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418768
rensen and TorfingAdministration & Society
2011 SAGE Publications
AAS43810.1177/0095399711418768S
Enhancing Collaborative
Innovation in the
Public Sector
Abstract
Encouraged by the proliferation of governance networks and the growing
demands for public innovation, this article aims to advance collaborative
innovation as a cross-disciplinary approach to studying and enhancing public innovation. The article explains the special conditions and the growing
demand for public innovation, and demonstrates how it can be enhanced
through multiactor collaboration. The case for collaborative innovation is
supported by insights from three different social science theories. The theoretical discussion leads to the formulation of an analytical model that can be
used in future studies of collaborative innovation in the public sector.
Keywords
public innovation, collaboration, governance networks, metagovernance
Introduction
The recognition of the limits of traditional forms of topdown government
in the face of the growing fragmentation, complexity, and dynamism of contemporary societies has prompted the proliferation of interactive forms of
governance through networks and partnerships (Heffen, Kickert, & Thomassen,
2000; Heinrich, Lynn, & Milward, 2009; Kooiman, 1993). Although interaction between public and private actors is hardly a new phenomenon and
1
Corresponding Author:
Eva Srensen, Department of Society and Globalisation, Roskilde University,
Universitetsvej 1, P.O. Box 260, DK-4000 Roskilde, Denmark
Email: eva@ruc.dk
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temporal horizons for strategic action (Jessop, 2002). The attempt to close the
gap between the official governance ambitions and the actual performance of
public policy programs calls for innovation.
Third, public policy researchers tend to agree that a growing number of
public policy tasks involve wicked problems that are ill-defined, difficult to
respond to, require specialized knowledge, involve a large number of stakeholders, and carry a high potential for conflicts (Koppenjan & Klijn, 2004).
The need for policy instruments that can enhance sustainable development,
reduce lifestyle-related illnesses and augment public safety is a case in
point. These wicked policy problems cannot be solved simply by throwing
more money or standard solutions at them; rather, they require innovative
policy solutions.
The urgent need for public innovation should not blind us to the fact that
the public sectorin its classical, bureaucratic formcontains a number of
barriers to public innovation (Halvorsen, Hauknes, Miles, & Rste, 2005;
Rste, 2005). As such, it is often asserted that the strong adherence to legal
and bureaucratic rules and the lack of competition and economic incentives
in terms of patents and bonus payments tend to stifle public sector innovation
(Borins, 2001; Kelman, 2005). Another problem is that public services are
relatively complex, multifunctional, and based on statutory rights and, therefore, difficult to alter without causing all kinds of problems (Hartley, 2005).
A third problem is the proliferation of performance indicators that tend to
prevent innovation, especially when they are focusing on input and output
measures (Newman et al., 2001). Finally, the public sector is governed by
elected politicians and public managers who are risk-aversive because failures will often receive intensive media coverage that might ruin their careers
(Borins, 2001).
That being said, we should remember that there are also important and
distinctive drivers of innovation in the public sector. The size of the public
sector and its ability to absorb the costs of failure might help to reduce riskaversive behavior. Moreover, the recent introduction of competitive pressures,
strategic management, and a more rigorous measuring of outcomes tends to
force public agencies to change established rules, norms, and routines. As
such, there is no doubt that New Public Management has spurred public innovation, despite the backdrops mentioned above. However, the most important
drivers of public innovation relate to the actors involved in public governance
and service production. Politicians can make a political career on the basis of
new and successful innovations. Public managers and employees are relatively
well-educated people who are driven by professional values and ambitions that
prompt them to improve the content and performance of the programs that
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they are responsible for. In fact, the new innovation agenda provides a golden
opportunity for public employees to mobilize their professional knowledge
and competence that recently has been suppressed by New Public Management
reforms aiming to enforce rigid performance standards. Last but not least,
the customers in terms of users of public services are much more actively
engaged in raising demands, providing critical feedback, and coproducing
solutions than the customers in private markets.
