I am Caio Werneck and this portfolio brings together initiatives at the intersections of public innovation, design and collective learning. Over the last 12 years I have collaborated with governments, research institutions, foundations, and other types of Brazilian and international organizations. I have worked as a public manager, consultant and designer, with the main focus of creating and developing teams, organizations and systems capable of impacting collective challenges.
Trained in Public Administration at the Minas Gerais School of Government, I started my career as a civil servant, working in several state government agencies from 2010 to 2017. I was part of different waves of transformation of the public sector, driven by the mission of enhancing organizations capabilities to adapt and learn to create effective change. I worked mainly with strategic management, policy design and evaluation, collaborative governance and experimentation.
In the City Hall of São Paulo, I served for almost 2 years as Director of Methods at the (011).lab, where I worked with an inspiring team on service design, capacity-building and other public innovation programs and experiments. One of my contributions was to set up a sustainability strategy to overcome key political transitions and help institutionalize the lab.
I am also co-author of the publication Life cycles of public innovation labs, which resulted from a collaborative research involving 43 innovation units from Latin America, Canada and Portugal, coordinated by (011).lab and GNova, in 2019–2020.
My trajectory outside the public sector began when I took a leave to study at the Hertie School of Governance (2013–2015). Together with other colleagues from the MPP program, I engaged in a research project on how to bridge the gap between researchers and practitioners in the field of public policy. Using design principles and methods, we experimented different ways of approaching this problem. As a result, I co-founded Onda, a spin-off that existed until the end of 2018, through which I developed consultancy projects with organizations in Germany and Brazil.
More recently, I have been working as an independent consultant on strategic design and public innovation. I have collaborated with several public agencies, cities, schools of government, regulatory agencies, courts, funding agencies, research institutes, NGOs, and other Brazilian and international public interest organizations.
In addition to consulting work, I work as designer, with a main focus on creating collective learning experiences. I’ve created events such as Encontro Internacional de Inovação em Governo (2019) in São Paulo, or exchange programs like Tramas Democráticas (2020), created for the Goethe-Institut to bring together civil society initiatives in South America in the field of digital democracy, or experiments like Coworking Camp (2017), a one-week immersion for remote workers in a farm in Brazil, with the aim of rethinking urban–rural relationships.
In the last five years, I have been also practicing project-based learning programs. I am currently a Design Coach of the Innovation Training, a training program for cities, an initiative of the Centre for Public Impact in partnership with the Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation. I have worked in other project-based learning initiatives at the City Hall of São Paulo, at the Brazilian School of Public Administration (Enap) or at Bloomberg’s Global Mayors Challenge (with the Latin American mentoring team coordinated by chilean consultancy unit). I am also a professor at the Maranhão School of Government, in the northern coast of Brazil, where I currently live.
That help creating and developing teams, organizations and systems capable of impacting collective challenges.