A Typology of Approaches to Public Sector Innovation
By Lindsay Cole + Francisca Rojas
This blog post is part of the Pushing the Boundaries of Public Sector Innovation (PB PSI) community of practice (CoP). We are people working in- and alongside public sector organizations who share a curiosity and commitment to work more ambitiously, systemically, and respectfully on the biggest social and ecological challenges of our time. These posts are written from the diverse perspectives of different members of the CoP as we learn and explore together. Find out more about the project and/or join the CoP, here.
Context Setting
Public sector innovation (PSI) units and labs are proliferating in all levels of government, all around the world. The field is adapting in a variety of interesting and important ways — labs are opening, shapeshifting, and sunsetting; innovation challenges are getting increasingly diverse; methods and approaches continue to shift and expand; innovation work is becoming more diffuse and embedded; and researchers and network-serving organizations are supporting the work. As the field grows in extent and diversity, there is an opportunity and responsibility for us to grow in our maturity and impact as practitioners and as a movement. To gather up and share what we know. To be honest about what we don’t yet know and the questions that we are holding. To lift and hold each other up as leaders and practitioners in the important work of public sector innovation and transformation. To be strategic, skillful, and reflective about what our ‘innovation’ work actually means, and what vision of the present/future we are contributing to (note: innovation models like three horizons, two loops, and the adaptive cycle are helpful here).
A Typology of Approaches to Public Sector Innovation
The typology below aims to contribute to our maturation and movement-building as a field by articulating a contemporary framework of different public sector innovation approaches that we observe are currently in use by practitioners. We think that this will be helpful when exploring different theories of change that public sector innovators are using to strategically orient and implement their work. We define and illustrate a framework of eight approaches that PSI units/labs/initiatives use and describe them in terms of purpose, orientation to government, accountability, and methods and skills.
This framework draws from work of those that have come before (see footnote 1), theory, research articles, and practice-based insights from interviews we conducted in 2022 along with our colleagues Terrence Smith and Justin Entzminger, as part of a Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation at Johns Hopkins University project. Through that effort we had the pleasure of interviewing about forty public sector innovation practitioners, most of whom were working in/with local governments in cities around the world (see footnote 2).
We — as applied researchers — think it’s important to say that we think that the public sector needs more of all of these approaches to innovation. Different practitioners will have different views about which of these approaches may be ‘better’ based on the nature of the challenges we’re tackling as well as our training, experience, expertise, comfort zones, biases, blind spots, ambitions, vision, context, and many other factors. And this difference is great as it generates helpful contestation and debate that — when harnessed — can lead to important collective benefits for the field.
Many PSI initiatives have a primary type that they identify with, and then often mix-and-match from other approaches based on their own preferences, skill sets, and experiences, and to adjust to different project conditions, constraints and opportunities. Some public sector innovation initiatives have shifted away from their original model/approach if it became untenable, unsupported, or ineffective for some reason and they needed to adapt in order to be able to continue. We saw this flexible, shapeshifting quality in action particularly when initiatives work across the silos of government, when practitioners’ capability to apply innovation methods expands and diversifies, when a funding, political, or other significant pressure required adaptation, and when accountabilities shift and expand to include a larger collection of actors both within and beyond the public sector.
What’s important here is that we’re maturing in all of these approaches in ways that are skillful, strategic, appropriate, and effective in the unique contexts that each of us are working in. It is important that these different approaches are legible and available to us when we need to adapt in response to constantly shifting conditions, collaborators, opportunities, and constraints that we now know is an important factor influencing our work over time. It’s important that each of us is doing the very best that we can with the opportunities, agency, access, skills, and abilities that we have at a particular moment in time. We believe that, as a field, if we get clearer and more discerning about the approach(es) to innovation that we are choosing and why, that this will increase the credibility, legibility, and impact of our work and field.
Five things that we noticed about the typology-in-action
Based on the 2022 interviews, as well as on reviewing literature from thought leaders in the field and engaging with our own diverse experiences from practice, we noticed some interesting and helpful things about how practitioners would/could engage with these approaches in their practice. We offer these in hopes that they might spark some purposeful discussions within your teams and communities, as well as within the larger field and in our Pushing the Boundaries Community of Practice.
- These different approaches capture what practitioners are doing more accurately than using one generic “lab” or “innovation team” label to reflect all of the different theories of change, strategies, methods, etc. that they’re applying to public innovation work. They also provide more precise descriptions of how teams develop a shared purpose, vision, strategy and outcomes alongside their stakeholders and partners. The field has progressed and our language needs to support this development and discernment.
- By articulating these approaches, this opens up different, legitimate, and tested options for innovators to explore as they begin a new initiative and/or evolve their practice. It also provides strategic options to pivot an initiatives’ approach when the one that they are using is no longer fit for purpose by providing context for understanding how and why different enabling conditions impact (positively and negatively) our innovation work.
- This suggests different ways of thinking about who and what innovation leadership looks, feels, and behaves like and to identify what people, theories, methods, and skills may be missing or needed on an innovation team in order to best respond to changing conditions and different opportunities.
- This helps practitioners using similar approaches to find each other, compare practice, co-develop methods appropriate to their approach, share stories, describe their unique impacts and outcomes, and generally to learn from one another in ways that are most appropriate and helpful for what they want and need.
- This helps network-serving organizations to develop/adapt the resources and services that they provide to be better suited to what practitioners using these different approaches want and need.
In Closing
We hope that this typology of innovation approaches makes a useful contribution to pushing the boundaries of public sector innovation. We hope that it is a generous gift of seeing more options for our work and for the field. We hope that it offers multiple entry points for those that are joining us in this movement. We hope that it provides you with some different language to use in describing your work, and that it opens up different ideas and possibilities for collaboration. Perhaps it is a pathway to inviting new funding collaborations. It will very likely help us all with devising better ways to evaluate, measure, learn from, and tell stories about our impacts and outcomes. We look forward to hearing from you about your experiments with this typology, and to seeing what the next iteration of this work brings to the field.
Authors
Lindsay Cole, PhD (she/her) is a public sector innovation practitioner, an applied and action researcher, and an educator currently working as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with both the University of British Columbia, and with Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
Francisca Rojas, PhD (she/her) is the Academic Director for the Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation at Johns Hopkins where she leverages nearly 20 years of experience to connect cutting edge research with city hall practice and help leaders create better results for communities.
Footnotes:
- There are many practitioners and researchers that have shaped this thinking about typologies, and this recent article tracks (some of) this lineage.
2. A summary of the trends we identified after completing these interviews in 2022 is available in the short BCPI publication “Public Innovation: 6 Ways Local Governments are Breaking Boundaries”.
