The Challenge of Innovating in Government - Strategia … The... · · 2006-02-01Five Innovation Building Blocks ... The report also contains an interesting discussion of where

The PricewaterhouseCoopers Endowment for

The Business of Government

The Challenge of Innovating

in Government

Sandford BorinsProfessor of Public ManagementUniversity of Toronto

I n n o v a t i o n s i n M a n a g e m e n t S e r i e s

February 2001

About The EndowmentThrough grants for Research and Thought Leadership Forums,The PricewaterhouseCoopers Endowment for The Business ofGovernment stimulates research and facilitates discussion onnew approaches to improving the effectiveness of governmentat the federal, state, local, and international levels.

Founded in 1998 by PricewaterhouseCoopers, The Endowmentis one of the ways that PricewaterhouseCoopers seeks toadvance knowledge on how to improve public sector effec-tiveness. The PricewaterhouseCoopers Endowment focuses on the future of the operation and management of the publicsector.



The Challenge of Innovating in Government 1

The Challenge of Innovating in Government

Sandford BorinsProfessor of Public Management

University of Toronto

February 2001

2 The Challenge of Innovating in Government


TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword ......................................................................................5

Executive Summary ......................................................................6

Introduction: The Case for Change ..............................................8Finding the Best: A Note on Methodology..............................9

Five Innovation Building Blocks..................................................11Building Block One: The Use of a Systems Approach ..........11Building Block Two: The Use of Information Technology ......13Building Block Three: Process Improvement ........................15Building Block Four: The Involvement of the Privateor Voluntary Sector ..............................................................16Building Block Five: The Empowerment of Communities, Citizens, or Staff ..................................................................17

Winning Hearts and Minds: Implementation Techniques ..........18Obstacles to Innovation........................................................18Overcoming Obstacles ........................................................21Obtaining Support for Innovation ........................................24

Who Innovates? A Challenge to Received Wisdom ....................27

Supporting Innovation ................................................................30Support Comes from the Top ................................................30Rewards and Awards for Innovation ....................................31Resources for Innovation ......................................................32Diversity and Innovation ......................................................32Learning from the Outside....................................................33Innovation Is Everyone’s Responsibility ................................33Experimentation and Evaluation ..........................................34

Conclusion and Recommendations ............................................35

Appendix: Research Methodology ..............................................38

References ..................................................................................40

About the Author........................................................................43

Key Contact Information ............................................................44



ForewordFebruary 2001

On behalf of The PricewaterhouseCoopers Endowment for The Business of Government, we are pleased to present this report by Professor Sandford Borins, “The Challenge of Innovating in Government.”

The report presents excellent advice to aspiring government innovators on how they can overcome obstacles to innovating in government. The report is unique in that it is based on surveys of over 300 government reformers around the world who have received awards for their innovations. Professor Borinssurveyed innovators who have been recognized for their achievements either by the Innovations inAmerican Government program, sponsored by the Ford Foundation and the Kennedy School ofGovernment, or the Commonwealth Association for Public Administration and Management internationalinnovations award program. This study thus provides cross-cultural perspectives on innovation.

In the report, Professor Borins analyzes the key features that define the characteristics of an innovativeorganization and describes common obstacles to innovation and techniques for overcoming those obsta-cles. The report also contains an interesting discussion of where innovations within organizations are likelyto occur. Finally, Professor Borins provides advice to government leaders on how they can create support-ive environments for innovation within their organizations.

We trust that this report will be a highly useful resource for all government managers and leaders who wishto foster innovation in their organizations.

Paul Lawrence Ian LittmanPartner, PricewaterhouseCoopers Partner, PricewaterhouseCoopersCo-Chair, Endowment Advisory Board Co-Chair, Endowment Advisory [email protected] [email protected]




In contrast to the institutions and incentives thatencourage innovation in the private sector, the pub-lic sector traditionally has tended to discourageinnovation. It does not provide seed money forinnovations or bonuses for innovators. While therewards for successful innovation are meager, theconsequences of unsuccessful innovation are grave.Stringent central agency controls also constrainpublic servants’ innovativeness. The objective ofthis report is to find ways to change the traditionalbias against innovation in the public sector.

The report uses as its database large samples ofapplications to two major public managementinnovation awards, one in the United States andthe other in the Commonwealth. The experience ofthese innovators is analyzed to develop recommen-dations for aspiring public sector innovators. Theappendix discusses the research methodology indetail to show that these applications can be con-sidered representative of successful public manage-ment innovation in both advanced and developingcountries.

The five major characteristics of these successfulinnovations are:

• the use of a systems approach

• the use of new information technology

• process improvement

• the involvement of the private or voluntary sectors

• empowerment of communities, citizens, or staff

These characteristics have a number of sub-themesas well — for example, “process improvement”includes applications of the Pareto (80-20) rule,user pay mechanisms, voluntary compliance, andalternative dispute resolution. Innovators will oftenapply these characteristics as building blocks inresponse to complex problems. These buildingblocks are flexible and scalable, and transcend pol-icy areas and national public services or cultures.

After planning an innovation, it is essential to mapout the steps necessary to implement it. The sam-ples of innovations present a wide variety of obstacles, including those that arise within thebureaucracy, at the political level, and outside thepublic sector. These obstacles generate a set ofquestions innovators should ask themselves regard-ing the cost of the innovation and the availability of resources, the innovation’s legal mandate, thecapacity of organizations expected to deliver theinnovation, the attitudes of occupational groupsthat will be involved in the innovation, the implica-tions of using a new technology, opposition by cen-tral agencies, difficulties reaching the target group,and public skepticism or opposition.

There are many possible responses to these obsta-cles. The two most often used in our sample are,broadly defined, persuasion — showing the bene-fits of an innovation — and accommodation of theconcerns of skeptics. Strong-arm tactics were usedvery infrequently. Successful innovators display anability to take objections seriously and respondappropriately. Specific sets of tactics are most likelyto correspond to each obstacle.

Executive Summary


There are a wide variety of potential supporters ofinnovations from one’s own agency, other agencies,the political level, and the world outside, and suc-cessful innovators mobilized many of them.

The data from both the U.S. and Commonwealthinnovation awards showed that frontline staff andmiddle managers are the most frequent initiators ofpublic management innovations. This is a surprisingresult, given the traditional impediments to innova-tions emanating from that level in the public sector.It leads to the question of how public sector orga-nizations can be made more supportive of suchinnovations.

There is a consensus on the characteristics of inno-vative organizations, whether in the private or pub-lic sectors. This last section of the report providesthe following advice (with examples) to managerswho would like to enhance the level of innovationin their organization and who have the authority todo so.

1. An innovative culture needs support from thetop. It can come in the form of establishingorganizational priorities to guide innovation,recognition for innovators, protection of inno-vators from central agency constraints, andgranting the latitude to experiment.

2. Increased rewards to innovative individualsmay include financial compensation — forexample, performance-related pay and gain-sharing — or non-monetary awards orrecognition.

3. Individual innovators made clear that lack ofresources for innovations was a serious con-straint. One response to this is to establish acentral innovation fund to support innovativeideas within the public sector. Financial man-agement reforms also create the possibility ofenhanced internal funding for innovationwithin all agencies.

4. Because innovation often depends on the abil-ity to see things differently, diversity in termsof the backgrounds and ways of thinking of an organization’s members will enhance itsinnovativeness.

5. Innovative organizations are effective at seeking out information from the outside, forexample, by benchmarking, making site visits,and participating in professional networks.They are also effective at sharing this informa-tion internally.

6. Innovative organizations draw ideas from people at all levels.

7. Innovative organizations are effective at exper-imenting and evaluating their experiments.They recognize that failures are possible, andhave lowered the cost to their staff of honor-able failures. They continue with their suc-cesses and discontinue their failures.


With the rapid development of information tech-nology driving one of the strongest periods of economic growth in American history, it is not sur-prising that management practitioners and scholarshave become very interested in innovation. Inrecent years, gurus such as Rosabeth Kanter andTom Peters have written on the subject, while thelatest in a long line of best-sellers about businessinnovation is Gary Hamel’s Leading the Revolution(2000).

Interest in public sector innovation has also grownsubstantially in the last 15 years. The origins of thistrend are very different, however, with the launchof major public management innovation awards bya number of non-governmental organizations beingthe important catalyst. These awards shared twokey objectives: countering media criticism of andpolitical hostility to the public service and encour-aging the development and dissemination of inno-vations within the public sector. The best knownaward in the United States is the Ford Foundation’sInnovations in American Government program,administered by Harvard University’s KennedySchool of Government (Ford-KSG awards). It was

initiated in 1986 for state and local governments,and included the federal government for the firsttime in 1995.

What follows is a set of recommendations for aspir-ing public management innovators, practical advicefor practitioners based on extensive research regard-ing the best applications in both the Ford-KSGawards and a major award program for countries inthe Commonwealth. We’ll consider the implicationsof rigorous statistical analysis and look in detail at arange of exemplary international cases. While thisbody of research focuses on individual initiatives, italso reveals a number of organizations producing asteady stream of innovations. How did they do it?We’ll analyze their key features to define the charac-teristics of an innovative public sector organization.

We begin by clarifying our central term. Academicliterature on innovation has traditionally distin-guished between invention, the creation of a newidea, and innovation, the adoption of an existingidea by an organization. Strictly speaking, an inven-tion would be patentable whereas an innovationwould not. Increasingly, both popular and academicusage elides the distinction between the two terms.In a business context, it is not uncommon for onefirm to modify another’s invention or to come tomarket later with a more user-friendly product. Thefollower may even become more popular than theleader: VHS has long since pushed Beta out of themarket. Is the more successful follower, then, an

Introduction: The Case for Change*

* The research assistance of Dean Hennessy, Carol Hobbs,Marianna Marysheva, Marina Ninkovic, Salim Rajwani, DonRedl, and David Wolf; the editorial assistance of Beth Herst;and the support of the Innovations in American GovernmentAwards Program and the Commonwealth Association forPublic Administration and Management InternationalInnovations Award Programme are gratefully acknowledged.


invention or an innovation? More and more, theterm “innovation” is being used to refer to all cre-ative activity undertaken within organizations.

How do the public and private sectors compare intheir attitudes toward creativity? In many countriesgovernment and business are working together tobuild institutions that encourage private sector inno-vation, especially in areas like information technol-ogy. Mechanisms to protect intellectual propertyrights such as patents, copyrights, and the registra-tion of web addresses are designed to enable innov-ative firms and individuals to profit from theircreativity. Venture capital provides a dynamic andreadily available source of funding to seed innova-tive initiatives, while compensation through shareownership enables startup firms, their investors,their employees, and, increasingly, their suppliers to reap large financial rewards from this activity.

Contrast this with the traditional situation in thepublic sector. Innovations developed by public ser-vants in the employ of government are generallygovernment property. Public sector organizationsare funded by legislative appropriations; there areno venture capitalists to seed public managementinnovations. There is no share ownership in thepublic sector, and public servants are paid fixedsalaries, with bonuses that, at best, are minusculein comparison to those in the private sector. Inother words, the rewards for successful innovationsin the public sector are meager.

On the other hand, the consequences of unsuc-cessful innovation are grave. The media and oppo-sition parties are always eager to expose publicsector failures and pillory the public servantsinvolved, with potentially disastrous effects on theircareers. Additionally, the stringent central agencycontrols that governments put in place to minimizecorruption and ensure due process also serve toconstrain the innovativeness of public servants.Taken together, these asymmetric incentives andexternal constraints make the public sector a farless fertile ground for innovation than the private.And they further compound the problem by lead-ing to adverse selection — that is, to innovativeindividuals rejecting careers in the public sectorprecisely because of its hostility to change.

Jones and Thompson (1999) make a similar pointapplying Peter Senge’s (1990) model of the learningorganization to government and showing that government is a flawed learning organization.Extensive and inflexible rules and regulations, anunwillingness to empower employees, complicatedand rigid pay and classification systems, and a dis-taste for risk taking all undermine public servants’initiative and innovativeness.

In all likelihood, we as a society do not want apublic sector that is as unrelentingly innovative asthe private sector, nor one that displays the volatil-ity of an Internet startup. Yet it is equally likely thatwe do want the public sector to be more innovativethan it traditionally has been. There are change factors affecting organizations everywhere —advances in information technology, changes in the nature and preferences of the workforce, moredemanding customers, and increased global com-petition — and citizens expect a public sector thatcan transform itself in response. The question is,how can the public sector be made to do so?

I answer that question first by discussing someresults of my research about individual public man-agement innovations, in particular the characteris-tics of successful innovations and the process bywhich they were implemented. This informationwill improve the chances that initiatives will suc-ceed. I then turn from individual innovations toconsider how public sector organizations can beinduced to deliver more such innovations.

Finding the Best: A Note onMethodologyHow were the research results on innovations gen-erated? A brief outline of methodology will explain.Three award programs for public management inno-vation were used as the source for large researchsamples that were then subjected to coding andquantitative analysis, described in more detail in theAppendix. Do these samples represent the bestinnovations? Encompassing awards in the U.S.(Ford-KSG awards), Canada (Institute of PublicAdministration of Canada, or IPAC, awards), and thecountries of the Commonwealth (CommonwealthAssociation for Public Administration and Manage-ment, or CAPAM, awards), the source programs areall well-known in their respective jurisdictions. They


are defined broadly and encourage applicationsfrom all policy areas. Expert panels judge on thebasis of novelty, impact, and replication or replicability.

