Assessing Best Practice as a Means of Innovation

Abstract

This paper argues that Best Practice and innovation are different, if related activities, with Best Practice being just one of the means by which organisations can innovate. After reviewing the literatures on innovation diffusion and policy transfer, this paper reports the findings of two surveys of Best Practice in English local authorities on, respectively, regeneration and community safety. The paper finds that innovation is related to the CPA, but use of Best Practice is not; that greater capacity affects both innovation and the use of Best Practice; and that there is little link within authorities in the degree of innovation between policy sectors. In evaluating the use of Best Practice, the paper finds that local authorities encounter problems with assessing whether Best Practice is appropriate for their authority and judging whether Best Practice is in fact best practice. With Best Practice guides, the key problem is the difficulty in assessing whether the practice is as effective as the guides suggest and whether it would really work in a particular authority. The paper concludes that more effort could be made to ensure that readers of Best Practice guides can find out how the innovations really work and how they can be adapted to local needs.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Higher Education Investment Fund (HEIF) for providing financial assistance and SOLACE Enterprises for collaborative support.

Notes

1 Deprivation scores are aggregated scores of ward level rankings on the indices of deprivation produced by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM), now Department for Communities and Local Government.

2 It may also be the case that the relationship runs the other way, i.e., more innovative authorities are likely to generate higher CPA scores.

3 CPA scores are calculated by the Audit Commission annually as a measure of local authority performance and are on a five point scale for the basic measure.