The government’s plans for citizen empowerment set out in Building Britain’s Future have rightly grabbed media attention, but it’s by focusing on public sector innovation that the government could have the greatest effect on our public services.
The mismatch between increasing public spending and falling public sector productivity highlights the fact that the public sector still has a long way to go if it is to become consistently innovative. Whilst there have been some outstanding innovations in the public sector – eg NHS Direct, the Open University to name but two – these are the exception rather than the rule.
And while the ministerial commitment to innovation is welcome, it won’t – on its own – be enough to overhaul the culture in which public servants work that has held innovation back for so long.
A greater willingness to engage the public (and others, such as businesses or academia) in the exchange of ideas is vital, but without a public sector that can respond effectively, failure to exploit this flow of ideas runs the risk of simply leading to further disillusionment and disengagement.
By looking at the best innovators in the private sector, it is clear that the public sector needs to go further in changing the way it manages itself so that it becomes better at innovating in a systemic manner.
A more mature attitude to risk (and indeed, failure) – by both our parliamentarians and our public sector leaders – is necessary, as is a more creative approach to recruiting and rewarding public servants for innovative actions and behaviours. A more empowered and less bureaucratic approach to management is needed if the public sector is to come up with the solutions to today’s problems, let alone tomorrow’s.
These challenges are real and they are substantial; with the current fiscal outlook, holding back on making major changes to the way the public sector works risks it being unable to maintain the current level of service, and will make it impossible to meet the rising demands that societal expectations and trends require.
Gill Hunter
Director, innovation, strategy & change, Avail Consulting
Gill Hunter’s examples are of radical public service innovations – new services or radically new ways of delivering services – thus downplaying the incremental innovation which certainly does happen in public services. But whether we seek radical changes or incremental improvements, promoting innovation in the public sector is not simply a matter of changing attitudes to risk or failure (the public sector has developed these attitudes for good reasons – and it also doesn’t help that the term ‘innovation’ is synonymous in the public sector with disruptive top-down change for change’s sake).
A more profound challenge is that the whole conceptual toolkit with which governments and analysts alike think about public sector activity is based around static notions of ‘efficiency’ which are inimical to innovation. Even process innovations which may cut costs in the medium term require experimentation to begin with. It is certainly necessary to be prepared to see failed experiments as sources of learning but to even have the chance to experiment to begin with you need ‘slack’ in terms of time and resources. How likely is this to be forthcoming in the current circumstances?