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

180 8 Summing Up, Looking Forward: Awards, Practitioners, and Academics If there is a single point this book has sought to make, from its title onward, it is that public sector innovation is an enduring, ongoing phenomenon. It is fitting , then, that this final chapter stands as a point of departure rather than a conclusion . There is, happily, no final word to say. Innovation in government persists because inspired individuals launch innovations, awards programs recognize them, and scholars study them. It is a three-way partnership, and this book is intended as both a testimony to the potential of that partnership and an argument for its extension. Innovation begins with ideas and the individual practitioners who instantiate them, as well as the organizational structures that sustain them. Awards programs not only recognize those ideas, they also offer opportunities to publicize and disseminate them, providing data for scholars in the process. Such programs serve a convening function, enabling practitioners to learn directly from one another. The academic research that the programs support introduces these innovative initiatives to a still wider audience, their histories now mediated by scholarly analysis and reflection. I have always envisioned this book speaking to practitioners and academics alike, even though I recognize how difficult it can sometimes be to bridge the cultural and professional barriers that separate them. Rather than enshrine those divisions in the structure of the book, I have chosen to address both readerships jointly, by interweaving technically detailed accounts of the statistical analysis I’ve performed with speculation on the implications for practice of the patterns and relationships that analysis has revealed. This concluding chapter bifurcates more sharply. I begin by mapping out the landscape of public sector innovation—how it has changed, how it has not—and summarizing the results of the detailed com08 -2560-2 CH 8:PWW 2284-7 4/18/14 10:26 AM Page 180 Summing Up, Looking Forward 181 parisons previous chapters have explored. I then offer two sets of proposals, one directed to practitioners and the other to academics. These, necessarily, differ significantly in both aim and content. It is my hope that my findings here can be translated into practical advice for would-be innovators, particularly in relation to obstacles to anticipate, strategies of response, and tactics for securing support and recognition. The goal is to assist the important work they are choosing to do. For my academic colleagues, I offer suggestions of research possibilities, specifically new data sources and methodological links, which could in turn yield new support for public sector innovators and their efforts. I wish particularly to encourage other scholars to turn to innovation awards programs as the basis for research on innovations themselves, on public entrepreneurship, and on innovative organizations. I am fully aware of how much more there is to discover and to say. “The More Things Change . . .” Using the applications to the HKS Awards program as evidence, I have identified four significant changes in public sector innovation in the United States between the early 1990s and 2010. Do they transform the landscape? Certainly not beyond recognition, but, to push the metaphor a little further, they might be said to constitute important new landmarks. The first and perhaps most far-reaching in terms of its implications is the major increase in interorganizational collaboration the applications document. There have also been marked shifts in the nature of the innovation agenda in each of the six major policy areas the HKS Awards define. If both process and objectives have evolved, so too have the forms and frequency of external evaluation and the extent of both transfer and media attention. Table 8-1 sums up statistically what has and hasn’t changed by including all the results (slopes, intercepts, R2 ) for the regressions of the distributions of responses for the 2010 HKS Awards semifinalists on responses for the 1990–94 semifinalists and, when available and comparable, the 1995–98 finalists and 1998 and 2000 Commonwealth International Innovations Awards applicants. New Partners: Interorganizational Collaboration The increase in the frequency of interorganizational collaboration as a characteristic of innovations is broad-based and widespread. Since it is evident in both initial applications and semifinalists, it is not a result of a bias in favor of collaboration on the part of HKS Awards judges. It includes all four types of interorganizational collaboration : within one level of government; across levels of government; with the private sector; and with the nonprofit sector. It is evident in all policy areas, in...

Share