Challenge I work in public administration, and my job is to administer ﬁnancial support  programs for international cooperation in higher education. We have many  very different funding schemes, and one of them had recently ﬁnalized its ﬁrst  phase. About 14 smaller projects had received support for a 3 year period. I  had no previous knowledge of these projects, and I was suddenly given the  task to look into what adjustments should be made if we were to fund a  second phase. I read the ﬁnal project reports to get an impression of what  they had achieved, and for the most part they had been successful despite a  lot of practical challenges. However, I was unsure if the report format ensured  that all relevant information was communicated. I also wondered if the project  coordinators were affected by the fact that they were reporting to a funding  agency, and had to report a sufﬁcient amount of activities to get their ﬁnancial  report approved. I was short on time, and expected to give policy advice on  the basis of these few reports.

Selection and application I decided to apply a more open approach calling each project coordinator to  give me their story. This was a kind of ﬂipped use of the storytelling tool  (referred to in week 2)- not for me to sell a product or a service in the ﬁrst  hand, but for the users to be able to sell me theirs. Given the limited time, I  had to base my data gathering on telephone interviews. I asked very open  general questions about how they came about to start their project and where  they are now. The result was 10 stories from the researchers who had  coordinated the international projects, how the project came about, what was  they cause , and how did they perceived the future.

Insight What unfolded was a much more personal story, like a black and white  picture ﬁlled with colour. From these stories I could gather many useful  insights that had not been available through the formal reports. I could also  use their stories to more personally explain the mission of our agency, and to  inspire other researchers to get into more international collaboration. The  stories even served as useful input to the design of ﬁnancial support  programmes. For example, what became evident was that the most  successful projects were based on a personal connection, a common  research interest, a vision to improve education, and some form of connection  to the world outside (industry or innovation activities). The projects that had a  little bit of all these elements from the very start were the ones who manage  to successfully upscale their collaboration, and truly make an impact. It was  easier for them to get funding from more prestigious research and education

programs after the ﬁrst project had ﬁnalised. This means that our ﬁnancial  support scheme should support this from the very beginning, not necessarily  perceive it as a stepping stone (ﬁrst research, then education, then som  connection to industry/innovation).              Approach For the next time, I would love to do this as a part of an ethnographic  approach much earlier in the innovation process, using interviews combined  with visualization tools, and I would involve different kind of stakeholders.  Through this course I have realized that in government administration we are  mostly concerned with implementing something that have been decided at  policy level, but skip the exploration phase on how this could be done. We  just do it like we have done it before, perhaps with some smaller adjustments.   The course also made me realize that it is not just what kind of data you have  that matters, but how you gather your data. If we had users and stakeholders  involved in a different manner, using a design thinking approach, we could  possibly achieve our mission in a better way and ensure more efﬁcient use of  taxpayers money. We would also be better at providing policy advice, based  on what really works. Coming from public sector, I particularly liked the Good  Kitchen story. I was very inspired by the fact that true innovation could  happen in any organisation, also smaller public ones, if we truly put our  «customers» at the centre.

