Conclusions

While some factors, such as the prevailing organisational culture, may impact private and public sector innovation alike, there are essential and more important differences between the sectors. While private sector innovation is essentially about gaining or retaining competitive advantage (through quality, price, or novelty), public sector innovation is fundamentally different. It is not normally about price nor about competitive advantage. Public sector innovation is about process and outcome, the former concerned with how and where services are delivered, the latter about the quality of what is delivered. All local public services – schools, housing, and environmental services, for example – can be seen through this lens. Accountability resides ultimately at the political level. The process is enhanced by effective collaboration and by sensitive leadership, mindful that public money is at stake. Within this process of collaboration are to be found the key elements of public sector innovation – human learning, power, values, risk, and the needs of local place – bound together by trust, and explicable by relational processes of human interaction rather than those of hierarchical and managerial control.