At the 2026 Mission Forward Conference, the OECD brought the global mission community together again to share best practices and common challenges. The programme of the conference reflected the evolution of missions, focusing on mission implementation and how to evaluate the success of MOIPs. As a result, the conference programme focused on four areas, each reflecting current political trends (a growing focus on competitiveness and productivity) and the stages that an increasing number of missions are now reaching (scaling-up, learning, and even phasing-out):
1. Missions for social well-being and competitiveness – missions were increasingly asked to deliver concrete economic impacts in terms of productivity, competitiveness and jobs. Discussions addressed the economic and societal impacts of missions, and how to design missions that serve competitiveness while still addressing the greatest societal challenges of our time.
2. Scaling missions – as many missions were reaching the crucial stage of supporting the deployment of new solutions, participants explored how the impact of missions can be scaled up effectively, and what governance arrangements are needed to ensure scaling is effective and sustainable.
3. Evaluating missions' impacts – as the pressure to deliver societal and economic impacts increased in a context of tight public resources, sessions examined how to measure the added value of missions and the current stage of knowledge and experience on mission evaluation.
4. Leveraging the mission way of working in other domains – the conference considered what lessons can be extrapolated beyond individual missions and applied across different policy levels and domains. Missions often generate spillovers (e.g. governance practices and collaborative processes) whose influence can extend well beyond the mission arena itself. A key question was how these learnings can be consolidated, diffused and sustained.