The Ford-KSG awards yield the most varied sourcesof information, including initial questionnaires, amore detailed semifinalist questionnaire, a site visitreport by an expert, and an interview. A question-naire virtually identical to the semifinalist versionwas sent to applicants to both the CAPAM andIPAC awards programs. To avoid overweightingCanadian responses in the Commonwealth sample,this report uses the statistical results of the Ford-KSG and CAPAM samples only. It quotes com-pleted questionnaires and, for the U.S. sample,expert evaluations of the finalists.

Studies of innovation in both the public and privatesectors have generally relied on individual or smallsample case studies, or small samples of innova-tions in a particular region or a specific policy area.In contrast, the research cited in this report useslarge samples, many regions of the world, andmany policy areas. It is truly representative of thebest public management innovations.


All the applicants in our samples were asked todefine what was innovative or distinctive abouttheir initiative. Their responses were varied andmultiple, frequently identifying more than one keyfeature. Quantitative analysis of these responsesreveals five building blocks of innovation, proventools for change. Table 1 presents the characteris-tics of the innovations as identified by the appli-cants. The table entries indicate the percentage ofthe sample displaying a given characteristic in theirprogram. Where responses are closely related, thepercentage of the sample displaying one or morerelated responses (e.g., total systems approach) isprovided. Five characteristics stand out as appear-ing most frequently in the U.S. and both CAPAMsamples:

• the use of a systems approach, appearing inapproximately 70 percent of the samples inadvanced and 60 percent of the sample indeveloping countries

• the use of new technology, usually new infor-mation technology, appearing in between 29and 57 percent of the samples

• process improvement, appearing in between35 and 66 percent of the samples

• the involvement of organizations or individualsoutside the public sector to achieve public pur-poses, appearing in approximately 30 percentof the samples

• the empowerment of communities, citizens, orstaff, appearing in between 14 and 30 percentof the samples

Building Block One: The Use of aSystems ApproachThe systems approach theme became apparent inmy original study (Borins 1998, 19-22 and 26-29). I approached the data with my own classificationscheme for the characteristics of the innovations,one component of which was partnerships. In cod-ing the applicants’ own testimony about what madetheir programs innovative, I noticed that, whilesome programs were formal partnerships, otherapplicants were often referring to a wider range ofinter-organizational arrangements. Applicants, par-ticularly in social service programs, often describedtheir innovations as dealing with the whole person,rather than any one problem a person faced. Finally,a third group of applicants emphasized that theirprograms focused on developing a systemic analysisof how the problem they were attempting to solveinteracted with other problems and programs. Thus,the overarching category of systems approach wasintroduced to encapsulate the three concepts appli-cants most often expressed. This finding is consistentwith contemporary research and practice. For exam-ple, Bardach (1998) examined a sample of success-ful interagency collaborative programs to deducesmart practices in developing and maintaining sucharrangements. The Blair government in the United

Five Innovation BuildingBlocks


Kingdom has been espousing “joined-up govern-ment,” which refers to both integrated frontline service, often facilitated by information technology(IT), as well as interdepartmental policy develop-ment to respond to interrelated social problems.

This is also evident in the literature on private sec-tor innovation. In her review article, RosabethKanter (1988, p. 171) concluded that one of thedistinctive characteristics of private sector innova-tion is that

the innovation process crosses boundaries.An innovation process is rarely if ever con-tained solely within one unit. First, there isevidence that many of the best ideas are

interdisciplinary or interfunctional in origin.… Second, regardless of the origin ofinnovations, they inevitably send out rip-ples and reverberations to other organiza-tional units, whose behavior may berequired to change in the light of the needsof innovations, or whose cooperation isnecessary if an innovation is to be fullydeveloped or exploited.

Three international examples illustrate the varyinglevels of complexity and comprehensiveness of thesamples’ organizational partnerships and coopera-tive arrangements. The first example shows a pro-gram that crosses organizational boundaries, whilethe second and third illustrate more ambitious

Table 1: Characteristics of Innovations (percent)

Characteristic U.S., Commonwealth, Commonwealth,1990-98 Advanced Developing

Systems analysis 39 25 37

Coordinates organizations 38 41 22

Multiple services 27 36 7

Total systems approach 69 68 59

Use of information technology 29 57 37

Faster process 32 59 33

Simpler process 7 25 11

Total process improvement 35 66 37

Uses incentives, not regulation 10 20 11

Uses private, voluntary sectors 21 16 22

Uses volunteers 7 4 7

Total non-gov’t involvement 30 29 33

Empowerment 28 14 30

New management philosophy 15 18 30

Changes public attitudes 11 14 19

Total (percent) 217 266 245

N 321 56 27

Notes:N = number of observations.Table entries are the percentage of a given group displaying a particular characteristic.For example, the “39” in the first cell of the first column means that in 39 percent of the 321 innovations in the U.S. sample from

1990 to 1998, the innovators claimed that one of the characteristics of their program was that it was based on a systems analysis ofa problem. Totals add to more than 100 percent because some innovations had several characteristics.

Total systems approach = uses a systems analysis of a problem or coordinates organizations or provides multiple services to clients.Total process improvement = faster process or simpler processTotal non-governmental involvement = uses incentives, not regulation or uses private or voluntary sectors or uses volunteers.Because a single response to the questionnaire might include several of the responses in a group, group totals are less than the arith-

metic sum of the responses in the group (e.g., total systems approach is less than systems analysis + coordinates organizations + pro-vides multiple services).


attempts to deliver a wide range of services througha single portal.

• South Africa’s Working for Water programcombines environmental protection withemployment creation. The program’s objectiveis to clear 25 million acres (over 8 percent ofthe country) that are covered by invasive non-native plants. The work is very labor-intensive,and has been used to create jobs for marginal-ized groups such as the rural poor, women, thedisabled, youth, and ex-offenders. Managingthe program requires a partnership among theDepartments of Environmental Affairs,Agriculture and Land Affairs, and Water Affairsand Forestry, all responsible for the program’stechnical base; the Departments of Educationand Welfare, responsible for program partici-pants; and a variety of community organiza-tions and entrepreneurs who serve ascontractors. This program brings into contactdepartments that normally have few dealingswith one another (South Africa Department ofWater Affairs and Forestry, 2000). Working forWater won one of two silver awards in the2000 CAPAM awards program.

• In April 1999, the government of Singaporelaunched eCitizen (www.ecitizen.gov.sg), itscomprehensive website for the delivery of pub-lic services online. The site is organized aroundlife events, rather than the current departmentalstructure. Thirty agencies are now offering atotal of over 100 services through this site,which receives 100,000 visitors per month,approximately 10 percent of potential clientele.The United States Office of IntergovernmentalSolutions has cited eCitizen as a leader in inte-grated service delivery, and eCitizen won oneof three bronze awards in the 2000 CAPAMawards program (Infocomm DevelopmentAuthority of Singapore, 2000).

• Centrelink is an agency of the Australian fed-eral government with a mandate to provide awide variety of services (income support, jobtraining, pensions, student grants) on behalf ofnine government departments. It serves 6 mil-lion of Australia’s population of 19 million andpays A$45 billion (US$25 billion) in benefits. It has an operating budget of A$1.6 billion

(US$.9 billion), and 24,000 staff in 400 loca-tions. Establishing Centrelink was a key minis-terial priority of the current government, whichwanted to separate policy making from opera-tions to allow the operational agency to focuson increasing efficiency and improving servicedelivery. Centrelink is funded on the basis ofpartnership agreements with its client depart-ments, and its chief executive reports to aboard of management with representatives ofindustry and of its two largest client depart-ments (Centrelink, 1999). With a clear servicedelivery mandate, Centrelink has produced anefficiency dividend of approximately A$100million in 1998-99, while enhancing customersatisfaction. It is also in the process of imple-menting one-to-one service, with each cus-tomer assigned to a specific service officer(Centrelink, 2000). It was a finalist in both the1998 and 2000 CAPAM awards program.

Centrelink and eCitizen present two very differentstarting points for large-scale service integration.The Australian government established an inte-grated service delivery organization by undertakinga major departmental reorganization. Centrelink’sfocus on service delivery and producing efficiencydividends drives it to make increasing use of infor-mation technology. On the other hand, Singaporebegan service integration by establishing a compre-hensive website, and gave departments the optionof buying in. A large number of departments havealready done so. The open question is whethertechnology will then drive organizational structureand lead to reorganization.

Building Block Two: The Use ofInformation Technology Information technology (IT) innovations appearedin the 1990 to 1994 U.S. and Canadian samples asingenious applications devised by middle managerswith technical backgrounds who saw opportunitiesof which politicians and agency heads wereunaware. Consider an Australian example. Adecade ago, the government of New South Walesset up a judicial commission to investigate incon-sistencies in sentencing. As a result, a databaseoperating on mini-computers was established, butit proved to be both cumbersome and unreliable.


In late 1994, an information systems manager, ananalyst, and a programmer at the judicial commis-sion came up with the idea of moving the databaseto an intranet. Using a very early version ofNetscape as their browser, they programmed theoriginal system; its successor is widely used andhas had a significant impact on the sentencingpractices of Australian judges and magistrates(Judicial Commission of New South Wales, 2000).

Awareness of IT’s potential has became more wide-spread in the last five years, especially at the seniorlevel. This change likely explains why the U.S.sample, two-thirds of which consists of innovationsfrom 1990 to 1994, contains a smaller percentageof innovations involving IT than the CAPAM sam-ple, which was taken in 1998 and 2000. For example, the 2000 CAPAM sample included 13responses from Singapore, almost all of which used IT as a major component.

The later technology-based innovations are largeprojects that entail extensive transformation of themanner in which agencies conduct their business.Some involve the creation of new information sys-tems that have a powerful impact on how an orga-nization does its work. Three of the winners of the1996 Innovations in American Government Awardsdemonstrated this transformative effect.

• The New York Police Department began pro-ducing comprehensive crime statistics on aprecinct-by-precinct basis in a timely manner.This geographic information system is used inregular meetings in which the department’ssenior managers ask precinct commanders toexplain recent trends. Precinct commandersare being given increased autonomy to developlocal solutions and are being held accountablefor local results (New York Police Department,1996).

• The United States Department of Housing andUrban Development consolidated and rational-ized the management of a wide variety of com-munity development management programs.Underlying this reform is the development ofgeographic information system (GIS) mapping software that enables the department and itsclients to see the interaction of programs andprojects locally, with the objective of improv-

ing planning and decision making (U.S.Department of Housing and Urban Develop-ment, Office of Community Planning andDevelopment, 1996).

• The Federal Emergency Management Agency,as part of a management turnaround in theearly 1990s, developed its ConsequencesAssessment Tool Set (CATS), a set of computermodels and databases that can be used to pre-dict the impact of disasters, determine theappropriate response needed, and set inmotion the logistics of the response (FederalEmergency Management Agency, 1996). Thesite visit report concluded that “one couldalmost say that CATS is to emergency manage-ment what radar is to flying” (Smith, 1996).

Websites did not feature as prominently in the sam-ples of IT innovations as might have been expected.The explanation for their absence is simple. Thespread of Internet technology virtually overnight in1994 and 1995 meant that it became standard prac-tice for departments to establish informational web-sites. The websites that did win awards were thosethat pushed forward the boundaries of integrated ser-vice delivery, such as Singapore’s eCitizen, or thosethat reached out to communities in unique ways.

An example of the latter is Canada’s SchoolNet(www.schoolnet.ca). This site provides content toaccompany a joint federal-provincial initiative thatconnected all 16,500 Canadian schools to theInternet by 2000. SchoolNet is also used by educa-tors and students throughout Canada to dissemi-nate Internet-based educational resources theyhave developed (Industry Canada, InformationHighway Applications Branch 1998). It was chosenas one of the two winners of the CAPAM bronzeaward in 1998. Schoolnet is supported by IndustryCanada’s Computers for Schools Program(www.schoolnet.ca/cfs-ope) that funds the refur-bishing of surplus government and other comput-ers for use in schools. The program has benefitedfrom the contributions of numerous partners, suchas the Telephone Pioneers, an organization ofretired telephone company employees who domuch of the work; Microsoft, which provides free software; Sears Canada, which solicits privatesector donations of computers; and CanadianNational, which does the shipping (IndustryCanada, Computers for Schools Program, 2000).


Information technology projects in developingcountries often involve “leapfrog” technologies, asignal example being Grameen Telecom, one oftwo bronze prize winners in the 1998 CAPAMawards. The Grameen Bank received a license from the government of Bangladesh to develop and operate a cellular telephone service in ruralvillages. Cellular telephones — operated on a pay-phone basis by local women — are provided forvillages that previously had no telephone service atall. Establishing a cellular phone system is muchless expensive than building land lines. It deliversnumerous benefits such as information for farmersabout market prices for their crops, contact withthe outside world in the event of natural calamitiessuch as floods, employment for the women operat-ing the pay phone, and communication with rela-tives working overseas (Latif, 1999). GrameenTelecom may well be a model for the provision ofwireless Internet access to villages in the develop-ing world.

