What if all public servants were equipped with the capacity and capability to be more entrepreneurial in their efforts to create change? For the City of Bogotá this question forms more than a thought experiment; they are seeking answers in practice. As I engaged with participants at the City of Bogotá’s recent innovation festival, #FestIBO2024, I saw the scale of ambition in answering this question. Innovation and design practitioners mingled with genuinely curious public sector staff, those who actively apply innovation methods in their work and those who are keen to learn how to. 

Opening the conference Miguel Silva, the Secretary General ^⁠1of the mayor’s office of Bogotá, summed up the critical need for a more entrepreneurial approach. He was clear^⁠2 that because so many of our social challenges are dynamic and always changing we can’t find and implement permanent solutions – and so the work to address them doesn’t end. Our interventions, made with the best of intentions, only serve to shift the nature of the challenge, the way it manifests in our communities. It was refreshing to hear a politician be open about the nature of the complex challenges we face and the need for alternative approaches to tackle them. I believe this is the space in which the public entrepreneur finds their home. They know their core task is to navigate this never-ending journey of change, to address critical social challenges and in so doing create public value. 

I explored the obvious question in my keynote – how? In many respects it’s a question of ends and means. I argued that the task of 21^st century public servants, given the complexity of the social challenges we must address, is to select from a variety of means the most appropriate ones to support their journey towards the desired ends. In my talk I clustered them into four^⁠3 broad categories to illustrate the point. We tend to default to the more familiar and traditional market-led approaches to change, achieved through procurement and other mechanisms that engage the private sector. However well the market serves us when it presents solutions that align with a clearly defined problem, it works less well when our problems don’t match markets, existing services or public organisations. It can be unhelpful to engage the market when we are uncertain of the true problem at hand and it can’t be easily defined. In these complex and ambiguous situations we need alternatives, and here we can draw upon the other three categories: design-led, systems-led and complexity-informed. Each offers something different to the public official in terms of methods and tools and ways of proceeding. 

The public entrepreneur, I argued, understands the need to adopt different approaches in different circumstances. By avoiding falling in love with a single, specific method or approach they are able to respond flexibly to changes they experience and learning they generate on their journey. They are agnostic about the means they select in pursuit of their desired ends; what matters is not dogma or what’s trending but what works at any given time. How do they make these selections? Based on my research they spend more time than most generating an understanding of the context and system in which they find themselves and the nature of the challenge they face. But this is not at the expense of taking action. It is the insights they generate through this work that informs their next step, which generates new insights, which informs the next step… and so on.  

Perhaps they are programme managers who work across the system on cross-cutting issues such as reducing water use, health professionals improving access to care services, or urban planners figuring out how to reduce traffic congestion. Cultivating an entrepreneurial mindset and adding new tools and methods to those they are already familiar with can offer new ways of approaching these challenges and generate new insights. To be effective, we must help our public servants break out of their specific discipline. In many respects this conference can be viewed as part of that effort, helping to seed a culture of innovation amongst public servants. 

But to grow a more entrepreneurial culture is not without its challenges. It often requires public servants to go against the grain. They know – only too well – the limitations of past approaches. They would rather not place big bets, as we do through procurement processes that whittle a competitive field down to a single winner, usually adjudicated on financial terms. They would rather not take big risks, for that’s not necessarily a judicious use of public funds. They know they will have to find ways to bring about change despite the countervailing pressure to keep things as they are. To advocate for change while as the same time offering stability, balancing the risks of action with the risks inherent in things staying the same. They don’t offer false promises of pre-determined outcomes but focus on the generation of insights and social value. 

Seeing the world in this way, being flexible and collaborative in approach, methods and impact, creating a new relationship with citizens – this is the domain of the public entrepreneur. Not an isolated individual heroically fighting the odds of bureaucratic change but collaborative in their efforts at change, recognising that they alone can’t have the answer to complex social challenges. Part of a growing movement of public servants who know how to blend the systemic perspective to understand the issue in its wider context with the best pathways and methods that public entrepreneurialism offers them. And they cultivate a critical factor to their success – political support. 

In Bogotá, with the buy-in of the city administration, it’s little wonder that the City Council’s innovation team has now been mainstreamed for the next four years. Indeed, the Secretary General emphasised the importance of strengthening the innovation ecosystem in the City, building the capacity and capability across the sector to respond creatively to their challenges. By running a public entrepreneur programme for their staff they are helping teams create more value for their citizens and communities on a project-by-project basis, while at the same time shifting the culture. The journey of change is never a smooth one, as I’m sure we’ve all experienced. But, as the secretary general concluded, “we must always ask ourselves ‘how can we do this better?’ The problem is not making mistakes, it’s not noticing them, correcting them and learning from them”. Take the next step, generate insights, learn, take the next step… and so perhaps the public entrepreneur is, at heart, a steward of flexible progress towards hope. One collective step at a time. 

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¹ https://bogota.gov.co/mi-ciudad/gestion-publica/miguel-silva-moyano-tomo-posesion-como-secretario-general-de-bogota

² Of course, I’m paraphrasing the Secretary General’s speech as relayed through the translator.

³ I realise this is a reductive over-simplification, and the reality is far more nuanced, but it helped illustrate the point.