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

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