Information technology systems in government arelarge and expensive, and experience has shownthat some systems have been costly and disastrousfailures. As a consequence, we can expect to seemeta-innovations, namely innovations in the man-agement of the public sector’s information technol-ogy. One early example is New York State’s Centerfor Technology in Government, a research centerbased at the State University of New York atAlbany, with a mandate to study what does anddoesn’t work and to develop low-cost prototypes ofhigh-cost systems (State University of New York atAlbany, 1995). It was a winner of the Innovationsin American Government Awards in 1995.

Building Block Three: ProcessImprovementThe third characteristic frequently observed —process improvement — refers to innovationsdesigned to make governmental processes faster,friendlier, or more accessible. These initiatives ofteninvolved applications of the Pareto rule (20 percentof the cases are responsible for 80 percent of theworkload, and conversely) to separate the fewcomplicated cases from the many uncomplicatedones; separation of high and low value usersthrough user pay mechanisms such as electronictoll roads; voluntary compliance, especially in the

regulation of business; and alternative dispute reso-lution. Voluntary compliance and alternative dis-pute resolution initiatives start with a recognitionthat judicial processes are expensive, adversarial,and time-consuming, and look for ways to stream-line or circumvent them.

The Ford-KSG awards provide many examples ofprocess improvements.

• Applying the Pareto rule. The Pension BenefitGuaranty Corporation has the mandate ofinsuring private pension plans. In allocating itslimited staff resources, the corporation set apriority of monitoring most closely the largestunderfunded pension plans — one percent ofthe plans in its pool that were responsible for80 percent of its exposure. These plansreceived intensive monitoring, involvingresearch on corporate performance and fre-quent contact with senior financial officers.Smaller and fully funded plans are monitoredless frequently. This Early Warning Programwon an Innovations in American GovernmentAward in 1995 (Pension Benefit GuarantyCorporation, 1995; Donahue, 1999).

• User pay mechanisms. Information technologyhas made it possible to charge user fees withminimal transaction cost. An example is the use of electronic toll mechanisms (onboardtransponders and electronic readers) for high-ways. Tolls enhance economic efficiency byallowing those users most willing to pay toreduce travel time, and provide revenues tocover the toll roads themselves and/or fundother improvements in the transportation system.

California’s State Route 91, a finalist in the1997 awards, is a 10-mile, four-lane, electronictoll road built in the median of the RiversideFreeway in Orange County. It is restricted tovehicles using transponders (California Depart-ment of Transportation, Office of Public/PrivatePartnerships, 1997). The Canadian province ofOntario built a technologically more sophisti-cated toll road, Highway 407, on the outskirtsof Toronto. Unlike State Route 91, which runsfor 10 miles and has entrances and exits only atthe ends, Highway 407 is 40 miles long, withentrances and exits every mile or two. If cars donot have transponders, the license plates are


video-imaged and the bill sent to the owner.Highway 407 was privatized in 1999.

• Voluntary compliance. The U.S. Department ofLabor has too few inspectors to enforce mini-mum wage and labor standards legislation inthe thousands of garment factories throughoutthe country. In the mid-‘90s, it adopted a differ-ent strategy, namely pressuring the large retail-ers to ensure that their subcontractors werefollowing the law. The department did this bycalling retailers’ attention to a clause of the Fair Labor Standards Act prohibiting interstatecommerce in goods made in violation of laborlaws, then signing agreements with retailerswho were willing to monitor the wages andworking conditions of their suppliers, and pub-licizing which retailers were in compliance.This campaign to eradicate sweatshops byusing an understanding of the dynamics of thefashion industry to develop a voluntary compli-ance strategy won an Innovation in AmericanGovernment Award in 1996 (U.S. Departmentof Labor, Wage and Hour Division, 1996;Donahue, 1999).

Building Block Four: TheInvolvement of the Private orVoluntary SectorThe fourth characteristic of the innovations — usingthe private or voluntary sectors to achieve publicpurposes — included initiatives opening up somepublic sector activities, such as municipal servicesor military supply, to private sector competition;partnerships entailing private sector delivery, partic-ularly in the area of technology; the use of volun-tary or non-governmental organizations forprogram delivery; and, occasionally, the involve-ment of individual volunteers in public sector programs. The following are a few among manypossible examples:

• Opening up the public sector to private sectorcompetition. As a result of shortcomings in themilitary supply system exposed during the GulfWar, the U.S. Department of Defense decidedto give all branches of the military increaseddiscretion over their purchasing decisions. Thethreat of private sector competition was takenseriously by the Defense Logistics Agency’s

Defense Supply Center, which previously was a monopoly provider of support services suchas food, clothing, and medicine. As a result,the agency underwent a complete reinvention,with innovations being driven by frontline staffand middle managers. Its initiatives includedonline ordering, faster delivery, purchasing inbulk, benchmarking private sector retailers,partnerships with the private sector, and elimi-nation of rigid military specifications (DefenseLogistics Agency, 1995; Donahue, 1999). Thistransformation won an Innovations inAmerican Government award in 1995.

• Partnerships involving private sector delivery.The Province of Ontario has used private sectordelivery extensively in the last decade. This isdue in part to fiscal necessity (the province wasrunning substantial deficits for most of thedecade) and because many of its innovationsinvolved leading-edge information technology.The technology for Highway 407 was suppliedby a consortium of companies includingHughes Aerospace, which provided thetransponder reading and video-imaging hard-ware; Bell Canada, which provided the billingsoftware; and two transponder manufacturers.The province developed a system of electronickiosks for automobile-related transactions suchas renewing licenses and paying fines. Thekiosks are provided and serviced by IBM,which is compensated by a $1 fee for everytransaction. Ontario is also developing a lead-ing-edge geographic information system for itsland titles system in a joint venture betweenthe government and several software compa-nies (Ontario Public Service, RestructuringSecretariat, 1999). This package of innovations,under the rubric of “Ontario Delivers,” wonone of two CAPAM gold awards in 1998.

• Involving volunteers. As noted earlier, retiredtelephone company employees have played amajor role in refurbishing computers for use inCanadian schools. One of the applications tothe 2000 CAPAM awards receiving an honor-able mention was Project Ilima, an initiative torepair schools in the Pietermaritzburg Regionof the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal. Ilima is a Zulu term, referring to a tradi-tional custom of voluntary community help forthose in need. Because the government had no


funding available for school repairs for at leastthree years, communities volunteered laborand materials to repair schools. The programalso solicited private sector donations of mate-rials in major cities, and the South African AirForce delivered the materials to remote schools(Province of KwaZulu-Natal, PietermaritzburgRegion, 2000).

Building Block Five: TheEmpowerment of Communities,Citizens, or StaffEmpowerment, the fifth of our tools for change,may take a number of forms. Initiatives directed atcommunity groups or citizens involved consultingwith them in policy making or inviting them to playa role in policy implementation. Staff empower-ment involved encouraging frontline staff to takethe initiative for change and showing greater toler-ance for risk taking. The “new management philos-ophy” category in Table 1 encompasses initiativessuch as participatory management, continuousimprovement, and restructuring. It has some over-lap with staff empowerment. We’ll look moreclosely at this issue in our consideration of innova-tive public sector organizations.

The CAPAM awards demonstrated numerous com-munity empowerment initiatives in developingcountries. The Education Guarantee Scheme in theIndian state of Madhya Pradesh was the other goldaward winner in 1998. The objective of the schemeis to provide schooling for children of sociallyunderprivileged groups in one of India’s poorestregions. As soon as a village demonstrates that ithas a group of at least 25 children who do nothave access to a school within one kilometer, thestate government will provide a salary and trainingfor a local teacher as well as educational materials.The village’s responsibility is to provide a facility,mobilize the children to attend school, and managethe school, for example, by establishing a schoolyear consistent with local agricultural practices.This educational partnership between the state government and local communities rapidlyexpanded access to schooling in Madhya Pradesh,and became the model for a national program(Rajiv Gandhi Shiksha Mission, 1999). In April2000, the program established a website calledwww.fundaschool.org, which enables people

throughout the world to support one of the program’s26,000 schools for a year at a cost of US$400.

The initiators of the program were two youngerofficers in the elite Indian Administrative Service(IAS). Members of the IAS spend their first develop-mental assignment as senior administrators at thelocal level (Borins, 1999). A number of other appli-cations from India were also initiated by IAS mem-bers in such positions, suggesting that theseassignments give them the latitude to innovate.

These characteristics of public management inno-vation should be thought of as building blocks forpublic management innovators to use in designingtheir programs. Mathematically, there are a verylarge number of ways that the five building blocksand their subcomponents can be arranged. Many ofthe most interesting innovations came about whenthe originators were faced with a complicatedproblem and then fashioned a multi-facetedresponse.

A systems approach, new technology, processimprovement, external involvement, and empower-ment — these are the conceptual tools for innova-tion revealed by my large sample of internationalstudies of successful public sector innovations. Astools, they are both flexible and scalable, tran-scending particular policy areas and even nationalpublic service structures and cultures. They offerpublic management innovators a framework forthinking about change, as well as a repertoire oftechniques for effecting it, independent of the par-ticular problem, challenge, or opportunity faced.


Obstacles to InnovationDesigning an innovation is only the beginning.Securing its implementation can be no less chal-lenging. In this section, we’ll examine in detail therange of obstacles our sample of innovatorsencountered and the means they used to overcomethem. The U.S. and CAPAM questionnaires alsoasked the innovators who their strongest supporterswere, while the CAPAM questionnaire asked whatthey had learned from designing and/or implement-ing their program and what advice they would havefor those who follow in their footsteps. We’ll con-sider the implications of this data, too. Table 2 outlines the obstacles that were identified, andcompares the relative frequency of occurrence forthe total U.S. and total Commonwealth samples.The two Commonwealth sub-samples (especiallythe 27 cases in developing countries) were toosmall to be presented separately.

The obstacles reported were divided into threegroups. The first, consisting of barriers arising pri-marily within the bureaucracy, included hostile orskeptical attitudes, turf fights, difficulty coordinat-ing organizations, logistical problems, difficultymaintaining the enthusiasm of program staff, diffi-culty implementing a new technology, union oppo-sition, middle management opposition, and publicsector opposition to entrepreneurial action.

The second group identified obstacles arising in thepolitical environment, for example, inadequate

funding or other resources, legislative or regulatoryconstraints, and political opposition. One obstaclewith both bureaucratic and political aspects isinadequate resources, which can result from fund-ing decisions made at either the bureaucratic orpolitical levels.

The third group addressed obstacles in the environ-ment outside the public sector, such as publicdoubts about the effectiveness of the program, diffi-culty reaching the program’s target group, opposi-tion by affected private sector interests, publicopposition, and opposition from private sector enti-ties that, as a result of the innovation, would beforced to compete with the public sector.

The three groups of obstacles appear with similarfrequencies in both the U.S. and Commonwealthsamples. The largest number of obstacles arosewithin the public sector, reflecting the tendency ofthese innovations to change standard operatingprocedures, occupational patterns, and powerstructures. Many instances of obstructive attitudeswere cited, particularly on the part of occupationalor professional groups. Police officers were some-times opposed to a community policing initiativebecause it required them to do what they consid-ered to be “social work.” Health professionalsopposed initiatives that employed communityhealth workers or advocates in outreach programs.A voluntary action-learning based network ofteachers in Singapore has been resisted by officers

Winning Hearts and Minds:Implementation Techniques


in the Ministry of Education, who consider it achallenge to their authority (Singapore Ministry ofEducation, 2000). To generalize, programs requiringprofessions normally having little contact to worktogether; programs requiring professions to dosomething not traditionally viewed as within theirscope; and programs using volunteers, communityworkers, or para-professionals have often beenopposed by professional groups (Borins 1998, 67and 288). Surprisingly, given the traditional barriersto innovation in the public sector, the internalobstacle encountered least frequently was opposi-tion to acting entrepreneurially, which constitutedless than one percent of the occurrences in theU.S. sample and 2.4 percent of the occurrences in the Commonwealth sample.

