In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

86 5 Innovation Stories: Real People, Real Challenges, Real Outcomes The previous chapter dealt with the launch of an innovation. This one deals with the life of an innovation up to its appearance in the HKS Awards data set. For our 2010 semifinalists that is an average span of more than six years (see table 3-8), a considerable period of time in the life of a government program. In this chapter I examine the life stories of the Class of 2010 as recounted in the HKS Awards applications. You will be reading narratives of innovative initiatives written by either an originator or someone closely associated with the innovation. Participants are notoriously unreliable narrators, but the HKS Awards judging process should constrain applicants to keep their stories within the realm of nonfiction. It is not hard to imagine the sort of story applicants would like to tell, a tale of ingenuity triumphant and public interest well served. The narrative might run like this: The originality and effectiveness of the proposed innovation were quickly recognized. The initiative was promptly adopted by the organization or group of collaborating organizations to which it was proposed. The program or initiative rapidly grew. It created significant and widely appreciated public value, leading to widespread transfer and, perhaps, the public recognition of a prestigious award. That would be what Hollywood calls a feel-good story, and champions of the public sector (generally but not exclusively liberals) seize on instances of actual feel-good accounts eagerly when they can be found. But there is also an innovation failure story: An innovation is launched and begins to scale up, but it encounters so many problems, perhaps poor organizational design or perverse incentives, that it sinks under their weight and is terminated.1 This failed innovation story holds a particular appeal to those who equate innova1 . The recent Australian Public Service Innovation Index (APSII) pilot survey asked public servants to provide information about failed innovations with which they were associated. This question received so little response that the researchers dropped it. See Arundel and Huber (2013). 05-2560-2 CH 5:PWW 2284-7 4/18/14 10:18 AM Page 86 tion with government activism and for whom such activism is anathema.They seek such stories out and publicize them wherever they can.2 For most innovations, the truth lies somewhere between triumphant success and abject collapse. Innovations meet obstacles: some can be overcome, others must be lived with. Innovations encounter critics, whom their initiators or champions attempt to answer. Sometimes the critics are silenced, but not always. Innovations may grow as a result of increasing demand or may take advantage of new opportunities, but it may also be necessary to modify, redesign, or even reinvent the innovation. Some of the initiative’s target population embrace it, others object on grounds of principle or oppose the use of resources. Still others feel the program fails to reach far enough. More rethinking and repositioning may be necessary . And this is what I consider here: the real stories of obstacles, criticism, and evolution that can be read in the 2010 semifinalist applications—sometimes between the lines. To begin with the obvious, the author of the award application is an initiator or champion, a partisan. He or she is asked to respond to a series of sixteen questions , some of them multipart, designed to elicit as comprehensive an account as possible of the innovation. Six of the questions (questions 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 12) offer significant latitude to the author to frame the innovation’s story as positively as possible. Five of them (3, 8, 10, 13, 16) deal largely with factual, process-related, or organizational issues such as personnel, oversight, and budget. Three questions (11, 14, 15) ask for information concerning various forms of outside response, media coverage, formal evaluation, awards and recognition, information that would be largely a matter of public record and quite easily confirmed. But there are two questions (5 and the latter part of 10) that require the applicant to tell another side to the story, asking for details of the obstacles and criticism the innovation encountered. Thus, part of completing the application requires the innovation’s initiator or champion to speak on behalf of its opponents or critics. Do the applicants do so fully and fairly? There are reasons to trust their accounts. The application documentation makes clear that expert judges will be evaluating the applications, and finalists will be required to host a...

Share