Collaborative Innovation in the Public Sector

Jacob Torfing

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781626163614
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Affari pubblici e amministrazione

Governments worldwide struggle to remove policy deadlocks and enact much-needed reforms in organizational structure and public services. In this book, Jacob Torfing explores collaborative innovation as a way for public and private stakeholders to break the impasse. These network-based collaborations promise to multiply the skills, ideas, energy, and resources between government and its partners across agency boundaries and in the nonprofit and private sectors.

Torfing draws on his own pioneering work in Europe as well as examples from the United States and Australia to construct a cross-disciplinary framework for studying collaborative innovation. His analysis explores its complex and interactive processes as he looks at how drivers and barriers may enhance or impede the collaborative approach. He also reflects on the roles institutional design, public management, and governance reform play in spurring collaboration for public sector innovation. The result is a theoretically and empirically informed book that carefully demonstrates how multi-actor collaboration can enhance public innovation in the face of fiscal constraint, the proliferation of wicked problems, and the presence of unsatisfied social needs.

1
Defining and Contextualizing Innovation in the Public Sector

---

This chapter sets the stage for studying collaborative innovation in the public sector. The first step shows that we need a concept of innovation that helps us distinguish between different kinds of change, transformation, and development. The second step involves defining the concept of innovation and providing examples of different types of public innovation. The third step explains the growing interest in public innovation and justifies the need for a new public innovation agenda that both researchers and practitioners should pursue. The chapter concludes with a few cautious remarks about the role and impact of public innovation. These observations are counterbalanced by some empirical examples of the positive impact that public innovation may have on cutting costs, improving quality, and enhancing the effectiveness of public policies, organizations, and services.

Why Do We Need a Concept of Innovation?

Since the publication of the Trilateral Commission’s report in 1975, political and administrative interest in public sector reforms has grown. The report problematized the growth of public bureaucracies and the development of the modern welfare state by pointing out their structural limits. The commission claimed the public welfare systems were under severe pressure as they were caught in a bad situation characterized by the “overload of government” and “the ungovernability of society” (Crozier, Huntington, and Watanuki 1975). Its claim was sustained by the observations that the citizens’ expectations for the public sector tend to grow faster than the resources available to the public sector and that increasing societal fragmentation and individualization, which is reflected in the steady decline of public spiritedness, tend to make governing modern societies more and more difficult for public authorities. To avoid a mounting distrust in elected government among Western populations that potentially could spur the growth of totalitarian movements and cause a demise of liberal democracy, reforms of the public sector were considered strictly necessary. This bleak diagnosis of the problems in Western democracies was further perpetuated by the deep economic recession in the early 1970s that was marked by rising oil prices, stagnating economies, surging unemployment, soaring inflation, and increasingly large public deficits. The joint occurrence of a political-ideological crisis and a socioeconomic crisis produced a society-wide recognition that the public sector urgently needed reform.

Neoliberal politicians and right-wing think tanks used this window of opportunity to call for a dismantling of the modern welfare state and for an increasing reliance on private market forces (Pierson 1994). Although this political project found support in some Anglo-Saxon governments, it had limited appeal to governments on the European continent, where the neoliberal attempt to roll back the welfare state was replaced with a less radical and more nuanced reform program that was referred to as New Public Management (Hood 1991). The NPM reform movement recommended privatizing public enterprises, contracting out public services, and introducing management techniques from the private sector to help reinvigorate the remaining public sector (Osborne and Gaebler 1992).

Although the impact of the NPM reform movement on the size and form of the public sector in the Western world is mixed and varied (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2004; Klausen and Ståhlberg 1998), it has produced the new and widely accepted idea that the public sector should be capable of constantly renewing and developing itself. Along these lines, elected politicians should formulate the overall targets for developing public organizations and should create strong incentives for public managers to generate new and innovative ways of producing and delivering public goods and services. To encourage constant service improvement, public managers should be subjected to competitive pressures from customers and private contractors, and elaborate systems of performance management should monitor and assess their performance. Last but not least, the salaries and career prospects of public managers should depend on their strategic performance and their ability to innovate the public sector in the pursuit of radical efficiencies.

