Innovation and the Public Interest: Insights from the Private Sector

Promoting innovative government has attracted a bipartisan constituency. But if the concept of innovation is watered down to encompass any promising idea or any program change that hasn't been tried before, it will lose its power as a device to stimulate non-trivial improvements in governmental performance. Innovation is properly defined as an original, disruptive, and transformation of an organization's core tasks. Innovation changes deep structures and changes them permanently. Promoting innovation in government will require nothing less than basic changes in the incentives and opportunities facing public managers and in their relationships with citizens and elected officials.