Founding Idea Pública / Innovaap

Idea Pública started as a proposal, not yet a lab: a plan I helped write in 2017 for a “Laboratorio Colaborativo de Innovación Pública” inside the University of Costa Rica’s School of Public Administration. The school was in the middle of revising its curriculum and strategic plan, looking for a new model of “Administración Pública Relacional,” relational, citizen-centered public management, and the proposal argued the school needed an open, standing space where academia, government, and citizens could build solutions together, rather than one more one-off event like 2013’s Chepe GovJam, which had reached only university students.

The pitch became real in 2017, formalized under the school’s outreach program (Extensión Docente ED-3282): a hackathon convened with the Municipality of Montes de Oca and around 80 high school students from public and private colegios in San Pedro, walking them through a full design-thinking cycle, from mapping the canton’s problems to pitching prototypes, to select the three strongest proposals. It became the lab’s inaugural activity and the template for everything that followed: always three actors at the table, institutions, academia, and citizens.

From there, Idea Pública settled into a working model I helped define: a neutral, non-profit, capacity-building space running on design thinking and citizen-centered methods, operating in two modes, one flagship innovation event a year with a public institution and secondary students, plus on-demand engagements whenever a public entity or citizen group needed the lab’s help with a specific problem. After every event we systematized the experience into a knowledge product, so what we learned could be reused by others.

Co-founding this lab, now Innovaap, meant leading its Public Services Innovation area: managing a 15-person team and a portfolio of 10+ public-sector projects, achieving 100% on-time completion and the lab’s first peer-reviewed publication.