An organisation may exhibits neither improvement nor innovation. This may occur where an organisation is operating in a highly stable environment,where innovation is not needed because there is a close fit between that environment and the organisational processes, systems and stakeholder needs. This is theoretically possible but in practice highly unlikely – the world is changing at such speed that either innovation or continuous development will be needed.

Or improvement may occur but without innovation. This is an organisation that focuses on small, incremental changes in order to achieve improvement (eg continuous improvement methodology, total quality management; incremental development) but where the changes do not individually constitute innovation in that they are not large-scale.

Continuous development may be critical for many organisations but we should not confuse it with innovation. The organisation may implement innovation but there maybe no resultant improvement. Indeed, there may even be a deterioration of performance. Several situations fit this pattern. First, innovations do not always lead to success – in any sector. A failure rate across the board of about 40% is not unusual (Tidd et al, 2005), as already mentioned in this article.

Public service innovations not only have to run the gauntlet of commentary from press and politicians, but also there is a need to consider the complexity and contested nature of success, given that different parts of the public may have different views or values about what constitutes success (as an example, consider whether school academies are a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ Innovation).

There is also the situation where the innovation has not led to improvement in the short term but where the lack of immediate success can either be rectified or can have other benefits. Short-term performance loss is recognised as a feature of organisational change, due to two factors: the need to address operational bugs in the production or service processes and the learning curve or experience curve that results in part from staff adjusting to new ways of working. This is well recognised in the operations management literature, though has been less acknowledged in the public sector where political pressures may require a rhetoric of perfect improvement from day one.

However, very often, a failure to recognise implementation problems in a new way of working does a disservice to the reality as experienced by staff and users as well as hampering learning from prototyping.

Innovation without improvement may also occur where the innovation is not, ultimately, successful but where sufficient learning takes place to engage in a later attempt at improvement (which benefits from the earlier attempt). There are many examples of this phenomenon in both the private and public sectors.

For example, a local authority which pilots a new set of procedures to improve quality to the customer, but does not get it right first time but learns from the early mistakes. Again there is perhaps insufficient recognition of this phenomenon of learning from ‘failure’ in the public sector literature, though some Warwick research suggests that it is beneficial to longer-term learning capacity and service and corporate improvement.