Innovate On Demand

Ending the series in the same way it started -- with a round-table of Canada's Free Agents -- Nancy Pawelek reflects on lessons learned over a long career.

A chat with Brenna Maher, Director of Marketing and Digital, Trade Commissioner Service, Global Affairs Canada.

A fascinating conversation with Ryan Hum (CIO and VP of Data) and Jose Ribas Fernandes (Technical Specialist) from the Canada Energy Regulator.

A conversation with Aaron Schull, Managing director and general counsel, Centre for International Governance Innovation.

Jutta Treviranus, Director, Inclusive Design Research Centre discusses  the centre's purpose, vision and mission of ensuring that emerging  technologies and their associated practices are inclusive of everyone.

Kaveh Afshar discusses his experience working in the Chief Data Office at Environment and Climate Change Canada, and how that team works toward solving data problems through computer science, math and statistics.

Christiana Cavazzoni, Associate Assistant Deputy Minister and Deputy Chief Information Officer from the Department of National Defence, reflects on her ten year career in the public service, and how innovation has evolved.

How can we map data literacy within the public service, and how can organizations analyze their data competencies to further their data  readiness and maturity?

In today's day and age, organizations must make experimentation an  integral part of business to keep pace with market leaders. But if it's  so vital, why aren't more organizations taking this approach? Nurturing curiosity, empowering every employee to spearhead change, and embracing failure can seem risky and inefficient.

Have you ever had an idea that has the potential to innovate the public  service, and wished you had a peer group to act as a sounding board in  developing and presenting it? On this episode, Tracey Snow, Acting  Manager with the Canada Revenue Agency, talks about her experience with  this.

In this episode, we sat down with Anil Arora, Chief Statistician of  Canada, to discuss transformation within the public service and its  impact on the way we use and interpret data.

In the digital sphere, the public service has come a long way in facilitating internal collaboration and adopting best practices from other governments and organizations. What skills and knowledge should we strive to increase, because as we discussed on a previous episode, what got us here isn't going to get us to the next level.

In an ideal organization, innovation can grow from the grassroots. Any person, at any level of the hierarchy, has the potential to shape the future – if their idea has potential. But is there room for meritocracy in a hierarchy?

You may have heard of their breakfast meetups, virtual coffees or their unconfernence, and wondered who are they? What do they do? Or perhaps even... why should you care? 

Innovation can be personal. New ideas, such as Emotional  Intelligence, can evolve and transform us. What can we do to to be  better humans, individually, and foundationally as a species?

Some of the most valuable lessons we learn are shaped by specific  experiences, both good and bad. On this episode, Keith Colbourne, Product Manager at the RCMP discusses how growth gained through personal experiences can lead to professional change.

How do you hire the right person for the job? In our federal public  service, the conventional method demands that applicants use a rigid  format, using specific keywords to map their education, skills and  experience onto a defined list of essential and merit criteria. Canada's  Free Agents went another way, assessing applicants against a set of  behavioural characteristics, to great success. Our guest this episode  says that whatever process we try to implement, in the end, it all comes  down to first impressions.

A Surge Team is a group of employees with no ongoing files. Instead,  they exist to tackle priority initiatives identified by Deputy Ministers  and other senior government officials. The assignments are time  sensitive, complex and innovative, and as such, depend on employees  suited to this type of dynamic work. But how do you find the right  people to perform in an environment of frequent change?

In 10 years, we've transformed from a public service where individual  blogging and tweeting was considered career-endangering activity, to one  that now hosts public-facing professional networking and collaboration  platforms. Our guest this episode was at or near the centre of the  projects that orchestrated our transformation from then to now.

Telework remains a contentious issue in the public service. Some  groups use it extensively. Others grant it only in extreme circumstances  and for limited periods of time, requiring proof of need in order to  prolong the arrangement, because after all, how can you manage people  you can't see? And how could a manager ever possibly consider  teleworking?

Whether you're a citizen or a business, wading through policy,  regulation and legislation can be difficult. How can a human being  navigate thousands of words written in complex formal and legal  vocabulary? Well, increasingly, we're trying to delegate that difficult  work to a helper better suited to the task: software. By converting  rules into code, we can concentrate instead on asking AI to provide us  with the details pertaining to our situation, such as eligibility,  benefits, obligations, and restrictions.