This new discourse on how strategic managers in the public sector should initiate and drive efficiency-enhancing reforms and innovations completely redefined the administrative agenda. It was no longer enough for public administration and public governance to be legal, rational, efficient, planned, and coordinated. Instead, the protagonists of New Public Management persistently argued that public organizations should be subject to constant and deliberate changes that optimize their operation and functioning vis-à-vis the political objectives and performance targets set by elected politicians and the social and political demands advanced by citizens in their capacity as “users,” “customers,” or “stakeholders.”

In its most perverse forms, this discourse on perpetual reforms and restless transformation turns change into a goal in itself. Accordingly public organizations are only viewed as legitimate if they are constantly changing as a result of deliberate reform strategies. Without a proper problem diagnosis and a thorough evaluation of the effects of previous, ongoing, and proposed reforms, such changes might reduce the problem-solving capacity of the public sector, diminish the quality and impact of public services, and thus have detrimental effects on the citizens, private firms, and other beneficiaries. At the very least, this restless transformation process tends to create a stressful working environment for public managers and employees who must endure an endless number of rationalization strategies.

For these reasons the discourse on uninterrupted public reforms and transformations is clearly problematic. Nevertheless, we should not forget that the new public reform discourse creates some much-welcomed opportunities for amending and improving public policies, organizations, and services. Numerous policy deadlocks in the field of social welfare, health care, education, planning, and environmental policy cause great frustration for elected politicians, policy advisers, private stakeholders, and citizens and, thus, elicit calls for profound changes in public policy and governance. In addition, public managers and employees have many unfulfilled professional ambitions; to meet them would require both policy changes and organizational and cultural transformations. Finally, the changing needs of citizens and private firms necessitate constant adaptations in the roles, contents, repertoires, and amounts of public goods and services. These legitimate demands for change reveal the ambiguity of the discourse on perpetual public transformation and may warrant a cautious embrace.

Despite the perverse examples of “change for the sake of changing,” the new discourse of public change may serve the valuable purpose of breaking policy logjams and political stalemate, permitting a knowledge-based renewal of outdated organizational procedures and practices, and meeting the changing and unfulfilled needs of citizens, private firms, and other beneficiaries. If we accept this argument, then we need to comprehend the semantics of change in order to grasp the different meanings of the many terms indicating some kind of change. We frequently talk about how public policies, organizations, and services “change,” “develop,” or “improve,” and about how and to what extent they are subject to “transformation,” “reconceptualization,” or even “innovation.” Although these terms are sometimes used interchangeably, they are subtly different, and “innovation” seems to be the joker in the pack as it tends to capture some crucial aspects that the other terms fail to catch.

If things “change,” or “have changed,” then they are no longer the same as they were before. This is a binary code: change versus remain the same. The size or depth of a change may vary considerably, and we will often want to know how and how much things have changed. When we claim that something “has developed” or “is developing,” we are referring to a gradual process of more or less multidimensional change that can be measured on a quantitative or qualitative scale. The term “development” has a slightly positive connotation. Hence, we like development but resist change. Development is often preferred to the preservation of the status quo, which is associated with stalemate; moreover, the more developed something is, the better it is often assumed to be. However, a development can also go up and down or be cyclical and go back and forth, thus not producing anything new.

Sometimes we want to express a positive assessment and talk about a development as an “improvement,” indicating that it has gone in a direction that we desire and applaud. This does not necessarily mean that it has been subject to qualitative changes. Improvement often means there is simply more of what we know and desire than there was before. We usually use the term “transformation” to indicate a thorough and radical change, but the term does not implicitly indicate the direction of such a profound change. That being said, a transformation undoubtedly brings about a new state of affairs, although it is not necessarily the result of a premeditated set of actions. The notion of “reconceptualization” implies that there has been an attempt to rethink particular problems, programs, and practices in order to produce new visions, ideas, and ways of doing things, but they are not necessarily implemented or put into practice.

