Applied research is central to the IOG’s mission. Our research informs our advisory services, ensures that our course offerings and curricula are forward-looking and up-to- date, and promotes intellectual rigour in all our activities.
We engage in a wide range of research activities from environmental scans, trend analyses, and opinion research to modelling, interviews, facilitated workshops and comparative analysis.
We produce discussion papers and reports, analytical tools and models with real world applicability in advisory and teaching contexts, and have provided expert testimony to parliamentary committees.

The IOG disseminates its research findings through a range of media, from editorials, news articles and blog posts to academic articles, conference talks and presentations, as well as dialogues, webinars and other fora that we organize ourselves or with partners.
We engage in research in all our business and practice areas – always focusing on governance challenges, implications and solutions. This has included research in areas as diverse as housing governance, healthcare governance, and governance surrounding cannabis legalization, to reviews and evaluations of government policy portfolios, research on democratic governance and reform, and research on service modernization and transformation.
Our discrete research projects are informed by our work on key cross-cutting priority research initiatives:
- Public Governance Exchange (PGEx)
- Digital Governance Applied Research Program
- Indigenous Governance Research Agenda
- Federalism and Democratic Governance Research
- Public Governance Opinion Research
Ongoing Research
Clients frequently commission us to conduct specific governance related research to support their work and help them achieve their objectives. We also conduct applied research across all our domains of expertise. Have a look at our active research projects below.
