Digitally-focused public innovation in Ibero-America: towards the consolidation of institutional capacities

Over the past decade, we have watched public innovation in Ibero-America steadily gain ground: more labs, dedicated teams, and digital services are now available to citizens. But much of that progress has historically depended on pilot projects, the drive of isolated individuals, or political will that shifts with every new government. Maps and snapshots of public innovation show where initiatives exist, which problems they address, and which technologies they use, but not where the region is heading. This report seeks to move beyond a descriptive picture to a reading of the changes that recur across different countries.

Written by Juan Felipe López for SEGIB’s Public Innovation Division, the report was presented at the 4th Ibero-American Public Innovation Week in Cádiz. It analyses 152 cases and draws on 15 interviews with public innovation leaders from 14 countries. What emerges is a region showing signs of a transition from isolated initiatives towards more sustained institutional capacities.

Five trends towards consolidation

1. Interoperability and new forms of governance

Interoperability stops being an IT project and becomes a decision about who shares what information, and with whom. Brazil didn’t get there with a single app, but through almost a decade of sustained governance: Gov.br was launched in 2016 and now connects around 9,000 subnational services. In Uruguay, connecting the medical records of public and private healthcare providers first required answering a basic question: who owns the data? The answer was each individual person.

2. Understanding the public problem before its digital solution

Technology can speed up a response, but it cannot replace diagnosis. Two cases show this from opposite ends of the spectrum. In El Salvador, Doctor SV uses artificial intelligence to support medical diagnoses and has cut waiting times from months to hours for 1.5 million people. In Guatemala, RENAP tackled birth under-registration by giving phones and digital training to rural midwives, a gap no app could have closed without first understanding the local context.

3. Professionalising the practice of innovation

A creativity workshop without a clear mandate or resources is no longer enough to sustain innovation. The cases show how innovation is being built into the structures of the State, with budgets, regulations, methodologies and clear responsibilities. In Peru, TransformaGob sets up labs inside public institutions themselves, with backing from senior leadership. In Brazil, Rede InovaGov replaced sporadic cooperation with a permanent network of 38 thematic groups and 16 communities of practice.

4. Strategic influence on public priorities

For years, innovation teams were handed problems already defined by other departments. Today they get involved earlier, helping decide what to tackle and how. In Medellín, over thirty years, the Secretariat of Digital Innovation went from an IT office to defining the innovation framework used by thirteen of the district’s twenty-seven secretariats. In Buenos Aires, Boti shows how a WhatsApp channel can become cross-cutting infrastructure: it reached 4.2 million conversations a month in May 2026.

5. More proactive and personalised services

The State stops waiting for people to ask and starts anticipating their needs using data it already holds. Spain’s Carpeta Ciudadana is organised around the person rather than the procedure, based on the “once-only” principle. In Mexico, Huéspedes CDMX provides migrants with a digital identity to make it easier for them to access work, healthcare and education. This trend depends on the first: anticipating needs is only possible with clear rules on how data is used.

Key ideas

• From pilot to institutional capacity: the region is beginning to build capacities that last over time.
• It’s not just about technology: whether an initiative survives depends on who backs it, what mandate it has and whether it delivers verifiable results.
• Infrastructure comes before AI: the value of AI depends on the problem it solves and the capacities that support it.

Conclusion

None of these trends, on its own, guarantees the consolidation of public innovation: interoperability needs governance, strategy needs the capacity to deliver, and AI does not replace an understanding of the problem. The region’s challenge is no longer to launch new initiatives, but to build the institutional discipline to sustain them. To do so, the report proposes measuring public value by what changes for people, and understanding innovation as a capacity able to transform the architecture of the State. That is the difference between valuable but isolated experiences and a public capacity that creates lasting value.

Read the full report in Spanish here.