Toronto - A new book by a professor at the University of Toronto addresses the enduring significance of innovation in government as practiced by public servants, documented by innovation awards, analyzed by scholars, and discussed by the media.
The Persistence of Innovation in Government is written by Sandford Borins, a professor of strategic management at the Department of Management at the University of Toronto Scarborough, who is also cross-appointed to the University’s Rotman School of Management.
Published by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Brookings Institution Press, the book is based on Prof. Borins’s comparative analysis of applications to the Harvard Kennedy School’s Innovations in American Government Awards in 2010, combining significant new research with a fresh look at the findings of his earlier, highly-praised book Innovating with Integrity: How Local Heroes are Transforming American Government (1998). Offering a detailed, thematic survey of the field’s burgeoning scholarly literature The Persistence of Innovation in Government maps the changing landscape of American public sector innovation in the twenty-first century and compares it to that of other countries.
“Innovation is everywhere: federal, state and municipal governments are all well represented,” says Prof. Borins. “While we might expect that most innovations are launched by politicians or agency heads, an unexpected finding in my research was that a large proportion, approximately half of the innovations, were developed by frontline employees and middle managers.”
Probing both the process and the content of innovation in the public sector, Prof. Borins identifies major shifts and important continuities, including:
•the increasing frequency of inter-organizational collaboration,
•the increasing frequency and diversity of evaluation of innovations,
•the growing media and scholarly attention to innovations, and
•considerable continuity in the process of innovation.
He charts the implications of these findings as well as the influence of emergent policy agendas and the new culture of performance measurement on innovation. And he returns to perennial questions: Who innovates? When? Why? How? What are the persistent obstacles to innovation? What are the proven tactics and strategies for anticipating and overcoming them? He also provides a statistical explanation of the determinants of recognition, including the Innovations in American Government Awards, for public sector innovation– findings which will be of particular interest to past, current, or prospective applicants.
The book concludes with a challenge to practitioners and academics alike to exploit the potential of innovation awards data to further our understanding of two key phenomena: “serial innovators” and “hotbeds of innovation,” that is individual public sector agents who repeatedly and successfully innovate and jurisdictions or agencies that do likewise.
Sandford Borins is a professor of strategic management at the University of Toronto and a research fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, Harvard Kennedy School. His previous books include Governing Fables: Learning from Public Sector Narratives (2011) and Innovating with Integrity: How Local Heroes Are Transforming American Government (1998), and he is the editor of Innovation in Government: Research, Recognition, and Replication (Brookings/Ash Center, 2008).
The Persistence of Innovation in Government is the eighth volume in the Innovative Governance in the 21st Century series, a project that examines important issues of governance, public policy, and administration, highlighting innovative practices and original research worldwide, co-published by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation and the Brookings Institution Press.
The Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto is redesigning business education for the 21st century with a curriculum based on Integrative Thinking. Located in the world’s most diverse city, the Rotman School fosters a new way to think that enables the design of creative business solutions. For more information, visit www.rotman.utoronto.ca.
-30-
For more information:
Ken McGuffin
Manager, Media Relations
Rotman School of Management
University of Toronto
Voice 416.946.3818
E-mail mcguffin@rotman.utoronto.ca
Follow Rotman on Twitter @rotmanschool
Watch Rotman on You Tube www.youtube.com/rotmanschool