Advancing the collaborative and democratic practices of policy innovation labs with community engaged scholarship

‘Collaborative public sector innovation’ (CPSI) captures intersectoral collaborations aimed at using new ideas and approaches to solve complex societal problems. An important site of study in this area has been policy innovation labs (PILs), research and experimentation hubs that aim to improve policy outcomes by applying research evidence and facilitating intersectoral collaborations. Around the world, the number of PILs has grown rapidly in recent years, as has their study. Nevertheless, there is still limited understanding of their structures and operations, including the roles of collaborators and the nature of collaborations they support, their strategies for engaging with diverse residents, their potential impacts on the policy space, and the extent to which their design might also advance democratic innovations. In this article, we use a case study of a policy project hosted recently by a PIL in a mid-sized city in Canada to argue that using a community engaged scholarship methodology in a PIL can address knowledge gaps related to practicing CPSI and contribute to overcoming barriers to democratic innovations.