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
Read more about Finnish experiments
Here you can find essential information about experiments in Finland and links to our partners' websites.