Abstract
This article argues that debates about public innovation among governance scholars risk essentialising the concept. Rather than recognise the inherently normative content of public innovation, some scholars have created taxonomies that conflate very different forms of ‘innovation’ in the public and private sectors, the latter of which is deeply contradictory to public values. We re-think public innovation as both a pragmatic process, a way of responding to developments in contemporary governance, and an inherently public and democratic practice. Our analysis addresses three points: who innovates; what is the object of innovation, and what are the effects of innovation? From this analysis we specify public innovation as both inescapable and democratically necessary to safeguard and promote the important values of public life.
Highlights
Even a brief perusal of the public innovation literature demonstrates that, apparently, innovation in the public sector needs to be argued for
The sheer size of the literature on public sector reform shows that the siren call of public innovation is hard to resist
We show how existing justifications for public innovation tend to rest on precarious grounds, unless innovation is viewed as a democratic good
Summary
Even a brief perusal of the public innovation literature demonstrates that, apparently, innovation in the public sector needs to be argued for. Our theoretical argument is that in much public innovation literature (and practice) this democratic, political dimension is either downplayed or ignored altogether This is because the starting point is to argue that innovation is a private sector phenomenon, and assert that it can be a public one too This helps us to build a critical perspective on public innovation from multiple angles, focused on the actors, objects and results of innovation These questions capture the originators of innovation (government, the corporate sector, citizens, societal organisations, transnational bodies), its object (ideas, organisations, behaviours, relations, technology), and the allimportant question of its intended and unintended effects, on government agencies, on officials, citizens, the budget, and on society. We recap our argument and re-emphasise that if public innovation is not seen first and foremost as about democratic experimentation (Ansell, 2011), academics (and practitioners) may repeat the mistakes created through decades of managerialism attempting to mimic private sector values in a public sector context
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