Under political obstacles, the one most frequentlyappearing was lack of resources. This can beexplained by the fact that many of the innovationsstudied were pilot programs that were looking foradditional resources to increase their scale of oper-ations. Legislative or regulatory constraintsoccurred when an innovator was hampered byexisting legislation or regulations that had beenenacted previously, for other reasons. The least fre-quently appearing political obstacle was oppositionfrom elected politicians. The infrequency of politi-cal obstacles may mean that bureaucratic innova-tors are working far enough from the political levelthat their work largely escapes notice by politi-cians. Jerry Mechling, the director of the StrategicComputing Program at the Kennedy School of

Table 2: Obstacles to Innovation

Obstacle U.S. 1990-98, U.S., Commonwealth, Commonwealth,Occurrences % of total Occurrences % of total

Bureaucratic attitudes 66 9.2 16 9.6

Turf fights 12 1.7 5 3.0

Other resistance 50 6.9 11 6.6

Total bureaucratic 128 17.8 32 19.3

Coordination problems 66 9.2 18 10.8

Logistics 66 9.2 24 14.5

Burnout 38 5.3 2 1.2

Implementing technology 39 5.4 15 9.0

Union opposition 13 1.8 5 3.0

Mid-mgt. opposition 11 1.5 4 2.4

Opposition to entrepreneurs 6 .8 4 2.4

Total Internal 367 50.9 104 62.7

Inadequate resources 113 15.7 32 19.2

Laws, regulations 48 6.7 7 4.2

Political opposition 21 2.9 6 3.6

Total Political 182 25.2 45 27.1

External doubts 70 9.7 9 5.4

Reaching target group 49 6.8 2 1.2

Affected interests 28 3.9 2 1.2

Public opposition 13 1.8 2 1.2

Private sector competition 12 1.7 2 1.2

Total External 170 23.6 17 10.2

Total 721 100 166 100

Note: Each occurrence is unique, so each subtotal is the sum of previous elements and the total percentage is 100. Total includes totalinternal, total political, and total external.


Identifying these obstacles in detail enables us to formu-late a list of questions for innovators to ask when design-ing an implementation strategy.

• How much will this program cost? Can the moneybe found through public sector appropriations? Willuser fees be possible? Are private sector donations apossible funding source?

• Will the program require any changes in current reg-ulations or laws? If so, what is the process involvedand whose support will be required?

• Which organizations will be involved in deliveringthe program? If multiple organizations will beinvolved, what are their ongoing relationships? Arethey organizations that rarely deal with one another,or do they have a history of rivalry, for example, turfbattles? Will they fight for control of the program orfight to avoid involvement?

• What are the occupational groups that will beinvolved in delivering the program? How do theydefine their roles? What are the status relationshipsamong the different occupations (e.g., professionalsversus paraprofessionals)? Will cooperation of differ-ent organizational groups depend on understandingone another and/or on being able to do someaspects of each other’s work?

• If the innovation involves the application of a newtechnology, will it encounter incompatible legacysystems being used by different organizational par-ticipants? Will the technology lead to job losses,especially in unionized positions? Will users of thenew technology require special training?

• Who will be the key participants in delivering theinnovation? Will they be expected to go beyondwhat is normally expected of them in their currentpositions? If so, how will they be motivated?

• Innovations sometimes require help from volunteers,especially if funding is limited. If volunteers are tobe used, how will they be motivated to participateand how will their efforts be rewarded?

• Will the innovation create logistical problems, forexample, scheduling conflicts among different participants?

• Will public sector unions oppose the innovationbecause it threatens job losses or affects the workingconditions of union members?

• Will middle managers oppose the innovationbecause it devolves responsibility to frontline staffand weakens their supervisory authority?

• Will the innovation be opposed by central agencies,for example, because it reduces their control overfinancial or human resource decisions?

• Will the innovation face political oppositionbecause it is inconsistent with some politicians’ values? Will it face political opposition because itwill reduce their ability to allocate resources to their constituents?

• Will there be difficulties in reaching the innovation’starget group — for example, because they do notuse the official language, because they have specialneeds, or because they are unreceptive to those normally mandated to deliver the service?

• Will there be public doubt or skepticism aboutwhether the program can work?

• Will there be public opposition to the program, forexample, an application of information technologythat is considered by some to be an invasion of their privacy?

• Will the program face opposition from the publicbecause it allows public servants to operate in waysor receive compensation (for example, performance-related pay) considered to be more appropriate tothe private sector than the public sector?

• Will the program face opposition from private sectorfirms because it regulates their activities in ways thatreduce their profitability or forces them to abandona line of business?

• Will the program face opposition from private sector firms because it introduces public sectorbased competition?

This list of questions — formidable as it might seem — is not intended to dissuade potential public managementinnovators, but is designed to alert them to the chal-lenges faced by those who have preceded them on theroad to change. While all of these questions are worthasking, only certain obstacles may be encountered in agiven case.

Identifying Obstacles


Government, recognized the significance of initia-tives below the political level in a site visit report toa program involving optical imaging technology inthe City of New York:

Significant reforms in government oftenbegin as ‘middle out’ initiatives — that is,as agenda items that are not at the very topin terms of public discussion and contro-versy, but ride just below and, due to thepersistence of managerial leadership, cre-ate major benefits. The ‘middle out’approach is not as threatening as more vis-ible and aggressive reforms, but in somecases it can be extremely effective on acumulative basis (Mechling, 1997).

On the other hand, if these innovations are notice-able at the political level, the innovators mayunderstand what is and is not politically feasibleand gauge their actions accordingly, forestallingpolitical intervention or obstruction. The U.S. sam-ple examined the frequency with which those polit-ical obstacles that were experienced wereovercome, and found, encouragingly, that theywere overcome approximately 70 percent of thetime (Borins 1998, 67).

The third set of obstacles — external obstacles —includes difficulties reaching the program’s targetpopulation, public doubts about a program, andmore active public opposition. The U.S. sampleshowed that external doubts were overcome 90percent of the time and public opposition approxi-mately 60 percent of the time (Borins, 1998, 67).These numbers tell us something very importantabout the social context for public sector innova-tion. The infrequency of both political and publicopposition — and the substantial frequency withwhich any that did arise was overcome — suggeststhat the public recognizes that the performance ofthe public sector can be enhanced and that policyoutcomes in many areas can be improved. It fur-ther indicates that the public is not wedded toexisting policies or procedures, and is receptive toinnovation and change.

Overcoming ObstaclesTable 3 shows various tactics that were used toovercome the obstacles to innovation and the num-ber of times each was cited for both the U.S. and

Commonwealth samples. As was the case for theobstacles themselves, the tactics appear with simi-lar frequencies in both samples. The tactics mostcommonly used could be described broadly as persuasion — showing the benefits of an innova-tion, establishing demonstration projects, andsocial marketing — and accommodation — con-sulting with affected parties, co-opting affected parties by involving them in the governance of the innovation, providing training for those whosework would be affected by the innovation, com-pensating losers, and making a program culturallyor linguistically sensitive. The innovators tookobjections seriously, and attempted either tochange the mind of opponents or skeptics, or tomodify the innovation so that opponents or skepticswould be more comfortable with it.

It is instructive that the tactic used least frequentlyin both the U.S. and Commonwealth samples wassomething that might be considered a “power poli-tics” approach — changing the manager responsiblefor program implementation. The innovators usuallyattempted to persuade or accommodate their oppo-nents, rather than to appeal to the authority of supe-riors simply to stifle them. These successful changeagents overwhelmingly employed consensus build-ing rather than strong-arm tactics.

For both the U.S. and Commonwealth samples,obstacles identified were matched with the tacticsreported for overcoming them. The results are pre-sented in Table 4, which indicates up to five tacticsused most frequently to respond to each obstacle.The Commonwealth results are not always pre-sented because some obstacles appeared veryinfrequently. As in the previous two tables, theresponses to each obstacle are similar in both sam-ples. The most frequent responses to bureaucraticopposition in the U.S. sample were consultation orco-optation (in 37 percent of these 98 instances),provision of training (in 26 percent of theseinstances), persistence (24 percent), showing thebenefits of the innovation (23 percent), and estab-lishing a demonstration project (15 percent).Similarly, the most frequent responses in theCommonwealth sample were consultation or co-optation and a demonstration of the benefits of theinnovation. When the obstacle was difficulty coor-dinating organizations, something often faced bysystems approaches, the most frequent response


for both the U.S. and Commonwealth samples was consultation or co-optation. Other frequentresponses for the U.S. sample were focusing allparties’ attention on the most important aspects ofthe innovation (15 percent) and providing training(12 percent). The most frequent responses to diffi-culty implementing a new technology for bothsamples were modifying the technology to make it more user-friendly and training for those whowould be using it.

The most frequent response to legislative or regula-tory constraints was an attempt to change the legislation or regulations to permit the innovation(27 percent in the U.S. and 57 percent in theCommonwealth sample). Frequent responses in the U.S. sample also included building politicalsupport for the innovation (19 percent) and persis-tence (15 percent). Political opposition was mostfrequently overcome in the U.S. sample by buildingpolitical support for the innovation (33 percent),

Table 3: Tactics to Overcome Obstacles to Innovation, Total Frequency Used

Tactic U.S., number U.S., percent Commonwealth, Commonwealth,of cites of total number of cites percent of total

Show benefits of program to opponents 73 9.6 34 16.8

Social marketing 52 6.8 4 2.0

Demonstration project 41 5.3 2 1.0

Total persuasion 166 21.8 40 19.8

Training affected parties 76 10.0 16 7.9

Consultation with affected parties 75 9.9 9 4.5

Co-optation (opponents become participants in program) 60 7.9 18 8.9

Program design made culturally or linguistically sensitive 16 2.1 1 .5

Compensation for losers 11 1.4 1 .5

Total accommodation 238 31.3 45 22.3

Finding additional resources 72 9.5 19 9.4

Persistence, effort 69 9.1 8 4.0

Logistical problems resolved 52 6.9 11 5.4

Other 36 4.7 44 21.8

Gaining political support,building alliances 36 4.7 3 1.5

Focus on most important aspectsof innovation, have clear vision 27 3.6 5 2.5

Modify technology 26 3.4 20 10

Legislation or regulations changed 20 2.6 6 3.0

Provide recognition for programparticipants or supporters 9 1.2 0 0

Change managers responsible forprogram implementation 8 1.1 1 .5

Total 759 100 202 100

Note: Each occurrence is unique, so each subtotal is the sum of previous elements and the total percentage is 100.


persistence (24 percent), demonstrating the innova-tion’s benefits (19 percent), and the establishmentof a demonstration project (14 percent). In the U.S.sample, public doubts were most frequently over-come by consultation or co-optation (40 percent),demonstrating the benefits of the program to oppo-nents or skeptics (29 percent), social marketing (21 percent), establishing a demonstration project(16 percent), and persistence (16 percent).

Overall, the responses to the obstacles raised showthat the innovators took objections seriously andattempted to meet objectors on their own terms.They did not necessarily view opposition to changeas negative or an invitation to conflict. Rather, theyinterpreted resistance as a challenge to communi-cate their message more clearly and to improve thedesign of their programs. Within this generally con-structive approach, the specific tactics employedwere tailored to each obstacle.

Table 4: Tactics Most Frequently Used to Overcome Each Obstacle to Innovation

Obstacle Sample (n) Tactic 1 (%) Tactic 2 (%) Tactic 3 (%) Tactic 4 (%) Tactic 5 (%)Total U.S. (128) Consult, Training (26) Effort (24) Show Demo. Bureaucratic Co-opt (37) benefits (21) Project (15)

CAPAM (32) Consult, ShowCo-opt (31) Benefits (21)

Coordination U.S. (67) Consult, Focus (15) Training (12)Co-opt (52)

CAPAM (18) Consult,Co-opt (25)

Technology U.S. (39) Modify (29) Training (31)CAPAM (15) Modify (73) Training (13)

Inadequate U.S. (113) FindResources Resources (44)

CAPAM (32) FindResources (44)

Laws, Regs. U.S. (48) Change Political PersistenceLaws (27) Support (19) (15)

CAPAM (7) ChangeLaws (57)

Political U.S. (21) Pol. Support Effort (24) Show Demo.Opposition (33) Benefits (19) Project (14)

CAPAM (6) Show Effort (33)Benefits (83)

External U.S. (70) Consult, Show Marketing Demo. Effort (16)Doubts Co-opt (40) Benefits (29) (21) Project (16)Reaching U.S. (49) Mktg (37) Training (19) Effort (14) CulturallyTarget Group Sensitive (12)Affected U.S. (28) Show Consult, MarketingInterests Benefits (36) Co-opt (22) (18)Public U.S. (13) Consult, Demo. Marketing PoliticalOpposition Co-opt (31) Project (17) (9) Support (9)

Notes:Obstacles are as listed in Table 2 and tactics are as listed in Table 3.N indicates the number of occurrences of each obstacle in either the US or the CAPAM samples.The five most frequently used tactics to overcome each obstacle are listed in declining order of frequency.Percentages for each tactic indicate the percentage of the occurrences of each obstacle for which a given tactic was used.


Obtaining Support for InnovationIn addition to asking about obstacles, the question-naire asked applicants who their strongest support-ers were. Table 5 shows the results for the 1995-1998 U.S. sample, as well as the CAPAM sample.(It was not coded in the earlier U.S. sample.) Thetable shows supporters within the agency, else-where in the public sector, at the political level,and outside the public sector. For each of thesefour groups, the table shows the percentage of thetotal number of applications receiving support fromone or more of the parties in the group.

