People in Public Sector

People are central to public sector innovation at every stage of its process. Innovations begin as ideas in the minds of citizens, public servants, managers and political leaders and are generated at the cross sections of human interaction. These ideas are inspired by the needs of citizens and are transformed from idea to practice through the commitment of public servants and leaders who anticipate these needs and respond to them. As such the study of innovation must begin with an understanding of the people who contribute to innovation, and what motivates them and enables them to do so.

A recent report by the EC Expert Group on Public Sector Innovation suggests that the public leader of the future will need to strike a new balance “between administration, stability and predictability on the one hand, and leadership, change and innovation on the other.” This report links innovative behaviour to an entrepreneurial mind-set which includes challenging assumptions, focusing on outcomes and co-designing with end-users, and embracing the unknown through small-scale iterative experiments. This depends on leadership, vision, communications, and the ability to build alliances. For many, these characteristics simply describe the role public servants take on to serve the public interest. It means balancing visionary change with concrete implementation.

Recognising that humans are at the centre of innovation raises questions about what motivates people to be public innovators, what skills they require for success, and how public organisations can increase both. Answers to these questions require a nuanced understanding of the kinds of competencies and behaviours that support innovation, and the way that incentive structures interact with public servants’ values to motivate learning and engagement.

This suggests the need to look beyond an organisation’s formal training, incentives and rewards, and to include the organisational culture that frames and structures the way individuals and groups interact and take meaning from their work.

Motivating professional public servants to be innovative requires careful consideration of the range of incentives and disincentives that operate simultaneously within an organisation, both intrinsic and extrinsic. These can include extrinsic factors such as the way that pay is structured and the way promotions are granted. It can also include the quality of relationships among staff and management, the way teamwork is used, and the way effort is recognised. Intrinsic motivation can be impacted by the way that staff is made aware of the impact of their work – how close they are to the beneficiaries of the policies that they develop, how they see value created as a result of their ideas and their labour.

Motivating professional public servants to be innovative also requires that they have the right skills to apply to the problems they are being asked to solve.

Despite these challenges, much innovation takes place in government and at all levels of the public sector. Strategies to identify and promote innovative behaviour are top-down and bottom-up. From the top down, one could implement management tools and programmes to build the innovative capacity of public organisations and the innovative capabilities of employees and managers. From the bottom-up one could identify ways to encourage employees to experiment with new approaches, to explore new avenues, and to celebrate this kind of behaviour to inspire others to act in similar ways.

In contrast to the top-down practices mentioned above, bottom-up practices identify innovationpositive behaviour and bring this to light, in order to celebrate it and to inspire others. Using tools such as innovation awards to celebrate innovation success (arguably a top-down practice) can have diffusion effects by enabling groups to learn from each other’s experience, to identify and overcome specific barriers, and to signal the importance of innovation as an organisational priority.