottlenecks through the implementation of a novel methodology.
This new program ran one hundred-day challenges: intense periods of action where “acceleration” teams of frontline staff worked together across boundaries in a context of urgency to tackle some of government’s hardest problems. The teams presenting challenges to the Government Accelerators were selected by four criteria: they had to set clear and ambitious goals, touch people’s lives, involve multiple organizations or departments, and be achievable in the one hundred-day time frame.
By looking at the establishment of the Government Accelerators and three teams that participated in it, this teaching case aims to (1) raise discussion about different types of public sector innovation, (2) explain the approach and methodology of the Government Accelerators and identify its main ingredients, and (3) analyze the conditions under which the Government Accelerators may or may not work.
A practitioner guide, HKS Case 2192.4, accompanies this case.
Learning Objective:
- Examine, compare, and contrast methods to promote and sustain innovation and continuous improvement in government.
- Identify the conditions required to launch and make a Government Accelerators program thrive.
- Discuss the pros and cons of using one hundred-day challenges for public sector innovation.
- Identify the drivers of success for teams participating in one hundred-day challenges and the lessons learned by the Government Accelerators team from these experiences.