The table shows that the innovators received sup-port from a wide variety of sources. In general, the

U.S. and Commonwealth samples look similar,with a substantial percentage of innovators in allthree indicating support within their agencies,among other agencies and their managers, andfrom public interest groups, agency clients, andbusiness interests. The one sharp difference is thatin the U.S. sample, two-thirds of the innovationshad some support at the political level, while only16 percent of the Commonwealth sample fromadvanced countries and 26 percent of the Com-monwealth sample from developing countries did.In part this is the result of a higher proportion ofinnovations being introduced at the political levelin the U.S. and at the agency head and manage-ment levels in the Commonwealth samples (as

Table 5: Supporters of Innovations (percent)

Type of Supporter U.S., Commonwealth, Commonwealth,1990-98 Advanced Developing

Direct supervisor 20 7 0

Permanent agency head 27 25 22

Middle managers 23 25 19

Frontline workers n.a. 25 15

Other upper management,board of directors 24 23 22

Total within agency 62 63 41

Public sector unions 15 11 4

Other public agencies and managers 44 45 41

Total other public sector 53 52 44

Political head of agency 23 7 7

Head of gov’t. (president, PM) 40 4 4

Other individual politicians 14 5 15

Legislative body 36 2 15

Total political 67 16 26

Public interest group 37 20 30

Clients of agency 36 48 41

Business lobby 39 34 37

Media 5 0 0

General public 23 9 33

Total external to public sector 78 73 74

N 321 56 27

Notes:N = number of observations.Table entries are the percentage of a given group having a particular type of supporter.Categories in bold represent the percentage of a given group displaying one or more of the previous characteristics (e.g., Total within agency = direct supervisor or permanent agency head or middle managers or frontline workers or other upper management or board of directors.)


shown by Table 7 in the next section of the report).A second explanation might be that American leg-islative bodies delegate less to the public servicethan is the case in Commonwealth countries. Con-sistently, the two sources least often cited as beingamong the strongest supporters were public sectorunions and the media. The message these resultscarry for future public management innovators is toconsider whose support they should seek as theyattempt to overcome the anticipated obstacles.

Included in the Commonwealth survey was a finalquestion asking innovators the most importantlessons they had learned and seeking their advicefor would be innovators. Table 6 shows the resultsof this question in terms of the number of times acertain piece of advice was cited. The advice deal-ing with planning an innovation emphasizes theimportance of learning (“learn from other innova-tors” and “learn from your mistakes”) and incorpo-

rates the tension between having a clear vision(“have a clear idea of the end product,” “thinkstrategically,” and “make sure program objectivesreflect the organization’s objectives”) and improvisa-tion (“don’t be afraid to change plans based oninformation gathered or in response to a changingenvironment”). The advice regarding implementa-tion reflects the tension between being decisive andmoving quickly on the one hand (“the project man-ager should be task-oriented,” “have a champion,take ownership,” “keep the implementation teamsmall, with decision-making power,” and “imple-ment quickly to avoid losing focus”), and recogniz-ing the need to build wide support (“involve thestakeholders” and “keep regular, ongoing communi-cation”) on the other. The advice about process alsoreflects the importance of staff level innovation(“allow staff freedom to innovate”), of persistence(“be dedicated and/or persistent”), of morale (“makethe project exciting for staff”) and of upper level

Table 6: Lessons Learned by Commonwealth Innovators

Lesson Learned Cites

Make project exciting for staff 22

Promote program, ensure positive media coverage 21

Make sure program objectives reflect organization’s objectives 17

Project manager should be task-oriented 12

Involve the stakeholders 11

Keep regular, ongoing communication 11

Get support from senior management 10

Have a clear idea of the end product 9

Allow staff freedom to innovate 9

Keep implementation team small, with decision-making power 9

Think strategically, consider wider implications 7

Have a champion, take ownership 7

Be dedicated and/or persistent 7

Documentation is tedious but essential 7

Develop adequate control mechanisms, support governance structure with agreements 6

Solicit regular feedback as a motivator, demonstrate early ongoing success 5

Implement quickly to avoid losing focus 5

Learn from your mistakes, don’t be afraid to change plans based on information gathered or in response to a changing environment 5

Learn from other innovators 4

Ensure that you have the necessary resources 3

Note: These lessons were based on the 83 questionnaires received from innovators in Commonwealth countries.


support (“get support from senior management”).The advice includes references to the constraints ofoperating within the public sector (“documentationis tedious but essential” and “develop adequatecontrol mechanisms”). Given the frequency thatresource constraints come up, it is somewhat sur-prising to see that the least cited piece of advicewas “ensure that you have the necessary resources.”While Table 5 showed that the media were almostnever cited as being among an innovation’sstrongest supporters, the innovators suggest that,once a program is in place, it is important to pro-mote it and secure positive media attention.


The recommendations for designing and imple-menting innovations that were presented in the pre-vious sections did not discuss where in theorganization innovations come from. This sectiontakes up that question. The answer to this questionis important, because it bears on the issue of howto design innovative public sector organizations.

Innovation in the public sector has been frequentlyassumed to come from the top. There are reason-able — even systemic — grounds for the belief. Inboth presidential and parliamentary democracies,voters elect politicians to enact policies. While inthe United States a greater proportion of seniorexecutive appointments are made on a politicalbasis, in many parliamentary democracies the mostsenior appointments in the public service are madeby the politicians. This would seem to place theresponsibility — and motivation — for innovationoutside the public service itself. (The rationale forthe system, of course, is to make the bureaucracyindirectly responsive to the public through thepoliticians they elect.) In addition, the existence ofstringent central agency controls — to minimizecorruption and ensure due process — is seen toconstrain any interest in innovation public servantsmight demonstrate. The media’s interest in exposingpublic sector failures (management in a fishbowl) isyet another impediment to innovation. Therefore,career public servants may not be rewarded forsuccessful innovation and will likely be punishedfor unsuccessful attempts. These asymmetric incen-

tives may well lead to adverse selection, namely,the avoidance by innovative individuals of careersin the public service, further undermining thepotential for creative change from within.

That is the received wisdom. The results of all theinnovation awards examined tell a different story(see Table 7). In the U.S., approximately 50 percentof the innovations originate from middle managersor frontline staff, 25 percent from agency heads, 21 percent from politicians, 13 percent from inter-est groups, and 10 percent from individuals outsidegovernment. In the sample from the economicallyadvanced countries of the Commonwealth, the proportion from middle managers or frontline staff(82 percent) and agency heads (39 percent) washigher, while that of politicians (11 percent), inter-est groups (2 percent), and individuals outside government (5 percent) was lower. In developingcountries, the results are also similar. Since somerespondents gave multiple answers, these numberssum to more than 100 percent.

Both CAPAM samples and the 1995-98 U.S. dataseparated middle managers from frontline staff. The U.S. sample found that middle managers were involved in the initiation of 43 percent of theinnovations, while frontline staff were involved in 27 percent, the same frequency as politicians(27 percent) and agency heads (28 percent). TheCAPAM survey showed that in the economicallyadvanced countries, middle managers were

Who Innovates? A Challengeto Received Wisdom


involved in initiating 75 percent of the innovationsand frontline staff in 39 percent. In the developingcountries, middle managers were involved in initiat-ing 44 percent of the innovations, a figure compara-ble to the 43 percent in the U.S., but frontlineworkers initiated only 7 percent of the innovations.The latter figure is attributable to the disinclinationof developing countries to empower their frontlinestaff.

While these results are at variance with the tradi-tional understanding of public sector bureaucracy,they are consistent with the conclusions of otherinnovation scholars. Paul Light (1998, 45) studied26 innovative nonprofit and small public sectororganizations in Minnesota and observed that“almost all of them harvested ideas up and downthe organization regardless of who had the idea.”Hamel (2000) presented case studies showing thatthe inspiration for IBM’s involvement with theInternet came from two middle managers, one aprogrammer and the other a marketer; that the ideafor the development of Sony’s PlayStation videogame console came from a mid-level researcher;and that the impetus for Shell to become involvedin the production of renewable energy came from a mid-level planner. Peters and Waterman (1982)pointed to innovations undertaken by frontline staff,some of whom were mavericks working at “skunk

works” far from central offices, often operatingwithout a clear mandate from above and usingbootlegged resources.

Hamel provides two explanations why innovationsare not initiated at the top of corporate pyramids:the long years of experience predisposing those atthe top to be emotionally invested in the past, andthe absence of diverse points of view at the top.Given that political constituencies differ greatly intheir socioeconomic characteristics and that partiesof differing ideologies generally alternate power,we would expect politicians to display more diver-sity than senior managers in the private sector. The problem is that elected officials and politicalappointees often lack sufficiently detailed knowl-edge of their area of responsibility to innovate. On the other hand, if a public service consists ofcareerists right up to the top, as is the case in mostparliamentary democracies, it may have the sameproblem Hamel finds in the private sector.

In both public and private sector organizations, thelower and middle levels contain many youngerpeople who are close to the cutting-edge thinkingthey encountered in universities. They are alsoclose to day-to-day operations and therefore in aposition to apply what they have learned in aninnovative way. In addition, at a time when a great

Table 7: Initiators of Innovations (percent)

Initiator U.S., Commonwealth, Commonwealth,1990-98 Advanced Developing

Politician 21 11 15

Agency Head 25 39 37

Middle Manager 43* 75 44

Frontline staff 27* 39 7

Middle Manager orFrontline staff 51 82 48

Interest group 13 2 11

Citizen 7 0 11

Program Client 3 5 0

Other 6 9 11

Total (percent) 126 148 133

N 321 56 27

Notes:N = number of innovationsThe asterisks indicate that the breakdown between innovations initiated by middle managers and those initiated by frontline staff for theU.S. data was based on the 104 cases from 1995 to 1998. In the 217 cases from 1990 to 1994, these groups were coded together.


deal of innovation is based on the application ofnew information technology, it is usually youngerpeople who are most comfortable with it.

This finding — that innovative ideas emerge fromall levels of the organization and they may be leastlikely to flow from the conventionally assumedsources — has important implications. If innovativeideas can come from anywhere in an organization,rather than a senior elite, then organizations will bemost innovative if they can stimulate innovationthroughout. This thinking is similar to that espousedby the total quality management (TQM) movement,which asserts that ensuring quality is the responsi-bility of everyone in a company, regardless of theirposition or level of formal education.

Much of the management literature on leadershipdeals with the exploits of those who are at the topof organizations. The research I have been conduct-ing has demonstrated many instances of leadershipby innovative public servants in middle manage-ment and on the front lines. A few examples:

• Parks Canada’s accessibility program for seniorsand people with disabilities was initiated byRobert Fern, a public servant who suffered fromdiabetes-related visual impairment. He movedfrom the field to a line position in the headoffice in Ottawa because of his disability. Oncethere, he began developing low-budget pilotprograms for people with disabilities; amongother initiatives, Fern taught a course at theUniversity of Waterloo School of Architecture inwhich students developed designs to make thenearby birthplace of former Prime MinisterMackenzie King wheelchair accessible. TheCanadian Parks Association, a non-governmen-tal organization (NGO), took the best studentdesign and completed the project. Fern con-vinced both his assistant deputy minister andParks Canada field staff that enhancing accessi-bility was both desirable in itself and a goodway to increase visits. When the Treasury Board— the Canadian equivalent of the Office ofManagement and Budget — established a pro-gram of funding pilot accessibility projectsthroughout government, Fern had built momen-tum for Parks Canada to take advantage of theprogram (Borins, 2000c).

• The Texas Department of Human Servicesestablished a Volunteer Interpretation Service

to help clients with limited proficiency inEnglish communicate with the department. Theprogram relies on a network of volunteer tele-phone interpreters working from their ownhomes or offices. The program was developedby Sonya Meinert, a departmental caseworker,and was a finalist in the 1995 Ford-KSG awards.The application described Mrs. Meinert as“deeply empathetic with non-English-speakingpeople because she is a grandchild of immi-grants from central Europe and witnessed thedifficulties of non-English-speaking people in theU.S. in her own family.” Meinert’s region had aquality improvement committee with a mandateto reduce errors in eligibility determination, giv-ing her initiative a supportive environment. Thecommittee endorsed her proposal and she wasgiven time to start the project. When its successwas demonstrated, the position of program coor-dinator was created for her (Texas Departmentof Human Services, 1995). The site visitdescribed her as “an organizational pro” who“has the energy of a missionary” and noted that“in the short time [the program] has existed, shehas compiled excellent training materials, inter-nal evaluation processes, and a widening baseof community support.” (Dunn, 1995).

• After completing a Ph.D. in 1994 in pediatriccardiology at the University of London, Dr.Victor Grech returned to Malta to practice. Heestablished a computerized database for theentire congenital heart disease population inMalta, a total of 1,600 patients. This databasewas the first described in the medical literatureas being used for the long-term treatment ofsuch patients. Dr. Grech also uses the databasefor research, and has published prolifically ininternational journals. At the time of his appli-cation to the CAPAM award in 1998, the proj-ect had not been funded by his hospital orMalta’s National Health Service. It came aboutsolely because Dr. Grech spent his own moneyon hardware and software and his own energyon learning the necessary technology (Grech,1999). Dr. Grech exemplifies the public man-agement innovator who invests his own timeand effort at the outset in the hope that, afterthe value of his concept has been proven, orga-nizational support will be forthcoming. Hisapplication to the CAPAM award was anattempt to raise the profile of his work.


