The Government of Canada has recognized that it must innovate and find new ways to address persistent problems that traditional approaches have failed to solve, and is committed to increasing support for public sector innovation and experimentation. This commitment includes improving the impact of existing programs, scaling up and spreading knowledge of “what works” across government, and building skills and capacity within the public service to make it more agile, results-driven and responsive to Canadians. .
Impact Canada – A Cross Government Outcomes-based Initiative
The Impact Canada Initiative, announced in Budget 2017, will allow the Government of Canada accelerate the uptake of outcomes-based funding approaches, such as prizes and challenges which orient government spending to delivering on tangible results, not process. Under Impact Canada, a dynamic digital platform will be utilized to support challenge-oriented and outcomes-based programming that address economic, environmental and social challenges. Prizes and challenges are an internationally recognized tool used to address a policy question where a satisfactory solution does not yet exist. Funding and resources for prizes and challenges are focused on specific pre-determined outcomes, which require measureable evidence that they have been met. Under this approach, payment is issued only when pre-determined outcomes are met, aligning with the Government of Canada’s clear and strong mandate to improve the value that Government policy and programs deliver to the Canadian public.
Impact Measurement
Impact measurement is a fundamental component of the Government’s innovation and experimentation commitment to trial, test and embed new approaches to policy and program delivery with the goal of measuring its impacts in a causal way such that outcomes can be attributed to a policy or program intervention. Programming through the Impact Canada initiative will incorporate a variety of impact measurement methodologies, into outcomes-based funding approaches through customized evaluation frameworks, tools and guidelines. These methodologies will be flexible in order to best work with a wide range of policy and program areas under Impact Canada. Integrating these methodologies into programming under Impact Canada will help advance the evidence-based policy making within the Government of Canada.
What Works
A “what works” approach is grounded in improving the way governments and partners generate, share and adopt high quality evidence for decision-making, thereby supporting more effective and efficient policies, programs and services. Together, the impact measurement and What Works approach will help institutionalize experimentation inside of the Government of Canada by deliberately testing variations in approaches, vigorously evaluating them to help inform future policy and programmatic decisions.