By contrast, “innovation” seems to refer to a reconceptualization that has been implemented in practice and, as a result of some proactive effort, has produced a transformation that brings about something new and potentially valuable. Innovation is a particular form of change and a particular form of transformation that adds not only direction and newness but also the idea of a proactive effort to generate and implement new ideas. In short, innovation involves an intentional redesign of existing designs through some kind of rupture.

This brief semantic excursus seems to suggest that we need a concept of innovation when discussing the ongoing attempts to reinvigorate the public sector. We can talk about the change, development, improvement, transformation, or reconceptualization of public policies, organizations, and services, but we gain a certain conceptual precision when talking about something as being, or not being, an innovation. Innovation seems to capture the idea of a premeditated action to develop and implement new ideas in order to produce a stepwise change that is more than a “continuous improvement,” which merely gives us more or less of what we already have, and less than a “radical transformation,” which replaces one action system with another (Hartley 2006).

How to Define Innovation

As noted, innovation has a positive connotation. We tend to see innovation as something inherently good, and the concept of innovation invokes images of brilliant inventors, inspiring front-runners, and brave pioneers who help us do things in smarter and more ingenious ways than before. Innovation appears to create winners by rewarding the innovators with new and better ways of accomplishing particular goals and tasks and of satisfying unfulfilled needs and demands. The positive, and sometimes overly optimistic, discourse on innovation threatens to reduce innovation to an empty rhetorical device—that is, a magic concept that is better suited for official speeches and glossy government reports than for practical political attempts to transform public policies, organizations, and services (Pollitt and Hupe 2011). To avoid an unfortunate reduction of the notion of innovation to the latest fad, we need to develop a more rigorous definition that permits a precise and nuanced assessment of the promise of public innovation.

Innovation is often defined in short, catchy phrases such as “new ideas that work” (Mulgan and Albury 2003) or “new stuff that is made useful” (McKeown 2008). Although such definitions capture the gist of the concept, they lack the precision necessary for a deeper analysis. A more cumbersome but ultimately more adequate definition describes innovation as an intended but inherently contingent process that involves the development and realization, and frequently also the spread, of new and creative ideas that challenge conventional wisdom and disrupt the established practices within a specific context.

This definition aims to settle some of the ongoing conceptual disputes about what innovation means and how to define it, especially in relation to the public sector. First of all, the definition insists that innovation is a result of intentional but inherently contingent actions. As it has been repeatedly argued, innovation is an open-ended and rather unpredictable process that is triggered and influenced by unforeseen events and chance discoveries, and it is frequently based on processes of trial and error that produce experimental learning (Van de Ven et al. 2008). Thus, innovation can neither be programmed nor planned; instead, it requires a mental state characterized by curiosity, open-mindedness, and courage, as well as a pragmatic attitude toward accidents, contingencies, risks, and failures. Nevertheless, innovati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Collaborative Innovation in the Public Sector
• 1 Defining and Contextualizing Innovation in the Public Sector
• 2 Collaborative Interaction as a Source of Public Innovation
• 3 Toward a Theory of Collaborative Innovation
• 4 Triggering Innovation and Collaboration
• 5 Mobilizing and Empowering Actors and Institutionalizing Interaction
• 6 Enhancing Mutual, Expansive, and Transformative Learning
• 7 Making and Implementing Bold and Creative Decisions
• 8 Diffusing Public Innovation through Collaborative Networks
• 9 Enhancing Collaborative Innovation through Leadership and Management
• 10 Reforming Public Governance, Enhancing Collaborative Innovation
• Conclusion: Summary Propositions about Collaborative Innovation
• References
• Index
• About the Author