2.2.4 Innovation in the public services

Innovation isn't just the same as change. It's a particular form of change. And many people would argue that it is disruptive or step change.

So it's different from continuous improvement, it's not about gradually increasing efficiency and making things better. It's actually about doing things differently. And that may involve a different mindset, a different set of practises, something that's actually quite disruptive for the organisation.

And in relation to the public sector, Geoff Mulgan has talked about defining public sector innovation as new ideas that work at creating public value, not that necessarily achieve public value, but that are trying to achieve it. Because I think the other element of innovation I just want to underline is I think a good definition of innovation doesn't conflate it with improvement or better performance or success. It's quite possible to have very interesting innovations that, for whatever reason, don't work. We can think of high-rise housing in Britain in the 1960s as an example of that.

OK, that's a quick definition of that, and remember also that innovation, many scholars would say it's about being new to the organisation. So it doesn't have to be totally unique. It's about new and disruptive ideas and practises for the organisation that starts to develop or adopt this innovation.

So just drawing on The Tempest, when these shipwrecked sailors end up on the island and Miranda, who's never seen human beings in her life before, says, ‘Oh, brave new world that has such people in it.’ For her, people are an innovation. Her much more world-weary father, Prospero, says, ‘Tis new to thee.’ So that's a way, if you like, of underlining that innovation is about newness to the organisation. So it doesn't matter if it's already happened somewhere else. So I'm going to draw on those kind of definitions of innovation in my talk here today.

Now, I think the field of public services innovation or innovation in governance and public services has tended to draw quite a lot from the private sector. And that has been very valuable and has given us some really good ideas and is also very important in terms of public private partnerships and so on, hybrid organisations.

But I think the difficulty with some of the private sector literature is it still tends to focus on products, we tend to think of light bulbs or cars or LED lighting. It has, until recently, there's been less literature around service innovation. And service innovation is very different because you're not dealing with a product. Most service innovations are actually about a changed relationship between people, either between different staff groups or staff and citizens or whatever.

So I want us to just be aware of that. But on the positive side, I think we are now starting to see a really good and burgeoning literature about public innovation and seeing some of its distinctive features. And I'll refer to those. Now, finally, on my introductory remarks, I'm going to draw on, in my talk, the idea of three phases of innovation. And I'm going to think of them in terms of invention, that is where do the ideas come from? Creativity, inventing new ways of doing things. Then there's the implementation stage, which might include piloting, trialling, experiments, really embedding the innovation and so on. And then, thirdly, thinking about diffusion, in other words, the spreading of innovation across different organisations. Now, that's a very simplified view of innovation. There are lots of different models and stages and so on. And it doesn't always happen like this in any case because in the public sector, sometimes you get an implementation, for example, an announcement by a politician, and then the public managers have to think about the innovation. So it does sometimes go the other way. And Christian Bason calls it a half-rolled-up ball of wool.