The Persistence of Innovation in Government

3. The Class of 2010

11 2 Emergence and Diversity: Public Sector Innovation Research It is always instructive, if sometimes a little humbling, to re-read one’s earlier work. Revisiting Innovating with Integrity, I was struck by the relative brevity of its literature review. Fifteen years ago, a conscientious survey of relevant scholarship included Osborne and Gaebler’s best-selling Reinventing Government (1992) as well as the Clinton administration’s high-profile National Performance Review, commonly known as the Gore Report (1993), the academic critiques of both that became part of the New Public Management debate, and some key private sector literature such as Kanter’s (2000) encyclopedic review of the literature on innovation. A very few books and articles had been published on public sector innovation specifically, all of them employing only case study methods. Naturally , I referred to them. And that exhausted the field. Since then, the academic study of public management innovation has emerged as a thriving field of research, generating a diverse and growing literature. This makes it not only possible but also necessary to limit this current review to empirical research on innovation in the public sector only, ignoring the sprawling literature on the private sector. In any event, scholars studying public sector innovation whom I cite here have already reviewed the private sector literature in their publications, and there is no need to duplicate their efforts. As Potts and Kastelle (2010) argue in their article laying out an agenda for research in public sector innovation , there is good reason to differentiate between the two: private sector innovation is fundamentally driven by profit maximization; consequently, the financial interests of the owners of the firm and the innovators within the firm are closely aligned. In the public sector, however, a considerable amount of innovation is mandated by politicians seeking to serve or impress the electorate. The interests of the politicians and the public servants who implement these innovations are less 02-2560-2 CH 2:PWW 2284-7 4/18/14 10:10 AM Page 11 closely aligned—indeed, they can be widely disparate. A recent article coauthored by an eminent scholar of private sector innovation, Clayton Christensen, illustrates the pitfalls of failing to differentiate. When Christensen turned his attention to the public sector, he demonstrated a fundamental lack of familiarity with the unique public sector context. He and his coauthors (Sahni, Wessel, and Christensen 2013) restricted their attention to cost-reducing technological innovations, ignoring administrative or policy innovations. They advocated closing down outdated public sector infrastructure, not recognizing that the public sector cannot fire the customer and must serve the entire population, which may require keeping outdated infrastructure in operation. They supported the use of non-monetary incentives such as recognition to reward successful public sector innovators, but had nothing to say about the more difficult problem of protecting unsuccessful public sector innovators from public criticism and termination (Borins 2013). I further limit my focus to articles in academic journals or books with academic publishers, rather than professional reports, which constitute a different genre and are governed by different conventions. Because the literature has proliferated , I will not attempt to review every relevant article, but will choose representative ones, particularly for more prolific authors. Empirical studies tend to adopt an instrumental approach to the literature they cite, mining it for support for the set of hypotheses the author will be testing but making no attempt to map the scholarly terrain as a whole. The academic literature on public sector innovation is not monolithic. It comprises clusters of subliteratures with some researchers often moving between them. Some clusters are simply abandoned as scholarly attention is turned elsewhere. Yet for all this diversity , there is a “big picture” taking shape—and it is this picture I seek to outline here. My approach is both thematic and roughly chronological. This assumes that there is a reasonable chance researchers working in a particular cluster would have read research predating their own and are responding to or incorporating its results and approaches. They are, in essence, working as small epistemic communities , some overlapping and others quite separate. I have classified these communities in two ways, by their dominant methodology and by the focus of their research (see table 2-1).The two most commonly used methodologies are case studies and statistical analysis.The case studies may be either individual or comparative analysis of several cases. They are historical narratives, developed initially from documents in the public domain, that are supplemented by semi-structured interviews...