The cases in the previous section showed the inge-nuity and persistence of which frontline public servants are capable. The challenge for senior man-agers in the public sector is to provide incentivesand support to call forth more of the innovationexemplified by Fern, Meinert, and Dr. Grech. Thissection starts with the premise that, rather thanthinking that innovation is their responsibilityalone, politicians and agency heads must encour-age more innovation from the entire organization,particularly middle managers and frontline staff.What should they do to further that objective?

There has been substantial research on the charac-teristics of innovative organizations in the privatesector. Unfortunately, that research has not beenreplicated in the public sector. For example, Light(1998, 212) looked for innovative public sectororganizations in Minnesota, a state with a long tra-dition of effective government. He found 26 innov-ative public sector organizations, but this groupconsisted of 18 nonprofits and 8 small governmentagencies. He therefore observed that “although sin-gle acts of innovation occur in large governmentagencies every day, it is difficult to find many suchagencies that could be described as innovatingorganizations. At least in Minnesota, the search fororganizations that were large, governmental, andinnovating produced an empty set.” There will belarge organizations in the public sector for the fore-seeable future. The necessity is to find ways tomake them more innovative.

The prescriptions that follow for making large pub-lic sector organizations more innovative are based

on a number of sources: the literature about innov-ative private sector organizations, David Osborneand Peter Plastrik’s (2000) recent fieldbook for gov-ernment reinventors, Light’s work on innovativenonprofits and small public sector organizations,and the handful of organizations that appear suffi-ciently often in the innovation awards to suggestthat they have developed cultures supportive ofindividual innovations. Two examples of the latterare Ontario’s Ministry of Consumer and Commer-cial Relations and the U.S. Department of Labor, in particular from 1993 to 1996, when RobertReich was Secretary.

Support Comes from the TopA number of innovations undertaken by the U.S.Department of Labor were recognized as finalistsand winners of the Innovations in American Gov-ernment Awards. These include the initiative toeradicate sweatshops by putting pressure on retail-ers, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation’searly warning program, and a program in the Occu-pational Safety and Health Administration to pro-actively identify workplace health hazards amonglarge employers. In terms of the generic characteris-tics of innovations, these demonstrate processreengineering and alternative service delivery.

While middle managers and frontline staff initiatedthese innovations, Secretary of Labor Robert Reichplayed an important supportive role in a number ofways. First, he established the department’s priori-ties, which included initiatives to improve wagesand working conditions for America’s lowest paid

Supporting Innovation


and most vulnerable workers. Second, he made ahabit of consulting career civil servants, for exam-ple, in quarterly departmental town hall meetings.Third, he took every possible opportunity to recog-nize staff initiatives (Glynn, 1999). Forms of recog-nition included establishing departmentalinnovation awards, bringing his career public ser-vants to meetings with political appointees, andinviting careerists whose ideas had been incorpo-rated into legislation to White House signing cere-monies to meet the President (Reich, 1997). Theroof of the Department’s office building inWashington, D.C., is an ideal vantage point towatch the Fourth of July fireworks. Previous secre-taries always invited political appointees andfriends; Reich used these coveted invitations toreward innovative careerists.

The Defense Personnel Support Center in the U.S.Defense Logistics Agency, as discussed previously,has been energized by the threat of private sectorcompetition. The site visit report eloquentlydescribed the role the center’s top managementplayed in supporting the reinvention efforts of mid-dle managers. It dovetails with the discussion of theefforts of Secretary Reich at the departmental level.

Above all, these mid-level innovators werevitally reinforced, at critical points, by sup-port from top management. Top managersduring these years pushed the envelope ofwhat laws and regulations would allow,helped articulate a common sense of mis-sion, gave subordinates the scope to exper-iment with new ideas, helped draw theconnections between similar innovationsto create fruitful synergies, and funded thetravel, technology, and training that wasessential to the realization of the ideas(Zelikow, 1995).

Rewards and Awards for InnovationA second way of supporting innovation is byrewarding developers of successful innovations. Inthe private sector, the rewards for successful inno-vators, in particular through stock options, havebeen enormous. Hamel (2000, 217) observes thatthe energy company Enron “has typically givenentrepreneurs phantom equity in the new busi-nesses they are helping to create.” Such rewards

are now a necessity in the private sector becauseinnovative individuals who are not well rewardedwill either start their own businesses or move to a competitor.

The public sector traditionally has not given largefinancial rewards to its innovative employees. Theanalogue here to stock options or phantom equitywould be merit pay. While some governments haveadopted merit pay, the amounts are very small incomparison to the private sector. Even if innovationis not rewarded with merit pay, it could still be recognized, for example, through awards programs.In a recent study of awards and recognition inCanadian governments, I found that the number ofawards has been increasingly rapidly in the lastdecade (Borins, 2000b). These include the follow-ing types given specifically for innovation:

• departmental or government-wide achievementawards given to groups or individuals for a num-ber of factors, one of which can be innovation

• innovation awards given by non-governmentalorganizations, such as the Ford-KSG andCAPAM awards discussed earlier

• gain-sharing awards, such as financial awardsgiven to groups or individuals for implementedcost-saving ideas or royalties given to publicservants for inventions made while working forthe government

The financial implications of gain-sharing awardsare not large. The largest awards for cost-savingideas are one-time awards of several thousand dol-lars. The standard approach the government ofCanada uses for dividing royalties is 65 percent tothe department and 35 percent to the inventor. Thelargest royalty found was $70,000, providing anannual income stream of approximately $25,000 to the inventor. Internal awards for innovation orinnovation awards given by NGOs are not finan-cial, but rather involve public recognition. Thatsaid, there is a consensus in the private-sector liter-ature that recognition is an effective motivator(Kanter, 1988, 183) and a similar belief in theeffectiveness of recognition in the public sector.


Resources for InnovationMy original study measured the frequency withwhich the various obstacles to innovation had beenovercome (Borins, 1998, 67). While the overallsuccess rate was 58 percent, the obstacle that inno-vators overcame least frequently (at only 19 per-cent) was inadequate resources. Following that wasdifficulty maintaining enthusiasm, overcome 45percent of the time. This suggests that findingresources for public sector innovation is indeed apressing problem.

Traditionally, the public sector has funded innova-tion by using budgetary slack or cost savings due toenhanced efficiency. The difficulty with these sourcesof funding is that they are uncertain. Budgetary con-trol agencies have a mandate to reduce budgetaryslack and recapture cost savings. If the public sectorwanted to emulate the private sector’s ample supplyof venture capital, it would create funds that couldbe used to support innovation. If line agencies wereto attempt to do this, they would have to convincethe budgetary control agency that this is an appropri-ate expenditure. An alternative approach would befor the budgetary control agency to create a centralfund that could be used to support innovationsthroughout the government.

Osborne and Plastrik (2000) provide several exam-ples of federal, municipal, and state governmentsthat have created central innovation funds. In somecases, such as Philadelphia and Portland, Oregon,the fund loans money to line agencies with pay-back terms that show an expectation of significantsavings (for example, double the amount borrowedin five years in Philadelphia or a three-year pay-back in Portland). In 1993, the Florida Legislatureestablished a $12 million Innovation InvestmentProgram that funded 38 out of 163 proposals andmeasured returns in terms of cost avoidance, pro-ductivity gains, or new revenues.

The government of Singapore recently created TheEnterprise Challenge program. Modeled after ShellOil’s development of an internal capital market forinnovative ideas, the Singapore government estab-lished a fund with a two-year operating budget of S$10 million (US $5.7 million) and a mandate tofund innovative proposals for public services com-ing either from within government or from outside.The program’s secretariat is within the public

service reform and planning unit in the PrimeMinister’s Office. Projects are chosen by a 15-member board that includes business entrepre-neurs, area experts, and senior public servants. By mid-July 2000, 104 projects had been rejected,four had been accepted, and 38 were being nur-tured or evaluated (Singapore Prime Minister’sOffice, Public Service Division, 2000). Along simi-lar lines, the government of Canada’s executivedevelopment agency, the Canadian Centre forManagement Development, is proposing a learninginnovation seed fund to sponsor new ideas for ser-vice delivery, application of technology, or policydevelopment initiatives in the Canadian federalgovernment (Government of Canada, 2000).

These funds appear to be supporting innovation ona project-by-project basis. One could questionwhether that is sufficient, and some agencies mightestablish units whose mandate is to bring aboutinnovation. An example of this is the TechnologyDepartment in the U.S. Internal Revenue Service,which one Ford-KSG site visit report described as:

[having] the reputation of being a ‘skunkworks’ in which ideas could be developedand tested without serious repercussionsfor failure. This was possible because exec-utive leadership within IRS recognized thatsuch an environment must exist within theorganization to bring about innovation.(Kelly, 1997)

Public sector financial management reforms beingput in place in some jurisdictions create the possi-bility of enhanced internal funding for innovation.Organizations are being given discretion to chargeuser fees and keep some of the user fee revenue fortheir own purposes rather than returning it all tothe treasury, to retain some of the cost savings theyhave achieved due to increased efficiency, and tocarry forward unspent balances from one fiscalyear to the next.

Diversity and InnovationKanter (1988) argues that kaleidoscopic thinking isa good metaphor for the creative process — namely,the ability to rearrange fragments into new patternsand envision a new reality in those patterns. Hamel(2000) refers to this rethinking and reinvention in acorporate context as business concept innovation.


Kanter claims that individuals who are most likelyto exercise creative thinking are those who have thebest kaleidoscopic vision, that is, those who canbring the richest set of ideas to a given problem.Such breadth of vision can be institutionalized byorganizational and job design. Individual jobs thatare defined broadly, rather than narrowly, and thatgive people a mandate to develop a wide range ofskills and experience to use in solving problemspromote creativity. Workgroups that consist of peo-ple with a wide range of backgrounds bring a greatdiversity of perspectives to problem solving. Theseapproaches are at variance with the traditional pub-lic sector bureaucracy, which is characterized bynarrowly defined jobs and organizations dominatedby individual professions.

Learning from the OutsideThe Ontario Ministry of Consumer and CommercialRelations (MCCR) has a number of very traditionaltransactional responsibilities, such as vital statistics,business and personal property registration, andland titles, as well as some responsibilities for mar-ketplace regulation. In the last decade, however, it has been extraordinarily innovative in its han-dling of these responsibilities through the earlyintroduction of new information technology, theestablishment of teams of multi-skilled workers, apartnership with the private sector to convert landtitle records to a geographic information system,and industry self-regulation. It was a key player inthe “Ontario Delivers” package, mentioned earlier,that has won numerous innovation awards, includ-ing the CAPAM gold award in 1998.

What is this organization’s secret? When theOntario government was running large deficitsearly in the decade, MCCR, like other departments,was under fiscal pressure to increase user fees andreduce costs. MCCR’s creative responses camefrom middle management. While it had changedministers and deputy ministers quite frequently, ithad a team of assistant deputy ministers who stayedin place. One of them, Art Daniels, was notablyoutward looking. He was aware of best practices inthe private sector, and took the lead in introducingmulti-skilled work teams and electronic data inter-change. He was an enthusiastic proponent ofrecognition programs and had served as presidentof the Institute of Public Administration of Canada,

an organization of academics and practitioners thatsince 1990 has been giving an annual public man-agement innovation award. Daniels submitted hisdepartment’s innovations for the IPAC award.(Kernaghan, Marson, and Borins, 2000, 31-5).Achieving external recognition from IPAC andother awards was an effective way of motivatingfurther innovation.

The MCCR example illustrates organizational learn-ing from the outside. More generally, we could askhow organizations do learn from the outside. Someways would include wide reading by individualmembers of the organization, attendance at confer-ences and workshops, bringing in outside expertsor facilitators, site visits, benchmarking, and partici-pation in professional networks (Osborne andPlastrik, 2000). A public sector organization mighttake a neutral stance toward such learning, leavingit to the individual to undertake. Or it could go fur-ther by encouraging learning — for example, byproviding support for individuals to attend confer-ences and workshops, and by establishing mecha-nisms, such as internal seminars, to share what hasbeen learned.

Innovation Is Everyone’s ResponsibilityThe implication of the finding that innovations fre-quently come from middle managers and frontlinestaff is that they should be involved in the innova-tive process. The data on individual innovationspresent many examples of this, two of which areparticularly compelling. The Massachusetts Depart-ment of Environmental Protection won a Ford-KSGinnovation award for pioneering cross-media envi-ronmental inspection. Rather than sending severalinspectors to a factory to look separately at air,water, and soil pollution, it began to send teams of cross-trained inspectors to look at a factory’simpact on the entire environment. The idea wasdeveloped by Manik Roy, a member of the headoffice staff and a doctoral student at the KennedySchool of Government (Borins, 1998, 197).

The origin of Canada’s SchoolNet program is a sim-ilar story. In the early ‘90s, some middle managersin Industry Canada were thinking about how thefederal government could gain a presence on therapidly evolving Internet. An undergraduate student


on a work term in the government proposed aninteractive website to which primary and secondaryschool educators could send educational materials,and SchoolNet was launched. The initiative ulti-mately received enthusiastic political support atboth the federal and provincial levels.

