Innovations in governance

Abstract

This article explores a special class of innovations - innovations in governance – and develops an analytical schema for characterizing and evaluating them. To date, the innovation literature has focused primarily on the private rather than the public sector, and on innovations which improve organizational performance through product and process innovations rather than public sector innovations which seek to improve social performance through re-organizations of cross-sector decision-making, financing and production systems. On the other hand, the governance literature has focused on social co-ordination but has not drawn on the innovation literature. The article uses four case studies illustratively to argue that innovations in governance deserve greater attention theoretically. Further, it argues that five inter-related characteristics distinguish public sector innovations in governance from private sector product and process innovations. Innovations in governance: go beyond organizational boundaries to create network-based decision-making, financing, decision-making, and production systems; tap new pools of resources; exploit government's capacity to shape private rights and responsibilities; redistribute the right to define and judge value; and should be evaluated in terms of the degree to which they promote justice and the development of a society as well as their efficiency and effectiveness in achieving collectively established goals.

Key words:

• Innovation
• governance
• public value
• partnerships

Notes

In this paper, we use ‘government’ to refer to both government organizations (e.g., federal and national government, local government etc) and public service organizations which may have a degree of autonomy from central government, such as health services, criminal justice services, and agencies concerned with the environment, public health etc but which are funded and regulated as part of the public service sector.

Note: there is an equivalent issue in the private sector: namely, when private firms construct new contractual relations, or more ambitiously, new governance relations, to improve their individual firm performance (see Tidd et al. 2005). This includes mergers and acquisitions, that are evaluated in terms of the impact they have on the market position of the firms involved in the mergers. It also includes the complex bundles of ownership rights and responsibilities that have integrated high tech bio-med firms. It may even include choices that socially conscious enterprises make about whether and how to form working partnerships with nonprofit organizations. For our purposes here, however, we will focus most attention on these activities in the public sector where government is one of the important actors in creating or acting within a particular governance scheme.