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Paper short abstract:

Public Service Innovations (PSIs) move with socio-technical problems of the realm but miss out on anticipating futures. This paper presents a framework for foresight-based PSIs.

Paper long abstract:

Public Service Innovations (PSIs) work along two axes- new users’ needs and/ or new public services produced. However, the evolution of innovation in public services has been through New Public Administration, where citizens were treated as consumers, to co-creation of public services and Public Service Logic (PSL), which implies that citizens are integral to the creation of public services.

he paper uses the emerging problem of Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) and Endometriosis as an example of a public health issue that is on the rise and currently on the horizon, which if left unchecked will have implications for all walks of life as it impacts fertility, women participation in the workforce, and there is no cure of it currently.

An important aspect of the paradigm of PSIs is that it allows creative out-of-the-box solutions, but due to the path dependency of the end-users’ socio-technical context, they lack any foresight and anticipatory capabilities.

This paper fuses anticipatory governance and PSIs to develop a framework for policies with foresight. It is a four-step process starting with assessing the baseline socio-technical context of the end-users. Next, scanning the horizon for emerging trends and performing the futures wheel analysis for the first, second, and third-order consequences of the emerging problem. Then, mapping the stakeholder interests and aligning the ones whose interests will become bigger in the future. And in the end, designing the policy along with the end-users and the aligned stakeholders to solve the problem before it becomes too big to address.