These two examples show how students broughtleading-edge thinking to public sector organiza-tions. Some corporations, recognizing that beingabreast of information technology is essential totheir survival and that the young are closest to andmost comfortable with new technology, have put in place reverse mentoring programs, wherebyyounger staff members help senior executives learnto use information technology and increase theirunderstanding of its potential. In recent years, manypublic sector organizations have found that, as aresult of downsizing, their age profile is dominatedby the middle-aged, with very few employees underthe age of 30. This will make it difficult for them tobenefit from younger thinking. Some more forward-looking governments, such as Canada and Ontario,have established internship programs to increase thesupply of bright young staff.

Experimentation and EvaluationThe process of innovation often proceeds by trialand error. Organizations undertake experiments,put in place a process for evaluating the results,and, depending on those results, expand, modify,or scrap the innovation. Traditionally, the publicsector has been unwilling to do this for fear ofmedia and opposition criticism of failures. As aconsequence, it has been highly risk-averse,attempting to avoid errors by avoiding innovation.Innovative organizations, however, do not avoiderrors. Rather, they become very effective atquickly correcting and learning from them.

Despite this culture of timidity with its fear of pub-lic failure, there are possibilities for public sectorexperimentation and learning. As embodied inJustice Louis Brandeis’s famous reference to thestates as “laboratories of democracy,” a decentral-ized system of government does permit a wide vari-ety of approaches to a given problem, and learninghappens because public servants compare theresults of different approaches. Some systems ofgovernment may be more supportive of experimen-

tation than others. In parliamentary systems withdisciplined majorities, it is easy for the governmentof the day to use its majority to introduce a com-prehensive new program on a national scale. In alegislature lacking party discipline, a majority mustbe fashioned for each piece of legislation. Eachproposal will face firm proponents, equally firmopponents, and some legislators who are unde-cided. Those who are undecided could be broughtto support the legislation if it is introduced on anexperimental basis as a pilot program. Legislativenecessity may well create fertile ground for experi-mentation and evaluation.

The reinvention labs created under the U.S. federalgovernment’s reinventing government initiativeare, of course, an example of experimentation.They were established by individual departments,usually with a relaxation of departmental and cen-tral agency controls, and with the support of theoffice of Vice President Gore. The objective was to replicate successful experiments (Osborne andPlastrik, 2000).

The tactics of rewarding innovation and experimen-tation-with-evaluation can be linked together. Onthe one hand, innovation awards should be givenfor experiments that have achieved results such asimproved performance and reduced cost. On theother hand, innovation is encouraged when thecosts of failure to the innovator have been reduced.Osborne and Plastrik (2000) discuss a number ofways to do this, such as celebrating honorable fail-ures and protecting employees from punishment iftheir innovations do not succeed. Together, theseapproaches would reverse the public sector’s tradi-tional asymmetric incentives.


This report has combined two different perspectiveson public management innovation, that of the indi-vidual innovator and that of the organization. It hasexplored the individual perspective by using therich body of information provided by applicationsto the Ford-KSG awards. The CAPAM awards pro-vided comparative data about the economicallyadvanced and developing nations of theCommonwealth. Though the Commonwealth sam-ple sizes are relatively small, they do suggest sub-stantial similarities in the characteristics of publicmanagement innovations and the innovativeprocess in both the Commonwealth and the U.S.,and in advanced and developing countries.

The report has examined the characteristics of theseinnovations, where obstacles have arisen and sup-port has been found. Based on what was learnedfrom these samples, we offer the following adviceto individual innovators:

1. In planning innovations, expect to use the fivekey building blocks most frequently observedin our samples: the use of a systems approach;the use of information technology; processimprovement; private or voluntary sectorinvolvement to achieve public purposes; andcommunity, citizen, or staff empowerment.These building blocks, in turn, have severalcomponents — for example, process improve-ment innovations include applications of thePareto (80-20) rule, user pay mechanisms,

voluntary compliance, and alternative disputeresolution. Often innovations apply a numberof building blocks together in response to acomplex problem. These building blocks areflexible and scalable, and transcend policyareas and national public services or cultures.

2. When attempting to implement your innova-tion, anticipate a wide variety of obstacles.Obstacles will arise most frequently within thebureaucracy, but some may come from thepolitical level and others from the world out-side. Finding the necessary resources is themost frequent individual problem and the oneleast frequently resolved. The obstacles identi-fied generate questions innovators should askregarding, among others, program cost and theavailability of resources, the program’s legalmandate, the capacity of organizationsexpected to deliver the program, the attitudesof occupational groups that will be involved inthe program, the implications of using a newtechnology, opposition by central agencies, dif-ficulties reaching the target group, and publicskepticism or opposition.

3. There are many possible responses to theseobstacles. The two you are most likely to useare, broadly defined, persuasion — showingthe benefits of an innovation — and accommo-dation of the concerns of skeptics. Each ofthese, in turn, has a number of aspects: accom-modation includes consulting with or co-opting

Conclusion andRecommendations


affected parties, providing training, compensat-ing losers, or making a program culturally sensitive. Based on the experience of our sam-ple of innovators, expect to use strong-arm tactics (such as attempting to have opponentsremoved from their positions) least frequently.Successful innovators display an ability to takeobjections seriously and respond appropriately.Specific sets of tactics are most likely to corre-spond to each obstacle.

4. There are a wide variety of potential support-ers of innovation from one’s own agency,other agencies, the political level, and theworld outside, and successful innovatorsmobilize many of them.

5. When asked, successful innovators gavenumerous pieces of advice to potential innovators. The advice emphasized planningand improvisation, being decisive and beinginclusive of all stakeholders, persistence, andpromotion of the innovation.

The data from both the U.S. and Commonwealthinnovation awards showed that frontline staff andmiddle managers are the most frequent initiators ofpublic management innovation. This is a surprisingresult, given the traditional impediments to innova-tion emanating from that level in the public sector.It leads to the question of how public sector orga-nizations can be made more supportive of suchinnovations. There does appear to be a consensuson the characteristics of innovative organizations,whether in the private or public sectors.

This last section of the study findings provides thefollowing advice to managers who would like toenhance the level of innovation in their organiza-tion and who have the authority to do so.

1. An innovative culture needs support from thetop. It can come in the form of establishingorganizational priorities to guide innovation,recognition for innovators, protection of inno-vators from central agency constraints, andgranting the latitude to experiment. In thisapproach, those at the top of organizations,rather than initiating innovations themselves,are encouraging innovations to bubble upthrough the organization.

2. Rewards to innovative individuals may includefinancial compensation, for example, perfor-mance-related pay and gain-sharing. Whenfinancial compensation is constrained, awardsand recognition may serve as substitutes.Awards can include those given by the depart-ment or the entire government; innovationawards given by NGOs, such as the Ford-KSGand CAPAM awards; or impromptu recogni-tion. An example of the latter is former LaborSecretary Robert Reich inviting public servantswhose ideas were incorporated into legislationto meet the President at White House signingceremonies.

3. Individual innovators made clear that lack ofresources for innovations was a serious con-straint. One response to this is to establish acentral innovation fund to support innovativeideas within the public sector. Financial man-agement reforms also create the possibility ofenhanced internal funding for innovationwithin all agencies.

4. Because innovation often depends on the abil-ity to see things differently, diversity in termsof the backgrounds and ways of thinking of an organization’s members will enhance itsinnovativeness.

5. Innovative organizations are effective at seek-ing out information from the outside, forexample, by benchmarking, making site visits,and participating in professional networks.They are also effective at sharing this informa-tion internally.

6. Innovative organizations draw ideas from people at all levels.

7. Innovative organizations are effective atexperimenting and evaluating their experi-ments. They recognize that failures are possi-ble, and have lowered the cost to their staff ofhonorable failures. They continue with theirsuccesses and discontinue their failures.

There are some bridges between the individual andorganizational perspectives to innovation. Organiza-tions with a culture of innovation generate numer-ous award applications, and glimpses of the culturecan be seen as a setting for each application. Simi-larly, innovators who succeed despite an organiza-


tional culture that is either indifferent or hostile cre-ate the possibility of a cultural transformation.

Societies throughout the world are now convincedthat innovation by the private sector is essential tostrong economic performance. The harder chal-lenge is to create a public sector that is more opento innovation than has been the case. This reporthas suggested ways to do this; it will have suc-ceeded if it strengthens the resolve or informs thethinking of a few of the public sector’s future innovators.


The Ford-KSG awards program actively solicitsapplications regarding innovations in all policyareas and receives about 1,500 per year. The initialapplication form asks about the characteristics ofthe program, in particular: how it is innovative; itsbeneficiaries and funding sources; verifiable evi-dence of the program’s achievements; and itsreplicability. From the approximately 1,500 initialapplications received each year, juries of acade-mics and practitioners with expert knowledge ofthe relevant policy areas choose 75 semifinalistsrepresenting each policy area in the same propor-tion as in the 1,500 applications. The semifinaliststhen complete a more detailed questionnaire,including many questions about the process ofconceptualizing and then implementing the inno-vation. Twenty-five finalists are chosen on the basisof expert evaluation of the detailed semifinalistquestionnaire. Each finalist then hosts a site visit byan expert, who files a report. Using these reportsand an interview as input, a national committeechooses 10 winners. The award was changed toinclude the federal government in 1995.

My initial study analyzed a large sample of 217open-ended semifinalist questionnaires completedbetween 1990 and 1994 when the awards programwas open only to state and local governments(Borins 1998). The open-ended questionnaires werecoded and quantitative results were produced. Asimilar procedure was applied to a sample of 104finalists from 1995 to 1998 that included 29 fed-

eral, 44 state, and 31 local applications. The distri-bution of responses in the second sample stronglycorrelated with the first (Borins 2000a). As a conse-quence, results are presented for these two samples— totaling 321 questionnaires — together.

The Commonwealth Association for PublicAdministration and Management internationalinnovations award competition, held in 1998 and2000, is open to public sector organizationsthroughout the Commonwealth. A questionnairethat is virtually identical to the Ford-KSG semifinal-ist questionnaire was sent to CAPAM applicants.The Commonwealth includes several economicallyadvanced countries (Australia, Canada, NewZealand, Singapore, the UK) and many developingcountries in the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. Thisquestionnaire yielded a total of 83 responses, 37 in1998 and 46 in 2000. There were 56 responsesfrom economically advanced countries, includingCanada (20), Australia (15), Singapore (14), NewZealand (3), Malta (3), and the UK (1). There were27 responses from developing countries, includingIndia (8), Malaysia (6), South Africa (5), Jamaica (2),and individual responses from Bangladesh, Cyprus,Ghana, Iran, the Seychelles, and Zimbabwe. Thesequestionnaires were coded in the same way as theFord-KSG awards questionnaires.

A similar questionnaire was also sent to applicantsto the Institute of Public Administration of Canadapublic management innovation awards, open to

Appendix: ResearchMethodology


public sector organizations at all three levels of gov-ernment in Canada, between 1990 and 1994. Thedistribution of responses in the 33 questionnairesreceived was shown to be strongly correlated withthat of the 1990-94 U.S. study (Borins, 2000c).Because the CAPAM questionnaire already includes20 responses from Canada, I decided not to includethe earlier Canadian questionnaire, to avoid over-weighting Canadian responses in the Common-wealth sample. This report uses the statistical resultsof the U.S. and CAPAM samples and quotes com-pleted questionnaires — and, for the U.S. sample,expert evaluations — of the finalists. The questionsdiscussed in this report are as follows:

1. [Asked in 1990-94 U.S. sample]. What makesyour program or policy initiative innovative?Compare it with other programs currently operatingin your region, state, or nationally that address thesame problem. How does your approach differ?[Asked in 1995-98 U.S. sample and bothCommonwealth samples]. Describe your innova-tion; include the specific problem it addresses, andhow it has changed previous practice. (See Table 1.)

2. Please describe the most significant obstacle(s)encountered thus far by your program or policy ini-tiative. How did you deal with each of the obsta-cles? Which implementation obstacles ordifficulties remain? (See Tables 2, 3, and 4.)

3. What individuals or organizations are thestrongest supporters of the program or policy initia-tive and why? (See Table 5.)

4. [Asked in 1998 and 2000 Commonwealth sam-ples]. What are the most important things you havelearned from initiating and/or implementing thisinnovation? Is there any advice you would give to awould-be innovator? (See Table 6.)

5. What individuals or groups are considered theprimary initiators of the program or policy initia-tive? Please specify their position or organizationalaffiliation at the time they initiated the program orpolicy initiative. (See Table 7.)


Bardach, Eugene. 1998. Managerial Craftsmanship:Getting Agencies to Work Together. Washington,D.C.: Brookings.

Borins, Sandford. 1998. Innovating with Integrity:How Local Heroes are Transforming AmericanGovernment. Washington, D.C.: GeorgetownUniversity Press.

________. 1999. “Trends in training public man-agers: a report on a Commonwealth seminar,”International Public Management Journal, 2, 2:299-314.

__________. 2000a. “Loose cannons and rulebreakers, or enterprising leaders? Some evidenceabout innovative public managers,” PublicAdministration Review, November/December, 60,6: 498-507.

________. 2000b. “Public service award programs:an exploratory analysis,” Canadian PublicAdministration, Fall, 43, 3: 321-42.

