Innovation is increasingly embedded in the language of governments and public service organisations across the globe. It is sometimes used as a label (“an innovative treatment ”or “an innovative service”) without explanation of what is meant by the term, or analysis of what is distinctive. In this sense, innovation may be fashionable rhetoric rather than an analytical term. It is generally associated with newness, change, excitement, improvement, a break from tradition.

To what extent is the commentary on public sector innovation merely “policy chic”(Behn, 1997) or how far is innovation a valuable concept to understand changes in governance and public services? Innovation is seen by policy analysts as a key means to go beyond the quality improvement techniques applied to services and organisations in the 1980s and 1990s into something that could make a substantial improvement in the overall efficiency, effectiveness and responsiveness of government and public service organisations. While some analysts focus primarily on innovation as a contribution to improving the quality of services, others also recognise its potential contribution to rebuilding trust in government by being more responsive to the needs and aspirations of citizens and users of services.

What is innovation?
But to avoid the pro-innovation bias in much writing, it is vital to carefully consider what innovation is and how it may contribute to improvement. Until recently, there has been relatively little written about innovation in the public sphere and so there was an over-reliance on what has been written about innovation in the private sector.

There are some similarities in innovation processes and outcomes across the sectors (from which it is important to learn), but also distinctive differences between innovation in private firms and in public organisations. Market competition is not the primary driving force for innovation in the public sector, though the stimulus to innovate is just as dynamic and pressing, deriving as it does from the pressures to solve complex and changing public needs and expectations. The unit of analysis for the costs and benefits of innovation in the private sector has been, until very recently, the individual firm. While for public service organisations it’s generally the institutional field (eg the health service not just individual hospitals) or even the public service as a whole.

So, inter-organisational networks are important in the public sector to spread innovation between organisations. This task is more complex than in the private sector, where innovation tends to be restricted to a single firm or a closed network of strategic partners.

There are important technological developments in public services, such as IT, health and highways equipment, but service innovations typically have high levels of ambiguity and uncertainty since they are affected by the variability of the human characteristics of both service giver and service receiver (the latter, in some cases, as a co-producer).

So, what do we mean when we talk about innovation in public services? It’s more than having a bright idea or a new policy: it’s about implementation into practice. Some writers have suggested that there is a spectrum of innovation from large-scale dramatic, ‘headline-making’ innovations to small scale, incremental changes.

Managing large-scale innovation
However, many others argue that there is a need to distinguish innovation from general and incremental change, otherwise there is no need for a concept of ‘innovation’, which is separate from change. And managing large-scale innovation and its risks is a very different management challenge than steering a continuous improvement strategy. Some research only examines successful innovation but a definition based on success may limit analysis both of innovation failure and also of how innovations come to be successful. An alternative, and perhaps more comprehensive, approach examines innovation and success as separate dimensions. This can be valuable where there is interest in how innovations are developed and sustained, and what barriers and facilitators act to weaken or support innovation activities. This means an interest in how innovations grow, are nurtured, meet problems – and how some of them fail.