Public Innovation through Collaboration and Design

Christopher Ansell, Jacob Torfing

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134452927
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

While innovation has long been a major topic of research and scholarly interest for the private sector, it is still an emerging theme in the field of public management. While 'results-oriented' public management may be here to stay, scholars and practitioners are now shifting their attention to the process of management and to how the public sector can create 'value'.

One of the urgent needs addressed by this book is a better specification of the institutional and political requirements for sustaining a robust vision of public innovation, through the key dimensions of collaboration, creative problem-solving, and design. This book brings together empirical studies drawn from Europe, the USA and the antipodes to show how these dimensions are important features of public sector innovation in many Western democracies with different conditions and traditions.

This volume provides insights for practitioners who are interested in developing an innovation strategy for their city, agency, or administration and will be essential reading for scholars, practitioners and students in the field of public policy and public administration.

1 Collaboration and design

New tools for public innovation

Christopher Ansell and Jacob Torfing

The need for public innovation

There is growing interest in public innovation at the level of national and transnational policy-making, regional planning and development, and local regulation and service delivery (OECD 2010). National and international decision-makers call for innovative solutions to climate change, economic crises, poverty and illiteracy, drug-related crime, and the threat from epidemic diseases. Regional policy-makers aim to manage conflicting claims on land use, build eco-friendly transport systems, and stimulate growth and employment in peripheral areas by means of innovative planning solutions. Local councilors and public managers seek to improve service quality in the face of fiscal constraints and rising demands and to offer innovative ways of regulating social and economic behavior. Although some still believe that public innovation is an oxymoron, innovation is rapidly moving to the top of the public governance agenda. There is a growing demand for innovative policies, services and forms of organizations that is accompanied by a proliferation of innovation conferences, expert reports, public–private innovation partnerships, innovation labs, training courses for change agents and innovation managers, etc. In short, the public sector is striving to enhance innovation by improving its capacity for leadership, learning, experimentation, implementation and risk management.

With a few exceptions from the 1990s (Damanpour 1991; Rogers 1995), the current preoccupation with public innovation among scholars and public decision-makers is a recent one, and it is a result of mutually reinforcing interaction between research and practice. Hence, elected politicians, public managers and in some countries public trade unions have embraced the new public innovation agenda and they have been encouraged to pursue this agenda by a growing number of research reports and scholarly books focusing on public innovation. For instance, Christopher Hood (2010) recently submitted a report to the Swedish government about how it should react to the current economic and fiscal crisis. In his report Hood warns the Swedish government against forcing devolved public agencies to make blind across-the-board cuts that will demotivate the employees and reduce the number and quality of public welfare services delivered to the citizens. Since, obviously, the alternative option of getting the elected politicians to take responsibility for making politically prioritized spending cuts is an unpopular strategy, the best alternative to across-the- board cuts seems to be public innovation that may permit us to have more and better for the same, or even less, money.

However, the need to enhance productivity in the light of the economic and fiscal crisis is neither the only nor necessarily the best reason for wanting to spur public innovation. Another important motivation is that the political visions of elected officials and the professional aspirations of public employees can only be realized through innovative thinking and bold action (Polsby 1984). Improving public health, regenerating deprived neighborhoods and increasing the number of young people who continue with their education after they finish school requires the development of innovative solutions. A third reason for enhancing public innovation is that citizens’ needs are shifting and their demands for public welfare are rising. The demand for targeted, individualized and tailor-made services of high quality in a time of shrinking public budgets calls for the exploration and exploitation of new ideas that increase productivity while improving the content and effectiveness of public services. Last but not least, the public sector confronts a growing number of wicked and unruly problems that are unique, persistent, difficult to define and hard to solve because the solutions have to meet a large number of conflicting and changing requirements. Such problems can only be resolved if we begin to think out of the box and invent new and smarter ways of doing things (Rittel and Webber 1973; Koppenjan and Klijn 2004).

