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Posts Tagged ‘Welfare’

Christian Bason

Public sector innovation must move from Strategy to action

By Christian Bason November 25th 2011

This blog has previously been published in the Danish newspaper “Monday Morning”.

Innovation strategies are currently being developed throughout the public sector – including in the government. This is encouraging and long overdue. But the challenge will be to create strategies that lead to innovation in practice. The following presents a little more than five examples of what this means.

 “Can you give me some concrete examples of innovation for our coming strategy process?” (city manager). “Can you give a presentation to provide inspiration to our strategic work with innovation, now that we are a free municipality?” (development director). “We are finalising our innovation strategy, but what can we do about the incentive structure?” (municipal development consultant). These are examples of enquiries I receive from the municipalities. At the moment, I hear them almost daily.

Right now, interest in innovation in the public sector – particularly in the municipalities ­– is rapidly growing. This topic has certainly been on the agenda for years. But it is no longer a matter of isolated projects or initiatives. Innovation is now a strategic agenda that has the undivided attention of top management – both in the municipalities and national government. After the election, the victorious parties have set a national innovation strategy in its programme.

It is nothing new that the government will propose initiatives to boost research, development, productivity and growth in Danish companies. But it is new that a national strategy for innovation also includes the public sector. And it’s good timing – not just in relation to developments in the municipalities, but also in relation to the world around us. Other countries are already in full swing. If the government establishes a strategy, it will place us in the current of countries such as Australia and Sweden, who in recent months have adopted ambitious action plans to promote innovation in the public sector. For example, Canberra passed an Australian Public Service Innovation Action Plan.

The need for a more strategic and systematic approach to public innovation has rarely been greater. The challenges are many, whether we are speaking of education, employment, health or even productivity in the public sector. As shown by the municipal leaders’ statements above, the question is not whether innovation is needed, but rather how we will choose to approach the task of innovation. So what key considerations must a public sector innovation strategy include if it is to make a difference? Here are five questions:

  1. What should the strategy be about? In my book, “Leading Public Sector Innovation” (Policy Press, 2010), I emphasise that a good public innovation strategy requires direction. What key challenges must the strategy specifically focus on? What significant national, regional or municipal initiatives will we invest in to increase the probability of finding truly radical, innovative solutions? What should comprise the strategy’s portfolio?
  2. How will we work with innovation? Which means, methods and processes should the strategy utilise? For example, will we emphasise new technology, research, employee-driven innovation, or strengthening the involvement of citizens and businesses? Or will we use a mix of these? Are we seeking incremental or radical innovation? Do we even have a clear idea of these different forms of innovation? Do we have the competences to use them?
  3. Who must be involved? Innovation is made possible from the top, but is executed from below. Should the strategy primarily involve stakeholders in the public sector, or should there be a collaboration between a range of state, regional and municipal organisations, private companies, NGOs, or citizens themselves? What activities can ensure that the involvement happens in practice and that it focuses on practical, effective solutions rather than special interests?
  4. How will we measure the success of the strategy? Public innovation occurs when new ideas are implemented and create value for society. The bottom line is completely different from that of the private sector. Or rather, bottom lines. There are four in all: Productivity, service experience, effects, and democracy. Are some of these dimensions to be prioritised more than others? How will we continually document that the strategy delivers results?
  5. Where will the strategy be rooted? Where will we embed the strategy in the organisation so that we both secure top management focus and a broad commitment? How and by whom is it to be executed and what governance structures will ensure that it happens?

In fact, there is a sixth question that may be the most difficult of them all. When the Australian government announced its new innovation strategy back in May, I received an e-mail from one of its key advisors. “They’ve even included ‘courage’!” he wrote. The Australians thereby point out that strong and courageous leadership is essential if we want to translate innovation to action. How will we choose to approach this challenge?

Jesper Christiansen

Should we aim to create urbanity in public governance?

By Jesper Christiansen June 25th 2009

How to think about change in the public sector: thoughts from the CBS-conference ’Contemporary Issues in Public Management’

The urban city is often presented as a place of significant segmentality which makes self-presentation a complex matter with varied ways of making one known to others. It is not only a place with segregation of roles in different groups and networks. It also segregates moral judgements. In the city people can, at least situationally, slip out of their existing social settings and participate in different groups and partnerships with different expectations and values (see Hannerz 1980). In this respect, urbanity provides an interesting frame of thought when trying to grasp the concept of change in the public sector.

