Municipal services in the areas of child and youth care, social services and employment, as well as healthcare, face a range of structural, economic, and professional challenges. We are witnessing a demographic trend with an aging population and a growing shortage of labor leading up to 2050, compounded by difficulties in recruiting professionals to perform citizen-close tasks. Furthermore, municipalities must address a number of complex issues related to employment initiatives, vulnerability, distress, and inequalities in health and education. Additionally, an increasing number of prevention and treatment tasks are being transferred to municipalities, which need to handle the expansion of local health services as more elderly and chronically ill citizens strain hospital capacities. Finally, municipalities experience difficulties in adhering to budgets in specialized social areas, particularly those concerning vulnerable children and youth, as well as areas for citizens with disabilities, substance abusers, and other adults with special needs, which have seen significant budget overruns every year from 2018 to 2022.
Research, practice-based knowledge, and innovative solutions play a vital role in addressing the outlined challenges, enabling better prevention and resolution of complex welfare issues. Ideally, innovation in the welfare sector can provide solutions that sustainably make municipal services smarter and enhance their quality for the benefit of both society and citizens. However, many stakeholders point out that there is room for a much stronger and more systematic interplay between research and development (R&D) on one side, and municipal practice and daily operations on the other, allowing research to be more informed by, and informative for, practice.
In this project, DFiR will focus on examining the systemic support for welfare innovation within municipal tasks across childcare, education, social services, employment, and health sectors, including how bridges between research and practice can be strengthened. The council will do this by mapping the stakeholders in the existing innovation promotion system in these areas, identifying gaps in the current system, and presenting a catalog of international and national best practice examples of effective bridges between research and practice targeted at welfare innovation.
As part of the project, DFiR has published a brief:
Workgroup:
- Steffen Bohni (Project Leader)
- Søren Nedergaard
- Lene Tanggaard
Knowledge-Based Innovation
"Research-Informed Welfare Innovation" is part of DFiR’s three-year analysis program on Knowledge-Based Innovation. The program explores the scope for future efforts in knowledge-based innovation, which is crucial for the robust and sustainable development and prosperity of our society. In the program, DFiR focuses on the conditions for knowledge-based innovation, aiming to explore the potential for strengthening the framework conditions.
The results of DFiR's analysis program aim to refine the debate on knowledge-based innovation and uncover the scope for future political action.