The growing interest in public innovation is promising because a more systematic and pervasive attempt to spur innovation at the level of policy, service and forms of organization may help to provide an intelligent alternative to blind, devolved across-the-board cuts and enable us to respond to some of the key challenges confronting the public sector. However, despite the great potential of the increasingly fashionable innovation discourse, it also carries the imminent risk that innovation becomes reduced to an empty rhetoric about ‘renewing’ and ‘improving’ the public sector, ‘finding new solutions that work’ and pursuing ‘radical efficiency.’ As with all new buzzwords there is also a danger that public decision-makers will talk the talk, but not walk the walk. If the new innovation discourse ends up becoming a new fancy lingo with no real consequences, its days will be numbered and the chance of transforming the modus operandi of the public sector in order to make it more innovative will be lost. However, if we succeed to develop a clear and precise understanding of what public innovation means, what it can achieve and how it can be enhanced, the public innovation discourse may serve as a valuable starting point for reforming the way that the public sector operates and the way that it produces results and impacts people’s lives.

Some versions of the New Public Management (NPM) discourse that became prevalent from the 1980s onwards drew attention to the need for public innovation (Osborne and Gaebler 1993). The idea was that the public sector should learn from and imitate the private sector in order to become more innovative. Competition, customer orientation and strategic management were considered the key drivers of public sector innovation. NPM put innovation on the agenda, but it never became one of its central tenets. The focus was first and foremost on how to make the public sector more efficient through increased marketization and strategic management of input and output. That being said, it appears that the NPM reforms in the United States have been keener to promote the innovation agenda than the European reforms. In North America public innovation has been an important issue in public governance debates for some time (Polsby 1984; Damanpour 1991; Rogers 1995; Borins 2001), whereas discussions of public innovation in Europe have been few and far between (Mulgan and Albury 2003; Hartley 2005).

When it comes to the important question of how we can stimulate public innovation, there have traditionally been two rival views. Some people tend to think that public innovation will increase if we privatize, contract out and commercialize the public sector (Osborne and Gaebler 1993), while others believe that we should reinvigorate public bureaucracy by developing stable procedures for exploring and exploiting new ideas, strengthening the transformative leadership of public managers and giving more room for public professionals to use their knowledge and skills to create new and innovative solutions (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2004). These conflicting views share the idea that innovation is a process that takes place ‘in-house,’ either within the organizational borders of competitive firms or within clearly delineated bureaucratic institutions.

In this book we contrast these rival views with an alternative strategy for enhancing public innovation that aims to reap the fruits of collaboration between public agencies, users, citizens, business firms, interest organizations and civil society organizations (Roberts and King 1996; Sørensen and Torfing 2011). Drawing on a paradigm commonly referred to as New Public Governance (NPG) (Osborne 2006, 2010; Osborne and Brown 2011), we claim that the possession of relevant innovation assets (such as visions, concrete experiences, new ideas, creativity, courage, fiscal means, and implementation capacity), and not organizational boundaries, should determine who gets to participate in public innovation processes (Bommert 2010). The problem of the market and bureaucracy-driven claims is that they both ignore the innovative potential of cross-boundary collaboration.

If multi-actor collaboration can spur public innovation, it becomes paramount to consider how it is possible to design collaborative arenas that are conducive for the development of joint problem definitions, mutual learning, and joint ownership of new and bold solutions (Ansell and Gash 2008). The rapidly expanding field of ‘design thinking’ (Bason 2010) can help us to deal with the critical question of how to bring together various actors in an open-ended and cross-disciplinary search for new and creative solutions. Design is no longer merely a matter of improving the functionality and aesthetic quality and appearance of products in order to please customers and increase sales, but is increasingly used as a tool for tackling complex societal problems by involving users and other relevant stakeholders in collaborative innovation processes. Design thinking has moved upstream, and today designers are involved in creative problem solving through the design of collaborative spaces for co-creation.

