Innovation’s growing role in Latin America

Across Latin America, public design has become a familiar force. The rise of innovation laboratories, the digitalization of public services, and the creative inclusion of citizens have opened paths toward more responsive and collaborative governance. These developments mark a shift for governments seeking to rebuild trust through openness and participation. Yet institutional learning has not kept pace with creative practice. As pilot projects close and administrative priorities shift, much of this work risks being forgotten. For innovation to reach its full potential as a public practice, its success depends on not only outcomes but on its capacity to sustain institutional memory.

The Problem

Latin America is urbanizing faster than any other region on Earth. Over 80% of its population now lives in cities, which is double the density of Europe and quadruple that of North America. (Oliván, 2018). This transformation is shadowed by informality, with between 20% and 30% of residents living in informal settlements. In such contexts, public innovation isn’t a luxury but a condition for survival. When traditional systems cannot meet basic needs, creative public solutions determine whether residents can access fundamental rights.

At the same time, regional institutions warn that three in four citizens across Latin America don’t trust their governments (OECD, CAF, & CEPAL, 2018). This erosion of trust mirrors what Acemoglu and Robison (2012) describe in their book Why Nations Fail (Por qué fracasan los países, 2012): prosperity depends less on geography or culture than on the nature of institutions—whether they are inclusive, sharing power and opportunity widely, or extractive, concentrating control within a narrow elite. Extractive systems can generate bursts of growth, but if bureaucracies resist innovation that threatens their dominance, progress soon stalls. 

Documentation offers a counterweight to this tendency, turning experimentation into continuity and recording design activities directly into the institutional fabric of governance. Across Latin America, selective examples of good documentation practices show how even modest reporting efforts can strengthen continuity, helping innovation endure beyond individual projects or political cycles.

Acts of Documentation

From 700 academic and institutional publications reviewed on Latin American design and innovation initiatives, 85 final sources stand out for how intentionally they record and share their work. These cases illustrate distinct “good practices” in preserving institutional memory: consistent naming conventions, mapping relationships, methodological transparency, and temporal continuity. Each represents a different way that documentation reinforces collective learning and connects isolated efforts across the region. 

Naming as Memory

The simplest form of documentation begins with naming. Brazil’s innovation ecosystem demonstrates an unusual coherence in this respect. Most innovation units, from Laboratório de Gestão da Inovação in São Paulo’s Judiciary to Laboratório de Inovação e Estratégia em Governo at the University of Brasília, follow a consistent “Laboratório de…” structure. This uniformity allows labs to recognize one another, cite each other, and build collective identity within the ecosystem.

In Brazil, naming operates simultaneously as a linguistic pattern and a tool for institutional coordination. The scholarly distinction between Laboratórios de Inovação Governamental (LIGs) and Laboratórios de Inovação Social (SI-Labs) reflects an intentional classification that links language to function. LIGs, situated within public administrations, focus on improving internal management, testing services, and embedding experimentation into bureaucratic culture. SI-Labs, by contrast, orient themselves toward social innovation–convening actors from civil society, universities, and the private sector to co-create solutions for issues such as housing and education (Olavo, Beneyto, Nebot, & Emmendoerfer, 2022). Together, these frameworks give Brazil’s landscape innovation an unusual degree of conceptual clarity. By naming and differentiating the spaces where innovation occurs, Brazil has built a taxonomy of public experimentation that reinforces coherence across scales of government.

Elsewhere in Latin America, similar efforts often emerge without shared conventions. Mexico’s Laboratorio Nacional de Política Pública (LNPP) omits the “lab” identifier in their abbreviations, complicating discoverability. Others, like Colombia’s Equipo de Innovación Pública, perform similar functions without using the “lab” label at all. Cases such as i9.JFRN in Rio Grande do Norte go even further, adopting creative branding that resists easy indexing or translation. Without shared conventions, even well-documented initiatives risk isolation within their own institutional vocabularies.

Innovation thrives on novelty and adaptation, but without consistent naming and archiving, that same creativity erases its own lineage. Consistent terminology keeps initiatives visible over time, makes cross-country comparisons possible, and allows projects to be rediscovered after websites or administrations change. In that sense, Brazil’s clarity isn’t just stylistic, it’s a form of institutional design that binds innovation to language and ensures collective memory.

Mapping Relationships

Most innovation work in government happens not within a single institution, but between them. Projects depend on coordination across ministries, municipalities, and agencies, yet these relationships often go undocumented. When reports fail to visualize how actors fund, support, and evaluate, the innovation ecosystem appears fragmented. Mapping relationships therefore becomes an essential act of documentation, transforming dispersed efforts into a legible system of sustained collaboration.

A particularly strong example comes from Silva Junior and Emmendoerfer (2023), whose comparative table (figure 1) of South American innovation labs systematically traces each lab’s institutional ties, orientation, and focus. By aligning each lab with its parent agency–whether national ministry or municipal office–the table turns what could otherwise be isolated cases into a networked view of governance. Readers can immediately see how Brazil’s LAB.ges connects to a shared secretariat, how Colombia’s EiP sits within the national planning department, or how Uruguay’s MvdLab links directly to the city’s participation office. This clarity reveals the connective tissue linking administrative and political relationships, illuminating how authority and collaboration circulate across institutions.