The Creative Bureaucracy Festival celebrates outstanding innovation in the public sector and its contribution to a better, more sustainable, and more just world. It brings together bureaucrats and their allies – those who, at all levels of government, fight for the common good and make a difference.

Our mission: We want to cultivate a more positive attitude towards the public sector as well as more drive and eagerness to experiment within the public sector.

We do so in two ways: First, we organize the annual Creative Bureaucracy Festival – this year in its third edition and, for the first time, completely online. Second, we want to become the digital library for bureaucracy at its best – a platform for good ideas and creative minds, open for business year-round.

»Creative Bureaucracy is a powerful vision to energize the public sector.«

Charles Landry Festival President

»Public administrations today must be open for change, online services are a part of this, as is the competence to deal with cultural diversity. This is why I‘m delighted that so many people with great ideas meet at the Creative Bureaucracy Festival and discuss pathways for a better public sector.«

Bundespraesident Steinmeier
Frank-Walter Steinmeier President of Germany

The Festival History

This year’s festival is the third iteration of the Creative Bureaucracy Festival: We’re already looking back at and building on two festivals packed with ideas for making bureaucracy better. Since 2018, we are giving public sector innovators and their allies a platform for exchange, inspiration, and support – both at the festival and year-round online.

The initiative is built on the decades-long work and international network of the British urbanist Charles Landry – author of, amongst other works, “The Creative City” (2000) and co-author of “The Creative Bureaucracy & its radical common sense” (2017). When Charles met the publicist and entrepreneur Sebastian Turner, our story took its course: An idea turned into a festival.

Participants

More than 1,400 visitors from over 30 countries

Speakers

350 speaker from all over the world and all sectors

Programme

160 hours of programming over two days

Feedback

92 percent of participants want to come again

Our home: the Falling Walls Foundation

The Falling Walls Foundation was founded in 2010 in Berlin and serves as a unique international platform for pioneers in academia, industry, politics, the arts, and civil society. In commemoration of the peaceful revolution of 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, it asks: Which are the next walls to fall? To find answers to this question, it promotes groundbreaking ideas across borders and disciplines – and brings together pioneers and innovators form across the world.