The public welfare sector is often seen as a problematic and unlikely place for significant change and innovation. The way forward is by many claimed to be based on the creation of new partnerships which are able to combine and take advantage of different competences in close interaction and cooperation. This is thought of both in terms of public-private innovation partnerships and public-public partnerships between different public actors.

In both cases, the new organizational setting aims to develop new possible solutions which the different actors otherwise wouldn’t be able to develop. And in both cases, the goal is to enhance what Professor Garth M. Britton at the CBS-conference ’Contemporary Issues in Public Management’ called ‘change capability’. He understood this as an individual’s or organizational group’s “capability to change capabilities”.

Central to his argument was that he saw public value as the basic strategic driver for the partnerships aiming to change the public sector. He argued for an understanding of the relevant units and linkages between them in terms of values, operational and administrative capability, and the authorizing environment. As he puts it: “The interrelationships between formal and informal actors in chains of public value creation (complex and fluid) are a fundamental source of adaptability and change capabilities”.

One of the issues of these interrelationships is the question of agenda and experience of the actors involved. Going into a partnership which has a new, defined purpose gives possibilities in terms of generating new roles and identifications in the particular partnership. However, this process is difficult if existing professional agendas are strictly maintained in the partnership and the individual thus feel a strong obligation to keep certain ideas about for instance work practice. In other words, the interrelationships of one individual can collide with each other when he or she has to take different agendas into account.

This issue was among other things the concern of Adina Dudau who in her presentation at the CBS-conference focused on the interactive identities in welfare partnerships. Her argument evolved around negotiation when public or public-private actors cooperate about the change of welfare issues as it depends on one or more of the interdependent levels of motivation. The catalysts and obstacles of the partnership are to be found in the ‘complex whole’ consisting of individuals, professions and organisations. The most productive and innovative partnership, she argued, occurred when the partnership worked as a new established organization and a ‘cross professional identity’ was created. In comparison, longer standing organizations tended to be more resistant to change.

So that creates a dilemma. On one side you want to draw upon the existing experience of the different actors, but on the other you want to have them forget where they came from in order to abolish existing ties and make worth of their experience in the new organizational setting.

This leads us back to the concept of urbanity. For the urban individual it is legitimate and accepted when he or she separates his or her engagement in different networks and groups without making one known to the other. Whether you are a representative of a company or a public unit you are in the same way participating in different types of network with different levels of importance to your main work place. The difference is that here you are often obliged to keep your main role which make your participation on other networks a complex matter.

To think urban living into innovation partnerships is interesting because it leads to following questions: what if the individual participating in a welfare innovation partnership wasn’t confronted with his or her particular role in that partnership? What if the only parameter of moral judgement was the one inside the partnership? What if innovation in the public sector becomes a matter of temporary roles in new established organizations and cross-professional identities instead a matter of doubt in terms of confronting the new establishment with one’s existing organizational setting?

Christian Bason

Rethinking government. Can anthropological research hold the key to public sector transformation?

By Christian Bason April 5th 2009

On April 6th, 7th and 8th MindLab is participating in the annual conference of the International Research Society for Public Management, IRSPM. The conference takes place in Denmark at the Copenhagen Business School, and is thus an obvious opportunity to share our perspectives on the future of the public sector and, not least, our current Ph.D. research.

MindLab is now hosting a total of three Ph.D. students – all of them with a background in anthropology and ethnology. Their fields of interest are quite different, however, ranging from sick leave reform to tax compliance, to public-private innovation processes.

Why do we believe that anthropological research can improve our understanding of what it takes to create more effective public services and policies? Let me just offer a single but powerful reason:

Anthropology can offer an outside-in perspective on the public sector. Anthropologists have a highly developed ability to immerse themselves in the subjective reality of life as it is lived. Not least, they go behind immediate attitudes, and examine actual practices, for instance through observation. Viewing the world of public sector interventions through the lens of citizens and enterprises holds a promise of showing us a different reality – a reality we need to understand if we want public policies to be sufficiently relevant to the groups they target. Although our projects are far from finished, I’ll try to share a taste of the themes they might address:

How does a major public sector reform unfold from top to bottom of the implementation chain, and how are the political objectives translated into concrete interactions between citizens and front line staff?

What are the concrete practices that shape tax compliance in small and medium sized enterprises, and how are they created?

Under what circumstances can cooperation between public and private actors unleash new social innovations?

I hope and expect that, in due course, you can read about the answers (and new questions) that this research raises. So stay tuned.