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851
Dissemination of
new practices
Implementation
of new ideas
Generation
of ideas
Selection
of ideas
the quality of public services, and there are crucial trade-offs between these
different objectives.
Innovation is a complex, nonlinear, and iterative process. However, as
shown in Figure 1, we can identify four constitutive phases in the innovation
cycle (Eggers & Singh, 2009).
Generation of ideas. This involves the development, presentation, and crossfertilization of ideas, but the generation of ideas presupposes the identification
of problems and opportunities, the clarification of relevant goals and values,
and the questioning of long-held assumptions.
Selection of ideas. This involves decisions about ideas that are worth pursuing. Ideally, ideas should be big, bold, and transformative, and at the same time,
feasible, flexible, and broadly accepted among the key stakeholders. As such,
negotiation, compromise formation, and conflict settlement are key features of
the idea selection.
Implementation of new ideas. This involves conversion of ideas into new
procedures, practices, and services. Changing existing patterns of behavior is
a difficult task that requires the exercise of leadership, the construction of
ownership, and the creation of positive incentives. As many things can go
wrong in the implementation phase, public innovators must be prepared to
deal with uncertainties, unforeseen problems, and temporary setbacks.
Dissemination of new practices. This involves the spread of innovation
throughout an organization or from one organization to another. Spreading
innovative practices requires highlighting the gains obtained by first movers,
establishing contacts to potential followers, overcoming standard objections
such as we do not need any changes and this is not invented here, and
adopting innovative concepts to new and different circumstances.
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The four phases do not always follow neatly after each other, but are often
rearranged, combined, mutually integrated, and repeated in and through a
series of complex feedback loops (Van de Ven et al., 2007). However, the four
phases are key components in the complex, nonlinear, and often messy processes of innovation.
With this in mind, we can now advance our main claim, which is that each
of the constitutive phases in the innovation cycle can be strengthened through
collaboration between relevant and affected actors from the public and private
sector. Our first proposition is that the generation of ideas is spurred when
different experiences and ideas are circulated, challenged, transformed, and
expanded through multiactor collaboration that facilitate mutual learning. Our
second proposition is that the selection of ideas is improved when actors with
different perspectives and forms of knowledge participate in a joint assessment of the content and the potential gains and risks of competing ideas. In
addition, collaborative interaction will facilitate the formation of compromise
and agreement, so that stalemates are prevented and the role of veto players
is mitigated. Our third proposition is that the implementation of the selected
ideas is enhanced when collaboration creates joint ownership to new and bold
initiatives, so that implementation resistance is reduced. Collaboration in the
implementation phase also helps to mobilize resources, ensure flexible adjustments, and compensate eventual losers. Our final proposition is that the dissemination of innovative practices in the public sector is propelled by the
formation of social and professional networks. Networks with strong ties
have a short reach but provide a strong mutual support, whereas networks with
weak ties have a longer reach but a high potential for disseminating novel
ideas (Granovetter, 1973).
The positive impact of collaboration on innovation is not only confirmed
in studies of innovation in private firms (Powell & Grodal, 2004) but also in
empirical analyses of public sector innovation. Hence, a meta-analysis of
studies of organizational innovation shows that diversity among the involved
actors and a high level of internal and external communication has a positive
impact on innovation in both public and private organization (Damanpour,
1991). Moreover, the analysis of innovative projects submitted to a national
innovation award program in the United States reveals that 60% of the projects were generated through interorganizational collaboration (Borins, 2001).
A number of qualitative case studies confirm the conclusion about the positive impact of collaboration on public innovation. First, the analysis of stakeholder collaboration in the area of school policy at the state level shows that
collaboration has a positive impact on policy innovation, although the participants in the collaborative process were constrained by their constituencies
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cocreators from around the world to help solving a specific problem. It goes
without saying that the choice between the different collaboration strategies
depends on the time and place, the character of the innovation challenge, and
the experiences and capacities of the public agency aiming to facilitate collaborative innovation.