However, design thinking is not only helpful because it endeavors to bring together actors from different sectors, organizations and disciplines and exploit their differences in and through processes of collaborative innovation. Another interesting feature of design thinking is that it offers an alternative to the rational decision-making approach in public administration. Hence, design thinking aims to solve emerging problems and challenges in a heuristic rather than algorithmic way. It draws on intuition, combines divergent and convergent thinking, and invokes pragmatic methods of experimentation and trial and error. Design thinking operates through iterative rounds of inspiration, ideation, selection and implementation, and it combines a large array of tools and methods to guide and sustain the design of new and better solutions. It uses user surveys, shadowing and workshops to generate input and inspiration that deepens and transforms the understanding of the problem or challenge at hand. In the ideation phase it draws upon structured brainstorming, role playing and model building to craft new ideas. In the selection phase it invokes consensus conferences, scenario building and computer guided simulations to identify, assess and negotiate gains and risks. In the implementation phase the most promising ideas and solutions are transformed into prototypes that are tested and redesigned until they work in a satisfactory way and produce desirable outcomes.

This book will draw on central insights from theories of collaborative governance (Ansell and Gash 2008, 2012; Sørensen and Torfing 2007, 2011) and the new design thinking (Bason 2010; Plattner et al. 2012) in order to improve our understanding of the impact of design and collaboration on the public innovation. It explores these insights through a number of empirical case studies from different countries and policy areas.

Before briefly outlining the content of the empirical chapters written by leading scholars in the field of public innovation, collaboration and design, we shall first define the concept of innovation and the conditions and forms of public innovation. We shall then demonstrate the limits of NPM and the promise of NPG in order to further sustain our recommendation of a collaborative approach to public innovation based on design thinking.

Defining innovation

Innovation is a complex, creative and open-ended search process that develops and realizes new ideas in ways that lead to step-changes that transform the way that we are imagining and doing things. For strictly analytical purposes we can disaggregate the innovation process into a number of different phases or stages (Eggers and Singh 2009). As such, innovation involves exploring and defining problems, challenges and opportunities; generating, articulating and assessing new and creative ideas; selecting and implementing the most promising ones; and consolidating and diffusing those solutions that seem to be working. The different phases do not always follow neatly after one another in a well-ordered and logical sequence (Van de Ven et al. 2007). In fact innovation processes are rather chaotic, with numerous jumps, gaps and iterations. Nevertheless, the practices associated with the different phases are necessary and constitutive components of innovation processes. Without problem analysis, idea generation, idea selection, implementation, and consolidation of new solutions, there will be no innovation.

Innovation involves a creative combination of old and new ideas, but creativity only becomes innovation when the new and creative ideas are realized in practice (Hartley 2005). As such, innovation requires more than getting a new, good idea. The good idea must be implemented in order to become an innovation. Following this line of argument, some people will claim that innovation is simply another word for change. But while it is true that innovation involves change, it is important to realize that not all forms of change qualify as innovation. Hence, only those forms of change that either disrupt established practices or challenge the common wisdom in a certain field are considered to be innovations. First-order change that gives us more or less of the same bunch of well-known services or regulations does not amount to innovation since there is no discontinuity. Innovation involves either second-order change of the repertoire of services and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Collaboration and design: new tools for public innovation
• 2 Necessity as the mother of reinvention: discourses of innovation in local government
• 3 Reconstructing bureaucracy for service: innovation in the governance era
• 4 The complexity of governance: challenges for public sector innovation
• 5 The impact of collaboration on innovative projects: a study of Dutch water management
• 6 Understanding innovative regional collaboration: metagovernance and boundary objects as mechanisms
• 7 The importance of joint schemas and brokers in promoting collaboration for innovation
• 8 Collaborative networks and innovation: the negotiation–management nexus
• 9 Innovative leadership through networks
• 10 Designing collaborative policy innovation: lessons from a Danish municipality
• 11 Design attitude as an innovation catalyst
• 12 Collaborating on design – designing collaboration
• Index