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61 4 Present at the Creation Innovations are not static and they are often complicated. You cannot code more than 500 descriptions of innovative initiatives over a twenty-year period of research without realizing that. A successful public sector innovation process depends on an evolving interplay of interpersonal, organizational, political, social, and economic factors. What is more, it grows out of a history of previous successful , and unsuccessful, efforts. Here I will be investigating both this history and this interplay, with a particular focus on the beginning of the innovation process—the circumstances of its creation. As in chapter 3, I approach the subject from a variety of perspectives. I look first at new data for the Class of 2010 regarding the novelty of its innovations. I then consider the organizational level and gender of the initiators who launch the innovations, as well as the triggering circumstances and the nature of the thinking and planning processes initiators employ. In addition, I delve into secondary analysis of the relationships among the circumstances of creation. Are certain types of initiators more likely to be present at the creation together? Is there a pattern of certain types of initiators being associated with certain trigger factors? Are there consistent determinants of the characteristics of the thinking and planning processes? Some of the data regarding circumstances of creation are also available for the three antecedent innovation data sets (U.S. semifinalists, 1990–94; U.S. finalists, 1995–98; and Commonwealth International Innovations Award applicants in 1998 and 2000). The only instance where I analyzed the relationships among the circumstances of creation was for the 1990–94 innovations (Borins 1998, 37–65), primarily because the other two data sets were too small for the results of correlation analysis and regression modeling to be significant. Consequently, I compare the results of the secondary analysis of 127 semifinalists in 2010 to the 04-2560-2 CH 4:PWW 2284-7 4/18/14 1:17 PM Page 61 62 Present at the Creation results of analysis for the 217 semifinalists between 1990 and 1994. I would have preferred to have a recent semifinalist data set closer to that size by including semifinalists from several other years. In a more perfect research world, that would have been possible. As it is, I felt it was more important to allocate the available resources to code initial applications to the 2010 awards, something I did not undertake in my previous work. Finally, where relevant, I provide comparisons to other data sources about public sector innovation, in particular the EC Innobarometer ’s large cross-sectional sample of public sector organizations. New or Newish? I begin this analysis with the question of novelty because of its continuing importance to the HKS Awards program itself. The program’s original mandate included hastening the diffusion of good ideas throughout the public sector, and the novelty of those ideas has been one of the HKS Awards selection criteria from the outset (Walters 2008, 18). Global novelty is not intrinsic to the definition of an innovation. An initiative still constitutes an innovation if it is new to the organization in which it is being implemented. The HKS Awards program, however , seeks global novelty—in effect leading-edge innovations. To determine this, the second question in the semifinalist questionnaire asks whether an innovation is an application or a replication of another innovation; if so, which program and where; and how the semifinalist adapted or improved the original innovation (see appendix, “Semifinalist Application Questions,” question 2). Table 4-1 charts the answers to that question. Forty percent of the 2010 semifinalists replied that they hadn’t heard of other programs or initiatives doing exactly the same thing, but 64 percent indicated they were replicating an original innovation elsewhere, and another 10 percent said that they extended the reach of an original innovation. (Multiple answers were possible.) Conceptually, there is no contradiction if a semifinalist replies that she thinks what she is doing in its totality is original, even if certain components of it replicate other programs. The HKS Awards judges provide a check on claims of originality. An applicant may think her program is original, but the judges, chosen for their broad-based knowledge of the state of practice nationally, may well be aware of similar programs elsewhere. There is another way to think about and access the concept of novelty. In my 2011 article “Making Narrative Count: A Narratological Approach to Public Management Innovation” (Borins 2012, 173), I...

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