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Anthony Downs (1967) tends to conceive the high degree of stability in public
bureaucracies as a perennial problem because it prevents a dynamic adaptation
of the public sector to societal changes and new conditions for public governance. According to Downs, public bureaucracies tend to become bigger and
bigger, and large-scale public bureaucracies have great difficulties bringing
about change because they spend all their energy and resources on internal
coordination and external boundary wars. In Downs own words, public
bureaucracies become increasingly ossified.
This criticism of public bureaucracies was a key driver in the development
of Public Choice theory (Niskanen, 1987) and the tidal wave of New Public
Management reforms that from the late 1980s onwards have aimed to reduce
and transform the public sector (Pollitt & Bouckaert, 2004). The key ambition
of New Public Management was partly to increase the use of market-driven
governance mechanisms based on competition and free consumer choice to
create a more dynamic and flexible public sector, and partly to develop new
and more effective forms of public management based on performance contracts and performance-related salaries that aim to enhance the motivation
and entrepreneurial spirit of the public managers and their employees (Hood,
1991). However, seen from a public innovation perspective, New Public
Management has two clear limitations: (a) It builds on a dogmatic assertion
that the main source of efficiency-enhancing innovation comes from imitation
of the competitive logic in private sector and (b) it places the responsibility
for public sector innovation solely in the hands of the public managers.
Building on this criticism, the new theories of governance networks recommend that we take a more open and relational approach to the question of how
public innovation is enhanced. The new governance network theories developed in response to the growing complexity of modern society, and they claim
that public innovation can be enhanced through collaboration as well as competition (Kickert et al., 1997). As such, there are a host of actors such as public
managers, street-level bureaucrats, private stakeholders, and users who are
capable of providing important inputs to public innovation processes (Hartley,
2005; Vigoda, 2002). As such, the role of public managers is not to produce
public innovation all by themselves but rather to create, institutionalize, and
manage open and flexible arenas for collaborative interaction with other
relevant and affected actors (Nambisan, 2008). This kind of facilitating network management that aims to provide a political, institutional, and
discursive framework for collaborative innovation is exactly what the
new theories of network governance denotes metagovernance (Jessop,
2002; Srensen & Torfing, 2007, 2009). Metagovernance is defined as
the regulation of self-regulation, and it is here that public administration
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Discursive
problematization
Initial conditions
Macro
Institutional arenas of
interaction
Collaborative
innovation processes
Meso
Micro
Metagovernance
Hands-off
Hands-on
Public innovation
outputs
Empowered
participation
Mutual and
transformative
learning
Joint ownership
Cultural
Institutional
Inter Organizational
Organizational
Identity related
Policy
Organizational
Service
Evaluation
Standards
Method
Results
Public innovation is a result of open-ended and nonlinear processes of collaborative innovation. The study of the processes of collaborative innovation
will initially focus on the participation of empowered actors with different
identities, roles, and resources (March & Olsen, 1995). The active participation of politicians, administrators, experts, private organizations, and citizens
can be difficult to obtain and requires that the public and private actors can
make good sense of the transformative process, its purpose, and its underlying
premises (Wenger, 1998). However, it is not sufficient to study how the various actors are motivated to participate in communities of practice. We must
also analyze the conditions for the emergence of collaboration and the conditions for collaboration to spur innovation processes. With regard to the latter,
it is essential to study the processes of transformative learning. According to
Mezirow (2000), both instrumental and communicative learning may result
in an affirmative view of the world that tends to preserve status quo. Hence,
critical reflection is a decisive condition for the development of transformative learning processes that stimulate creative recombinations of old and new
ideas and practices. Critical reflection questions tacit assumptions, challenges
acquired habits, and aims to toss metaphors that facilitate new interpretations
and new ways of making sense of the world. Finally, we should analyze the
impact of collaboration in terms of the development of a joint ownership to
860
new and bold ideas that will help to overcome implementation resistance and
ensure coordination and flexible adjustment of innovative practices. The participating actors ownership to new ideas and solutions depends on their active
participation in the innovation process, their ability to influence the process,
and the responsiveness of the other actors (Skelcher & Torfing, 2010).
