La Transfo

La Transfo is a participatory action research programme carried out between 2011 and 2020 with eleven local authorities. It aimed to explore how to create and then sustain an innovation lab within each of these local authorities.

To this end, a multidisciplinary team of in-residence experts (designers, sociologists, urban planners, etc.) was embedded within each partner local authority for 18 to 24 months. Their role was to work hand in hand with a group of volunteer ‘ambassador’ staff to test, in real-world situations and through very concrete practical cases, new ways of designing or improving existing systems, and to draw lessons from this regarding the functioning of the future innovation laboratory (its methods, its team, its governance, etc.).

La Transfo was designed as an open framework enabling the creation of knowledge across local authorities, through days of reflection, discussion and analysis that brought together the teams involved in the programme.

More and more local authorities are seeking new approaches and solutions to tackle complex challenges in the fields of housing policy, poverty alleviation, public health, security and the environment... Transfo's hypothesis is that public innovation labs can play a role at several levels:

• At the administrative level: designing and implementing public policies through a process that starts with the heart of the problem and allows for prototyping and testing prior to implementation - an approach that generates greater impact and transcends organisational silos.
• At the level of individual staff members: fostering engagement and well-being at work, empathy towards service users and colleagues, a sense of creativity and ingenuity, and the ability to question one's professional routines.
• At the political level: making elected representatives more attentive to the processes of design and implementation, as well as to the actual impacts of public policies, and facilitating cooperation with the administration.