Innovation and Collaboration

Public innovation is necessarily collaborative. The capacity to innovate is directly linked to the environment of the public organisation. This environment includes the structure and culture of the organisation itself, together with its range of partners and collaborative actors including the local community. This organisational environment may encourage or discourage innovation. As international examples demonstrate, mayoral governance is a key institutional basis for successful innovation, as it transcends the bureaucratic structures of local governance and retains, through mandatory election, direct public endorsement. Evidence from Finland, the Netherlands, and Sweden suggests that collaboration is key to the development of innovation initiatives, with clear leadership from the centre in the shape of, for instance, central government. Crucially, such leadership is facilitative and supportive rather than dictatorial and top-down. Research during the Covid “lockdown” suggests that collaborative governance of the innovation process may generate public value and that the lockdown may even have encouraged collaboration between local communities and local agencies. The defining feature of collaboration is that it cuts across established organisational boundaries. In contrast, traditional public administration in its discrete silos is a deterrent to innovation.