Risking innovation:Understanding risk and public service innovation - evidence from a four nation study

This paper presents new evidence about the governance of risk in public service innovation. It finds that risk is currently poorly understood with public service organizations. Either it is presented as a professional issue or it is dealt with purely as an actuarial or health and safety issue. There is little understanding of risk as a core component of innovation. In response, this paper argues for a more nuanced risk governance approach that calls for transparent decision-making on risk in public service innovation in relation to its intended outcomes. Politicians and public service managers need to understand that risk is an inherent element of innovation, because it engages with uncertain outcomes. A framework needs to be evolved to balance these risks against potential benefits and which can drive forward transparent risk governance involving politicians, public service mangers, citizens and local communities and other key stakeholders. This approach also needs to accept that failure can often by an outcome of innovation. The key here is not to maintain the blame culture that has dominate the debate to date but rather to embrace failure as an opportunity to learn and to improve public services and their outcomes

Entrepreneurship in the public sector: a framework of analysis in European local governments

In this paper we explore the potential role of entrepreneurship in public sector organizations. At first, we present a review of the entrepreneurship theme in the political science and public management research streams, comparing these ideas with the mainstream business literature on entrepreneurship. Thereafter, we illustrate empirically how Stevenson's classical framework of entrepreneurship can be applied in a European local government context to explain the recent initiatives to compete for and utilize European Union structural funds. The empirical basis of the study is comprised of ten in-depth case studies of local government organizations, five in the UK and five in Italy. Finally, we propose five distinct types of entrepreneurial agents in the public sector: professional politician; spin-off creator; business entrepreneur in politics; career-driven public officer; and politically ambitious public officer

Federalism and Entrepreneurship: Explaining American and Canadian Innovation in Pollution Prevention and Regulatory Integration

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/72611/1/j.1541-0072.1999.tb01969.x.pd

Heuristics for practitioners of policy design: Rules-of-thumb for structuring unstructured problems

This article is an attempt to bridge the divide between academics and practitioners. Informed by both design theory and the reality of policy work, its focus is on ‘problems’. From a practitioners’ perspective, policy design is both an intellectual and political process, an inevitable oscillation between ‘puzzling’ and ‘powering’, in which ‘messy’ or unstructured problems are re-structured from problems as webs of ‘undesirable situations’ to problems as specific, time-and-space bound ‘opportunities for improve- ment’. This requires a questioning habitus in practitioners of policy design. Using a socio-cognitive theory of problem processing, this paper shows how policy design is an iterative process of problem sensing, problem categorization, problem decompos- ition and problem definition. For each of these stages, appropriate rules-of-thumb for questioning and answering can be suggested that induce thought habits and styles for responsive and solid policy designs

Many Are Called But Few Are Chosen: Modeling the Selection Process for the Innovations in American Government Awards

The paper can be viewed at http://www.innovations.harvard.edu/showdoc.html?id=2638028The adoption of new services and practices is widespread in public organizations as they respond to demands in the external environment and internal aspirations. In order to recognize these activities and disseminate good practices, awards programs have proliferated around the globe. Given the limited empirical analysis of the characteristics of innovation award winners, this article examines the 2010 Innovations in American Government Awards (IAGA) program. Using a quasi-experimental methodology, a sample of 234 applications, of which approximately half were selected as semifinalists and half were not, was subjected to multivariate logit analysis. Analysis reveals that the selection criteria of the IAGA played varying roles in explaining progress to the semifinalist round and that some confounding effects were identified. The implications of these findings for the future conduct of awards and ongoing research in this area is discussed