Mapping why federal innovation struggles to take root
Nido is the innovation lab of the Belgian Federal Public Service for Policy and Support. Its role is to support innovation across the federal administration by helping public services explore new ways of working, test new approaches and create better conditions for change. However, innovation adoption remained difficult to embed structurally and Nido wanted to understand why.
The challenge
The Belgian federal administration does not lack people who want to innovate. But willingness does not remove the rules, incentives and routines that keep the system in place.
Innovation can get stuck between unclear definitions, risk-averse decision-making, short-term funding, evaluation mechanisms that leave little room for experimentation, and procurement or budget rules that make it difficult for pilots to grow into visible results.
The challenge was not to produce another list of barriers. Nido needed to understand why the same barriers kept returning, how they reinforced each other, and where action could have the strongest effect.
That meant looking beyond individual projects and mapping the system around them: the formal rules, informal habits, leadership expectations, decision-making structures and incentives that shape whether innovation can move forward or not.
The diagnosis also had to become shared. It needed to be tested with people inside the system, from middle managers to mandate holders, so that the outcome would not remain an external analysis but become something stakeholders could recognise, discuss and use.
The solution
Namahn developed a systemic model showing how different barriers to innovation influence and reinforce one another.
Using causal loop diagrams, we identified 15 feedback loops: 10 reinforcing and 5 balancing. Together, they made recurring mechanisms visible: unclear definitions of innovation, leadership selection criteria, evaluation cycles, procurement rules, budget structures, operational pressure, weak recognition mechanisms and unclear mandates.
Instead of treating these as separate issues, the analysis showed how they interact. An unclear definition of innovation can make innovative work harder to evaluate. Evaluation systems that reward predictability can discourage experimentation. Short-term budget logic can prevent pilots from becoming visible enough to gain support.
These findings were consolidated into an outcome map structured around four capability areas: definition and legitimacy of innovation, leadership and accountability, incentives and capacity, and enabling conditions.
For Nido, the outcome map became more than a diagnosis. It became a shared reference document between Nido, mandate holders, middle managers and external experts.
The map helps Nido distinguish which barriers can be addressed by teams, which ones require organisational change, and which ones need political commitment. Barriers like unclear mandates, evaluation systems, procurement rules or short-term budget cycles are no longer treated as one general problem, but as different intervention areas.
This is where the work becomes strategy: the map gives Nido a way to prioritise its own programming, prepare conversations with new mandate holders, and identify which barriers require team-level action, organisational change or political commitment.
The approach
The work started with 24 in-depth interviews conducted by Nido’s team with mandate holders, cabinet staff, strategic planners and policy advisers across the federal government.
Namahn analysed the material using causal loop diagrams, then tested the model through workshops with middle managers, external experts and mandate holders.
Middle managers compared the feedback loops with their day-to-day reality and identified interventions within their own scope. External experts challenged the analysis with perspectives from academia and the private sector. Mandate holders validated the model and identified leverage points, places where one intervention could influence several connected dynamics.
The process also resulted in three concrete asks for the political level: regulatory sandbox coverage, goal-oriented coalition agreements and multi-year budget stability for innovation work.
These asks were brought into a political pitch that positioned Nido’s strategic role and made the structural conditions for innovation explicit.
The project also produced reusable workshop materials, including intervention cards organised by capability area and bilingual preparation documents. These give Nido a toolkit for working with new groups of stakeholders without restarting the analysis from scratch.
Today, the outcome map is used to prioritise Nido’s programming, support conversations with new mandate holders and make the case for structural changes that no single FOD can deliver alone.
It gives Nido a concrete way to name the blockage, locate it in the system and discuss who can act on it. Instead of staying at the level of “innovation is blocked”, the conversation can move to the specific dynamic involved: mandate, time, incentives, procurement, leadership, recognition or political framing.
