Easy Innovation and the Iron Cage: Best Practice, Benchmarking, Ranking, and the Management of Organizational Creativity

The use of what came to be known as best practices, benchmarking, and ranking, which took corporate America by storm in the 1980s as a method for managing innovation, has seeped into government and nonprofit organizations in the intervening years. In fact, as H. George Frederickson demonstrates in this Kettering Foundation occasional paper, these practices have proven to be counterproductive both in the business and the public sector. Frederickson suggests, instead, a more flexible, less directive, model he calls "sustained innovation." He offers abundant evidence that this model is more effective in producing organizational effectiveness

Trusting in Change

Describes the background to a series of changes that led the foundation, beginning in 2000, to implement a new grantmaking approach

Reinventing Municipal Governance: From the New Generation of Big-City Mayors

The decade of the 1990s brought to power in many American cities a new breed of mayors who have sought to reinvent municipal governance through a variety of innovations that, like the mayors themselves, defy easy partisan or ideological classification. These innovations are widely viewed as having helped to turn around such cities as Philadelphia, Cleveland, New York, and Chicago. The purpose of this paper is to explain the most notable of these innovations for possible consideration by Atlanta's incoming mayor

Resources for Child Caring: An Early Childhood Intermediary?

While Minnesota's early childhood (EC) system has many assets, the existing high degree of fragmentation creates resource accessibility problems for both families and providers. Recently, there has been a growing call for a unified voice to facilitate change in Minnesota's early childhood system. This presents an opportunity for an organization like Resources for Child Caring (RCC), a well?established regional organization, to assume a prominent role in efforts to reform the EC system by becoming an intermediary organization. Becoming an intermediary would provide RCC an opportunity to grow and become a leader in efforts to improve services and outcomes for Minnesota's children.Before taking this path, RCC will need to carefully consider the benefits and consequences of such a change and whether such a move would fit the mission and vision of the organization. To help RCC assess its capacity for growth and to fulfill an intermediary role, we conducted an in?depth study of the organization's current state, as well as research on the Minnesota early childhood field and existing models of intermediary organizations. This report presents our literature review, organizational audit of current conditions, and organizational gap analysis

Ireland

This report will focuses on the current innovations and the future development of the practices and approaches to the assessment of learning in the area of work-based Vocational Education & Training in Ireland. The report is written from the perspective of the Irish Partner (Dublin City University) of the Leonardo da Vinci QualPraxis Research Project. In Ireland Vocational Education and Training (VET) exists mainly in the further education sector and this report will focus on this area

An analysis of the environment and competitive dynamics of management research

Purpose – The purpose of this paper examines some of the controversies facing business schools in their future evolution and pays particular attention to their competitive positioning as centres of management research. Design/methodology/approach – The paper combines and builds on current literature to provide an analytic overview of the environment and competitive challenges to management research in business schools. Findings – The paper assesses the impacts of a globalized environment and ever-changing competitive dynamics, for example in terms of the supply of high-quality faculty, on the activity of management research in business schools. It points out that research impacts must be judged not only in terms of theoretical development but also managerial and policy impact. However, managerial impact is difficult to measure and the “voice of practice” must be carefully identified. Originality/value – The paper identifies the current challenges for undertaking innovative research in business schools in light of their competitive environment. Three interrelated conjectures focusing particularly on managerial impact are raised which identify problems and limitations of current debates on management research in business schools

Benchmarking the business performance of departmental space in universities

Purpose and Theory: In UK higher education institutions, facilities management performance tends to be measured in space utilisation and space cost. A new approach uses the �return on investment� (ROI) concept of income generation to highlight space performance at faculty/department/building level. Design and approach: Using space data from several English universities and data envelopment analysis (DEA), six types of academic units (departments, institutes or similar) are compared in regard of their respective research and teaching income. This technique allows mapping out the total �envelope� with the best performers at the edge, showing what improvement/change would be needed for the others in the group to match their performance. Findings: This is a viable method of benchmarking and gives participating institutions better and more strategic and business-oriented feedback on the performance of their space envelope than mere cost comparisons. It can potentially inform strategic decisions about university estates. However, there are barriers to applying this approach: problems posed by issues of classification and diverse organisational structures can be overcome, but lack of collaboration of facilities/estates and finance directorates; lack of centralised, accurate and detailed data pose more serious challenges