Public Management Innovation

• Author: Sandford Borins
• DOI: 10.1177/02750740122064802
• Published date: 01 March 2001
• Date: 01 March 2001
• Subject Matter: Articles

ARPA/March2001Borins/PUBLICMANAGEMENTINNOVATION

PUBLIC MANAGEMENT INNOVATION

Toward a Global Perspective

SANDFORD BORINS

University of Toronto

Previousresearch based on a sample of the best applications to the State and Local Government Innova-

tion Awards(1990-1994) identified the most frequently observed characteristics of public management

innovations: They are holistic, use new information technology, incorporate process improvements,

empower citizens and communities, and involve partnerships with the private sector. This sample also

demonstrated the importance of middle managers and front-line staff as initiators, indicated that the

innovations were more frequently a response to internal problems or opportunities than crises, and

showed that the innovations weremore frequently the result of planning than of Behn’s model of “grop-

ing along.” This research was replicatedwith three new samples of innovations: applications to the

Instituteof Public Administration of Canada’s public management innovation award, the Innovations in

American Government awards, and the Commonwealth Association for Public Administration and

Management innovation awards.Preliminary results for all three replications weresimilar to the origi-

nal study.

Previous researchpresented a portrait of public management innovators based on

a sample of 217 of the best applications to the Ford Foundation–KennedySchool of

Government(Ford-KSG) State and Local Government Innovation Awardsbetween

1990 and 1994 (Borins, 1998). Some of the most significant (and, to some scholars,

counterintuitive) findings were the following:

•The most frequently observed characteristics of the innovations are that they are

holistic (requiring organizations to work together and/or providing multiple services

to clients), use new information technology, incorporate process improvements,

empower citizens and communities, and involvepartnerships with the private sector.

These characteristics are broadly consistent with the 10 principles of reinventinggov-

ernment set out by Osborne and Gaebler (1992).

•Even though the standard model of public bureaucracy emphasizes the existence of

stringent central agency constraints on entrepreneurship and innovation to minimize

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The financial support of the Innovations in American Government awards pro-

gram, the cooperation of the Commonwealth Association for Public Administration and Management,

and the research assistance of Christian Castelli, Lidia Kocovski, Marianna Marysheva, Jim

Michopoulos, Marina Ninkovic, Salim Rajwani, and David Wolf are all gratefully acknowledged.

Initial Submission: January 1, 2000

Accepted: June 6, 2000

AMERICAN REVIEW OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION,Vol. 31 No. 1, March 2001 5-21

© 2001 Sage Publications, Inc.

5

corruption and ensure due process, innovations were most frequently initiated by

middle managers and front-line workers rather than politicians and agency heads.

•Despite the conventionalwisdom that innovations in the public sector occur primarily

in response to publicly visible crises (Wilson, 1966), innovations were more fre-

quently a response to internal problems or opportunities for improvingperformance.

•Innovations were much more frequently the result of a planning process than a grop-

ing process toward goals that were initially loosely defined.

Recently, this research has been replicated with other samples to determine

whether the results are applicable more widely than to state and local governmentin

the United States. This article reports on the replication of the original study with

three new samples. Although the original book covereda wider range of issues, this

article will focus on the four results mentioned above. The article beginswith a dis-

cussion of methods and data and then moves to comparative results.

METHOD AND DATA

The academic literature on innovation distinguishes between invention,the cre-

ation of a new idea, and innovation,the adoption of an existing idea for the first time

by a given organization (Rogers, 1995, pp. 174-175). Public management innova-

tion awards do not recognize new butunproven ideas; they choose the best applica-

tions on the basis of results and replication as well as originality. Ideally, the win-

ning applications will be relatively recent inventions that have been in operation

long enough to show results and be replicated. If the diffusion of an innovation is

represented by a logistic (S-shaped) curve with time on the horizontal access and

the percentage of the relevant community using the innovationon the vertical axis,

then the judges of innovation competitions are attempting to give awards to pro-

grams on the lower part of the curve. Because they are making the awardrelatively

early in the life of the innovation, they are predicting that future adoption of the

innovation will trace out a rising logistic curve.

Any policy area will have a number of innovationsspreading more or less rap-

idly throughout its population of agencies at any given time. Because innovation

awards either do not limit applications by theme or define their themes quite gener-

ally (e.g., service to the public), the set of the best applications to an award will

include innovations in many different policy areas. The common denominator is

that they are at relatively early points in the diffusion process. If an innovation

award is well-known, the applications it receives will represent a good sample of

innovative activity in all policy areas.

The original sample of state and local government innovations between 1990

and 1994 was taken from semifinalists in the Ford-KSG State and Local Govern-

ment Innovation Awards, as the competition was then called. From the approxi-

mately 1,500 initial applications that are received each year, juries consisting of

academics and practitioners with expert knowledge of the relevant policy areas

choose 75 semifinalists who represent each policy area in the same proportion as in

6 ARPA / March 2001