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1 1 Public Sector Innovation: Still, and Again Innovation as a phenomenon within the public sector persists. Despite skepticism about whether large, hierarchical, monopolistic government agencies can initiate and embrace change, there is extensive evidence that they can, they do, and they will. Because innovators persist. In the face of the obstacles inherent to the process, in spite of the risk of failure, in spite of the time, energy, vision, skill, networking, preparation, accommodation, persuasion, education, and improvisation required to bring an innovation to fruition, public servants continue to try new ways to create public value. Innovation has also outlasted the theoretical controversies and political backlash of the 1980s, when the New Public Management was new and government was the problem, the all-too-brief limelight of Reinventing Government in the 1990s, and the security and financial crises of the new century, when government started to look more like the only possible solution. Innovation awards also persist, bringing wider recognition to these efforts among practitioners, scholars, and the general public and encouraging new generations of change agents, experimenters, and “local heroes.” Twenty-five years after their inception, the Harvard Kennedy School’s Innovations in American Government Awards receive over five hundred applications every year, two-thirds of them new, all of them evidence of an enduring fact. The academic study of public sector innovation clearly persists. Researchers worldwide are producing a continual stream of work, seeking new data sources, and asking new questions. And my own personal interest in innovation persists. Twenty years after first studying innovation awards applicants, I continue to find that they provide an important body of information and experience for grappling with this persistent, and shifting, subject. For if public sector innovation endures, and it clearly does, it still does not stay the same. 01-2560-2 CH 1:PWW 2284-7 4/18/14 10:09 AM Page 1 In many ways this book is a return—to a subject, to a methodology, and to data I have engaged with extensively, in my book Innovating with Integrity: How Local Heroes are Transforming American Government (Borins 1998) and in numerous articles that followed it. Technically, it is even a replication. Like the earlier work, this study will analyze applications to the Innovations in American Government Awards program run by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School. Like the earlier work, this too will employ rigorous statistical analysis, aggregating data to identify trends and anomalies and using regression analysis to test hypotheses about the relationships among characteristics of public sector innovations. And it will also try to convey something of the character and specificity of individual innovations, innovators, and their processes through secondary, disaggregated, qualitative observation. Within the social sciences, replication tends to be endorsed in theory more often than it is embraced in practice. No one questions the desirability of repeating research as a test of its initial validity or broader applicability. But replicating other scholars’ work can be felt to suggest a lack of imagination or initiative and generates none of the excitement of discovery. Most researchers, understandably, prefer to strike out for themselves. If they are revisiting others’ data, they do so in their own way, choosing their own methodologies and providing their own interpretations . The one exception occurs when findings are considered controversial or have proved to have a major impact on public policy. The recent reanalysis of Rogoff and Rinehart’s data about financially induced recessions comes to mind as a pertinent current example.1 When replication does occur, it is most often undertaken by the original scholar, because he or she believes in the ongoing value of the research and has better access to the original data and methodology. Replication of this type often appears as subsequent editions of a book. The study of innovation has a distinguished exemplar: the late Everett Rogers’s Diffusion of Innovations, published in five editions between 1962 and 2003. Rogers originally developed a conceptual model of diffusion. He then applied it to a growing number of phenomena in his subsequent editions. I do not see this book as a second edition of Innovating with Integrity, however, nor would I call it simply a replication. To explain why, it is necessary to recap something of the history of public sector innovation, as a practice and as an object of study, retracing the evolution of my own thinking and writing about the subject as part of that larger story. Initially, innovation...

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