Making innovation the rule, not the exception.

• Author: Kavanagh, Shayne C.
• Position: The Public Innovator's Playbook: Nurturing Bold Ideas in Government - Book review

The Public Innovator's Playbook: Nurturing Bold Ideas in Government

By William D. Eggers and Shalabh Kumar Singh

Deloitte Development LLC

2009, 155 pages

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Governments face a "new normal" economic reality of decreased revenues and permanent cutbacks in consumer spending, while demands on government service are not abating. Innovation is essential to adapting to these new conditions.

The Public Innovator's Playbook is dedicated to helping make innovation the rule rather than the exception in government. This requires an organizational culture that supports sustained innovation and a defined and managed process for creating innovation and bringing new ideas to fruition. Eggers' and Singh's aim is to make innovation a regular feature of public service, rather than relying on innovation-in-response-to-crisis or the occasional special project supported by particularly enthusiastic and capable individuals.

Public managers who share the authors' goal will need to develop and institutionalize dedicated processes to generate ideas, select the best ones, implement them, and spread the benefits throughout the organization. Along they way, public managers will need to use a variety of implementation strategies, including those that rely on the organization's own resources and those that seek to harness resources from outside. Finally, they will have to create an organizational culture that is not just conducive to innovation but actively encourages and even demands it.

The Public Innovator's Playbook argues that innovation is a "discipline, just like strategy, planning, or budgeting." Therefore, the book presents three aspects of the discipline of innovation and illustrates them with an arsenal of examples. These three aspects are: the innovation process; the strategies of innovation; and the innovation organization.

THE INNOVATION PROCESS

The authors describe the innovation process as a cycle with four phases:

* Idea Generation. Consistently coming up with good ideas first requires defining meaningful shared goals for the organization. Next, methods for coming up with new ideas to meet the goals must be institutionalized. This might include initiating employee suggestion programs, carefully examining the practices of other organizations, and working with clients to understand their perspectives and reaping the creativity that can come from taking the view of the customer.

* Idea Selection. A transparent idea evaluation process...