________. 2000c. “What border? Public manage-ment innovation in the United States and Canada,”Journal of Policy Analysis and Management,Winter, 19, 1: 46-74.

California Department of Transportation, Office ofPublic/Private Partnerships. 1997. “AB 680Program.” Semifinalist application to Innovations inAmerican Government Awards Program.

Centrelink. 1999. “Implementation of theAustralian Commonwealth Service Delivery Agency(Centrelink).” (July 20). Questionnaire submitted tothe author. Unpublished.

________. 2000. “One-to-One Service.” (May 15).Questionnaire submitted to the author.Unpublished.

Defense Logistics Agency. 1995. “National Defenseon the Offense.” Semifinalist application toInnovations in American Government AwardsProgram.

Donahue, John. Ed. 1999. Making WashingtonWork: Tales of Innovation in America’s FederalGovernment. Washington, D.C.: Brookings.

Dunn, Nancy. 1995. “Site visit report on TexasDepartment of Human Services, VolunteerInterpreter Service.” (June 5). Cambridge, MA.Unpublished.

Federal Emergency Management Agency. 1996.“Consequences Assessment Tool Set andOperations Concept.” Semifinalist application toInnovations in American Government AwardsProgram.

Glynn, Thomas. 1999. Interview, November 8.

Government of Canada. 2000. A Public ServiceLearning Organization, Ottawa.

References


Grech, Victor. 1999. “Maltese Paediatric CardiologyDatabase.” (May 17). Questionnaire submitted tothe author. Unpublished.

Hamel, Gary. 2000. Leading the Revolution.Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Industry Canada, Information HighwayApplications Branch. 1998. “Canada’s SchoolNet.”Application to CAPAM International InnovationsAwards Programme. Unpublished.

Industry Canada, Computers for Schools Program.2000. “Computers for Schools.” (July 24).Questionnaire submitted to the author.Unpublished.

Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore.2000. “eCitizen.” (May 27). Questionnaire submit-ted to the author. Unpublished.

Jones, Lawrence R. and Thompson, Fred. 1999.Public Management: Institutional Renewal for theTwenty-First Century. Stamford, CT: JAI Press.

Judicial Commission of New South Wales. 2000.“Judicial Information Research System.” (May 10).Questionnaire submitted to the author.Unpublished.

Kanter, Rosabeth. 1988. “When a thousand flowersbloom: structural, collective, and social conditionsfor innovation in organizations,” Research inOrganizational Behavior 10, 169-211.

Kelly, John. 1997. “Site visit report on IRS Telefile.”(July 15). Scottsdale, AZ. Unpublished.

Kernaghan, K., Marson, B., and Borins, S. 2000.The New Public Organization. Toronto: Institute ofPublic Administration of Canada.

Latif, Shahed. 1999. “Information technology,poverty alleviation, and village phones inBangladesh.” Unpublished.

Light, Paul. 1998. Sustaining Innovation: CreatingNonprofit and Government Organizations thatInnovate Naturally. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.

Mechling, Jerry. 1997. “Site visit report on City ofNew York, Controlling Claim Costs with Imaging.”(July 24). Cambridge, MA. Unpublished.

New York Police Department. 1996. “Compstat: ACrime Reduction Management Tool.” Semifinalistapplication to Innovations in AmericanGovernment Awards Program.

Ontario Public Service, Restructuring Secretariat.1999. “Ontario Delivers.” (May 13). Questionnairesubmitted to the author. Unpublished.

Osborne, D. and Plastrik, P. 2000. The Reinventor’sFieldbook: Tools for Transforming yourGovernment, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco.

Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. 1995. “Early Warning Program.” Semifinalist applicationto Innovations in American Government AwardsProgram.

Peters, T. and Waterman, R. 1982. In Search ofExcellence: Lessons from America’s Best-runCompanies. New York: Harper and Row.

Province of KwaZulu-Natal, PietermaritzburgRegion. 2000. “Project Ilima.” (July 5).Questionnaire submitted to the author.Unpublished.

Reich, Robert. 1997. Locked in the Cabinet. NewYork: Knopf.

Senge, Peter. 1990. The Fifth Discipline: The Artand Practice of the Learning Organization. NewYork: Doubleday.

Singapore Ministry of Education. 2000. “Teachers’Network.” (May 10). Questionnaire submitted tothe author. Unpublished.

Singapore Prime Minister’s Office, Public ServiceDivision, 2000. “The Enterprise Challenge.” (July20). Questionnaire submitted to the author.Unpublished.

Smith, Dennis. 1996. “Site visit report onConsequences Assessment Tool Set and OperationsConcept.” (July 7). New York, NY. Unpublished.


South Africa Department of Water Affairs andForestry. 2000. “The Working for WaterProgramme.” (June 23). Questionnaire submitted tothe author. Unpublished.

State University of New York at Albany. 1995.“Center for Technology in Government.”Semifinalist application to Innovations in AmericanGovernment Awards Program.

Texas Department of Human Services. 1995.“Volunteer Interpretation Service.” Semifinalistapplication to Innovations in AmericanGovernment Awards Program.

U.S. Department of Housing and UrbanDevelopment, Office of Community Planning andDevelopment. 1996. “Consolidated Planning/Community Connections.” Semifinalist applicationto Innovations in American Government AwardsProgram.

U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and HourDivision. 1996. “Eradicating Sweatshops.”Semifinalist application to Innovations in AmericanGovernment Awards Program.

Zelikow, Philip. 1995. “Site Visit Report onNational Defense on the Offense.” Cambridge,MA. Unpublished.


Sandford Borins is Professor of Public Management in the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management at theUniversity of Toronto and Chair of the Division of Management at the University of Toronto at Scarborough.He has been a visiting professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and theGoldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.

He is the author of numerous articles on public management, as well as five books, the three most recentof which are The New Public Organization, co-authored with Kenneth Kernaghan and Brian Marson(Institute of Public Administration of Canada, 2000), Political Management in Canada, co-authored with theHon. Allan Blakeney, former premier of Saskatchewan (University of Toronto Press, 1998), and Innovatingwith Integrity: How Local Heroes are Transforming American Government (Georgetown University Press,1998).

Professor Borins has had a wide range of professional experience. He was a member of the selection pan-els for the Commonwealth Association for Public Administration and Management and the Institute ofPublic Administration of Canada innovation awards, as well as chair of the selection panel for the AmethystAward for Excellence in the Ontario Public Service. He was a member of the board of directors of theOntario Transportation Capital Corporation, which developed Ontario’s electronic toll highway. He issenior adviser and conference rapporteur for the Commonwealth Association for Public Administration and Management.

Professor Borins received a master’s in public policy from the Kennedy School of Government in 1974 andhis Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 1976.

About the Author


To contact the author:

Professor Sandford BorinsChair, Division of ManagementUniversity of Toronto at Scarborough1265 Military TrailToronto, ON M1C 1A4(416) 287-7341fax (416) 287-7363

e-mail: [email protected]: www.scar.utoronto.ca/~borins/

To contact organizations sponsoring innovation awards:

Innovations in American GovernmentJohn F. Kennedy School of GovernmentHarvard University79 John F. Kennedy St.Cambridge, MA 02138

e-mail: [email protected]: www.innovations.harvard.edu

Commonwealth Association for Public Administration and Management1075 Bay St., Suite 402Toronto, ON M5S 2B1(416) 920-3337fax: (416) 920-6574

e-mail: [email protected]: www.capam.comnet.mt

Key Contact Information

To download or order a copy of these reports, visit the Endowment website at: endowment.pwcglobal.com

Innovations in ProgramDelivery

Managing Workfare: The Case of the Work Experience Program in theNew York City Parks Department (June 1999)

Steven Cohen

New Tools for ImprovingGovernment Regulation: AnAssessment of Emissions Trading andOther Market-Based RegulatoryTools (October 1999)

Gary C. Bryner

Religious Organizations, Anti-Poverty Relief, and CharitableChoice: A Feasibility Study of Faith-Based Welfare Reform in Mississippi(November 1999)

John P. BartkowskiHelen A. Regis

Business Improvement Districts and Innovative Service Delivery(November 1999)

Jerry Mitchell

An Assessment of BrownfieldRedevelopment Policies:The Michigan Experience(November 1999)

Richard C. Hula

San Diego County’s InnovationProgram: Using Competition and aWhole Lot More to Improve PublicServices (January 2000)

William B. Eimicke

Innovation in the Administration ofPublic Airports (March 2000)

Scott E. Tarry

Entrepreneurial Government:Bureaucrats as Businesspeople (May 2000)

Anne Laurent

Rethinking U.S. EnvironmentalProtection Policy: ManagementChallenges for a New Administration(November 2000)

Dennis A. Rondinelli

Innovations in Management

Credit Scoring and Loan Scoring:Tools for Improved Management ofFederal Credit Programs (July 1999)

Thomas H. Stanton

Determining a Level Playing Field for Public-Private Competition(November 1999)

Lawrence L. Martin

Using Activity-Based Costing to Manage More Effectively(January 2000)

Michael H. GranofDavid E. PlattIgor Vaysman

Implementing State Contracts forSocial Services: An Assessment of the Kansas Experience (May 2000)

Jocelyn M. JohnstonBarbara S. Romzek

Corporate Strategic Planning in Government: Lessons from the United States Air Force(November 2000)

Colin Campbell

The President’s ManagementCouncil: An Important ManagementInnovation (December 2000)

Margaret L. Yao

Using Evaluation to SupportPerformance Management:A Guide for Federal Executives(January 2001)

Kathryn NewcomerMary Ann Scheirer

Managing for Outcomes:Milestone Contracting in Oklahoma (January 2001)

Peter Frumkin

The Challenge of Innovating inGovernment (February 2001)

Sandford Borins

TransformingOrganizations

The Importance of Leadership:The Role of School Principals(September 1999)

Paul TeskeMark Schneider

Leadership for Change: Case Studiesin American Local Government(September 1999)

Robert B. DenhardtJanet Vinzant Denhardt

Managing DecentralizedDepartments: The Case of the U.S. Department of Health andHuman Services (October 1999)

Beryl A. Radin

Transforming Government: TheRenewal and Revitalization of theFederal Emergency ManagementAgency (April 2000)

R. Steven DanielsCarolyn L. Clark-Daniels

Transforming Government: Creatingthe New Defense ProcurementSystem (April 2000)

Kimberly A. Harokopus

Trans-Atlantic Experiences in HealthReform: The United Kingdom’sNational Health Service and theUnited States Veterans HealthAdministration (May 2000)

Marilyn A. DeLuca

Transforming Government: TheRevitalization of the Veterans HealthAdministration (June 2000)

Gary J. Young

The Challenge of Managing AcrossBoundaries: The Case of the Officeof the Secretary in the U.S.Department of Health and HumanServices (November 2000)

Beryl A. Radin

A Learning-Based Approach toLeading Change (December 2000)

Barry Sugarman

Creating a Culture of Innovation: 10 Lessons from America’s Best Run City (January 2001)

Janet Vinzant DenhardtRobert B. Denhardt

Transforming Government: DanGoldin and the Remaking of NASA(March 2001)

W. Henry Lambright

E-Government

Managing Telecommuting in theFederal Government: An InterimReport (June 2000)

Gina VegaLouis Brennan

Using Virtual Teams to ManageComplex Projects: A Case Study ofthe Radioactive Waste ManagementProject (August 2000)

Samuel M. DeMarie

The Auction Model: How the PublicSector Can Leverage the Power of E-Commerce Through DynamicPricing (October 2000)

David C. Wyld

Supercharging the EmploymentAgency: An Investigation of the Useof Information and CommunicationTechnology to Improve the Serviceof State Employment Agencies(December 2000)

Anthony M. Townsend

Assessing a State’s Readiness forGlobal Electronic Commerce:Lessons from the Ohio Experience(January 2001)

J. Pari SabetySteven I. Gordon

Privacy Strategies for ElectronicGovernment (January 2001)

Janine S. HillerFrance Bélanger

Commerce Comes to Governmenton the Desktop: E-CommerceApplications in the Public Sector(February 2001)

Genie N. L. Stowers

The Use of the Internet in Government Service Delivery(February 2001)

Steven CohenWilliam Eimicke

Revitalizing the PublicService

Results of the GovernmentLeadership Survey: A 1999 Survey ofFederal Executives (June 1999)

Mark A. AbramsonSteven A. ClyburnElizabeth Mercier

Profiles in Excellence: Conversationswith the Best of America’s CareerExecutive Service (November 1999)

Mark W. Huddleston

Leaders Growing Leaders: Preparingthe Next Generation of PublicService Executives (May 2000)

Ray Blunt

Reflections on Mobility: CaseStudies of Six Federal Executives(May 2000)

Michael D. Serlin

Toward a 21st Century Public Service: Reports from Four Forums(January 2001)

Mark A. Abramson, Editor

Becoming an Effective PoliticalExecutive: 7 Lessons fromExperienced Appointees(January 2001)

Judith E. Michaels

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For additional information, contact:Mark A. AbramsonExecutive DirectorThe PricewaterhouseCoopers Endowment for

The Business of Government1616 North Fort Myer DriveArlington, VA 22209

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