Latin America Leadership Program

by Guadalupe Ramirez

In a joint conversation, both alumni of the Innovation and Leadership in Government (ILG 2025) cohort share their motivation to become agents of change, their perspectives as leaders advancing public innovation, the factors that determine its success, and the opportunities across Latin America and the Caribbean.

Different Paths, One Shared Purpose: Innovating in the Public Sector

With very different academic and professional backgrounds—Luis, trained in Information Systems Engineering and with a strong career in the private sector, and Patricio, with business training in Chile and abroad—both have found in the public sector and public innovation a deep motivation to create impact.

For Patricio, Director of the City Hubs at the MIT City Science Lab–University of Guadalajara in Mexico, it is important to clarify some distinctions between public innovation, invention, and innovation more broadly. From his perspective, innovation takes place in an environment of trust, while public administration can sometimes be a space of suspicion. On the other hand, when no one assigns value to something, it remains merely an invention. Public innovation, in turn, is meaningful when it improves people’s quality of life and when individuals or organizations are willing to invest in achieving that improvement, whether in areas such as the environment, health, education, or the economy. For this reason, he believes that new sources of multisectoral solutions are needed today to complement the functions of government.

From his early days as a consultant at a competitiveness center serving the public sector, through subsequent professional experiences in Chile, Europe, and the United States, Patricio realized that government could become more efficient, agile, and collaborative by using better methodologies and technologies. This led him to accept an opportunity to help launch and operate the first Hub in Providencia, Chile. Later, after joining the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), he was able to scale this model and create the City Hubs initiative, which currently brings together 35 hubs across 12 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. Its work focuses on the intersection of government, technology, innovation, and business to transform common urban challenges into innovative, collaborative, and replicable solutions.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, Patricio points out, there is a significant opportunity to increase efficiency. According to the IDB study "Better Spending for Better Lives: How Latin America and the Caribbean Can Do More with Less", countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) invest, on average, between 2.4% and 2.5% of their GDP in research, development, and innovation (R&D&I), in stark contrast with the Latin American average of 0.4%. This reflects significant differences in public spending efficiency and investment in R&D&I, highlighting the substantial opportunity for governments and the private sector to work together to increase efficiency and improve people’s quality of life.

“Through public innovation, we want to bring together worlds that do not traditionally coexist, breaking down silos within government and understanding innovation and technology as enablers for improving people’s quality of life and making governments more efficient.” – Patricio Ovalle (ILG 2025, Chile)

For his part, when Luis, a consultant and strategic advisor on Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), Digital Identity, Cybersecurity, and Interoperability, began his career in the public sector, he recognized the unique multiplier effect created by combining public management and technology: reaching millions of people with a single solution, reducing inequalities, and driving deeper change. It was no longer simply about migrating systems, but about understanding the challenges involved in reaching communities through projects with clear governance, digital sovereignty, and long-term sustainability.

In countries across the region where public policies are often short-term, the combination of technology and innovation creates an opportunity to develop sustainable public policies with longer-lasting and broader impact.

Accept, Adapt, and Own: Keys to Success

From his perspective, innovation requires long-term sustainability. A digital transformation project, for example, is successful when it survives beyond a single administration. Achieving this requires several factors: 1) institutional capacity, including governments with clear rules, regulatory frameworks, and structures that can turn projects into state policies rather than initiatives that disappear shortly after they are created; 2) open standards that allow systems to connect and scale without depending on a single provider; 3) in-house capacity, with trained technical teams capable of maintaining and evolving what has been built; and 4) change-management capabilities to address emerging challenges.

“A strong public innovation project goes through three stages: acceptance, adaptation, and ownership. When it reaches the third stage, and it is embraced by government leadership, technical teams, and citizens alike, it can be considered successful.” – Luis Papagni (ILG 2025, Argentina)

One example, he continues, is Argentina’s digital processing system, which remains in operation more than 10 years after its implementation. Previously, people who needed to process their identity documents had to appear in person, make repeated visits, and wait six to eight months. 

Following the changes introduced in 2010, people applying for an identity document, including a passport, can begin the process and receive it at home within a few hours or several days. For citizens, it is now difficult to imagine the process working any other way. It is a sustainable model in which the technology is updated as needed, and it has been successful because both citizens and public institutions have accepted, adapted to, and taken ownership.

Continuity and Long-Term Trust, Beyond Political Administrations

For Patricio, those who innovate in the public sector must constantly demonstrate and explain their projects. From his perspective, this should be different. One way to achieve this is to have public authorities create the space needed to foster a culture around innovation and processes, while ensuring that the established architecture endures regardless of changes in government and is instead anchored in the state itself.

In Latin America, he continues, the major challenge lies in the political context, the lack of validation from public authorities, food crises, education, and healthcare. More broadly, there has been a lack of capacity to ensure continuity for solutions, along with an acceptance that public services do not function as they should.

As an example of how continuity and multisectoral collaboration can work, he points to countries such as Chile, which have maintained their presidential terms since the 1970s. President Sebastián Piñera created the world’s first public startup accelerator, Start-Up Chile, bringing together talent and the business sector to support ventures with local, national, and international impact. Subsequently, under President Michelle Bachelet, Small Business Development Centers (SBDCs) were promoted. Today, Chile has between 50 and 60 of these centers, where small business owners can access technical support and training to increase their economic impact. This kind of continuity, he adds, is an exception to the rule—but it should be the rule rather than the exception.

Luis adds that Latin America has the talent needed to innovate, and that several countries have made significant progress in digital transformation. However, there are also structural challenges, including fragmentation, where institutions end up solving the same problems separately without interoperating with one another. As a result, public innovation is constrained and unable to scale. This is also part of institutional discontinuity, as changes in government can lead to processes being restarted rather than built upon what already exists.

Maintaining an optimistic yet realistic perspective, he also believes that the focus must remain on citizens and their trust in institutions, particularly when it comes to the protection and use of their data. Governments today have an opportunity to view innovation as a public good and, drawing on the Sábato Triangle, bring academia, government, and the private sector together in a coordinated manner to create consistent, trust-based processes.

ILG: A Call to Transform the Region

In their final reflections, and sharing their experiences in the ILG program, both agreed that the program gave them the opportunity to engage with public-sector colleagues from different countries, confirming that the region faces common challenges, that none of these challenges can be solved alone, and that regional integration is no longer a romantic ideal but a viable strategy. Compared with what is happening in other regions, they emphasized that regional collaboration is both feasible and necessary. Both highlighted that the program not only trains technical professionals, but also develops people capable of leading change and building the networks the region needs to become more interconnected.

They both agreed that the program brings together talented people with a genuine passion and interest in improving people’s quality of life. It provides empowerment, but it is also a call to action: from whatever position each person occupies, to make a genuine difference. As they learned through ILG: “If not us, who? If not now, when?”

Thank you, Patricio and Luis, for your genuine commitment to public innovation across the region!