The extent to which interdependent actors collaborate and use collaboration as a vehicle for public innovation is conditioned by a number of contextbound drivers and barriers that either stimulate or hamper the processes of
collaborative innovation. (Halvorsen et al., 2005) Examples of potential drivers would be the construction of policy or service problems with a great sense
of urgency, the presence of a strong interdependency between empowered
and committed actors, agreement on the overall mission and a high level of
mutual trust, and the likelihood of significant gains from public innovation.
The potential barriers can be divided into the following: (a) cultural barriers
prevalence of a legalistic, zero-error culture and predominance of paternalistic professional norms; (b) institutional barriersstrong separation of
politics and administration and use of inappropriate designs for dialogue
with users; (c) interorganizational barrierspredominance of bureaucratic
silos, boundary wars, and groupthink; (d) organizational barrierslack of focus
on innovation and absence of procedures for exploration and exploitation;
and (e) identity-related barriersthe identities of key stakeholders prevent
collaborative innovation.
The processes of collaborative innovation are embedded in institutional arenas of interaction that can be analyzed as governance networks. The institutional arenas of interaction provide rules, norms, routines, cognitive scripts,
and discourses that structure the actions of the social and political actors (March
& Olsen, 1995) and create particular patterns of interaction that can be analyzed by Social Network Analysis (Considine et al., 2009). In relatively selfregulating partnerships and networks, the actors negotiate and amend the
rules of the game, and the institutional arenas may, therefore, be gradually
transformed in the course of interaction.
The attempt to create and sustain institutional arenas of interaction that
facilitate collaboration and public innovation depends on a number of initial
conditions. At the macro level, there might be different traditions for stakeholder involvement in different countries and in different parts of the public
sector. At the meso level, there will often be different legal and institutional
conditions for participatory governance in different policy fields. At the
micro level, the presence of strong power resource asymmetries, the lack of
clear incentives, and negative past experiences with cooperation might prevent collaborative interaction (Ansell & Gash, 2007). Analyzing the impact
861
Conclusion
The proliferation of interactive forms of governance through networks and
partnerships and the rising demands for public innovation have prompted our
attempt to advance collaborative innovation as a cross-disciplinary paradigm
for enhancing public innovation. We have in this article argued against the
increasingly fashionable attempts to highlight the role of particular innovation
champions and instead drawn attention to the large and relatively unexplored
potential for enhancing public innovation through networked collaboration
of multiple stakeholders. As such, we have claimed that multiactor collaboration may facilitate the cocreation of new and promising ideas and forge a
joint ownership to these ideas so that they may be implemented in practice
and produce outcomes that are deemed valuable and desirable by the key
stakeholders. To sustain this claim, we have shown that collaboration may
strengthen all parts of the innovation process and pointed out a number of
different strategies for facilitating collaborative innovation. Our argument
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Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article:
The authors received funding to a large-scale project on Collaborative Innovation in
the Public Sector (CLIPS) from the Danish Council for Strategic Research.
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Bios
Eva Srensen is professor in Public Administration at Department of Society and
Globalisation, Roskilde University, and director of a large-scale research project on
Collaborative Innovation in the Public Sector (CLIPS). Her most recent publications
include Theories of Democratic Network Governance, Palgrave, 2007 (coedited with
Jacob Torfing) and The Politics of Self-Governance, Ashgate, 2009 (coedited with
Peter Triantafillou).
Jacob Torfing is professor in Politics and Institutions, Department of Society
and Globalisation, Roskilde University, and director of Center for Democratic
Network Governance. His most recent publications include Theories of Democratic
Network Governance, Palgrave, 2007 (coedited with Eva Srensen) and Interactive
Policy Making, Metagovernance and Democracy, ECPR Pres, 2011 (coedited with
Peter Triantafillou).