Courage to Experiment Programme

The goals, benefits and impacts of the Courage to Experiment Programme — A culture of experimentation

Programme’s goals:

• Facilitating the launch and implementation of municipally-led experiments and,
• Benchmarking between municipalities and other parties
• Drawing attention to experimenting in municipalities and making visible the interesting, promising and good practices.

Programme’s benefits and impacts:

• Experimenting will strengthen the role of Finnish municipalities and the entire local government sector in innovating and improving overall efficiency.
• Municipalities will consolidate their reputation as social reformers.
• Crossing interfaces, an essential characteristic of experimenting, in areas larger than a municipality will increase the well-being and vitality of sub-regions and regions.

The Courage to Experiment Programme is based on the Prime Minister Sipilä´s Government Programme and one of its key projects, titled ’A culture of experimentation will be introduced’. 

Programme’s projects and activities:

• A network open to everyone interested in experimenting and to other networks
• Story workshops for learning from each other through experimental innovation
• Municipally-led projects that contribute to the success of experiments
  • Innovative procurements, agile methods of participation, overall efficiency of experiments, and evaluation methods for experiments
• Using and processing the information gained from research
• ’Courage to Experiment’ network forum and co-operation with other programmes
• ’Ambassadors’ (representatives from municipalities, regions and different interest groups) engaged in developing the programme further.

What do municipalities gain?

Programme’s principles and the Association’s role

• Focus on municipalities, development
  • From bottom up
  • From outside in
• Openness and multiple channels
  • Participants may join groups in different roles and invite others to join
  • Open, multi-channel communication, networks
• Agility and a chance to participate
  • Experimenting can be fast
  • Projects when needed, for example procurements and evaluation, agile means of participation and overall efficiency are coming up
• Processing information and sharing skills
  • Questionnaires and other research data in a usable form
  • Using national experiments and networking (the new digital municipality experiment)
• Dissemination of and learning from experimental practices
  • Different methods
  • Also unfinished stories and slip-ups allowed