Making sense of innovation and improvement in the public services

This post is written by Ed Bernacki, Director of the Idea Factory in Canada.

• The problem: The need for innovation is great for all governments. Innovation in services and systems is a complex leadership challenge that is often confused with improvement by convoluted language.
• Why it matters: Innovation and improvement strategies are both useful and necessary yet they require different perspectives on the challenges facing a department, and different tools and models to create solutions.
• The solution: Clarify our understanding of these strategies by simplifying the language to focus on the need to be innovative to design new and unique approaches that could become innovations and to design improvements to our current approaches.

If I tried to argue that the creativity needed to design and build a unique building is the same as the creativity to renovate an existing building were the same, would you believe it? I use this analogy to simplify the point of this article; the skills and creativity needed to invent original and unique solutions to our public service challenges are not the same skills and creativity needed to improve or renovate our current systems, services and processes.

Calling an improvement “innovation” does not make it innovation. Innovation is more than improvement.

Apolitical recently published my article, How to tell the story of innovation in government. In it, I outlined the need to tell a story of innovation that engages staff to innovate. Despite working in this field for 25 years, I am seeing that the distinction between improvement and innovation is becoming blurred.

“Innovation is only something you know looking back in retrospect, when it proves to be an innovation. Going forward you are only solving problems and creating opportunities.”

I started my career with New Zealand Post’s Total Quality Service team. We worked on improving postal services. We soon saw a problem; a small team could never solve the challenges of a big organisation. We had to empower managers and staff to act like innovators to meet regularly to solve their challenges. I wrote management guides to help. We offered training programmes and started an ideas programme.

Soon, ideas popped up for new internal and customer services. We then explored service design (personas, service blueprints, prototyping, and user experience) to design new service models.

For example, I worked on an idea for large clients to use a “postman” for an hour each day who picked up mail and parcels at various locations inside the office. New computerised franking machines could change mail from an administrative overhead to a value-driven service by giving clients weekly postal reports to show costs and trends. Clients could make better decisions. We piloted the service with two clients to test the model. In the end, we saw that the technology could not yet deliver the quality of reports we wanted. It was a good lesson. We also learned that inventing new services required different skills.

**Exploring definitions of innovation **

In a previous article l wrote for Apolitical, How to tell the story of innovation in government the editors linked to an article, How innovative are you? Measuring innovation in the public sector **. This article included the **OECD definition of innovation (2018):

_ “An innovation is a new or improved product or process (or a combination thereof) that differs significantly from the unit’s previous products or processes and that has been made available to potential users (product) or brought into use by the unit (process).”_

I believe this definition needs to be challenged to make sense of this work.

• Consider this phrase: “an innovation is a new or improved product or process.” Well, is it new or improved? Innovation cannot be both.
• “That differs significantly from the unit’s previous products”. Simply trying something different is not innovation. This is change management. Even if it’s new, that does mean it’s innovation.

Edward de Bono, the influential author of dozens of books on creativity, told a forum I was part of, “Innovation is only something you know looking back in retrospect, when it proves to be an innovation. Going forward you are only solving problems and creating opportunities.” His point is that we will not know something is an innovation until it proves to create value for users in unexpected ways.

I believe we must stop bending the definition of innovation to fit every change effort. In my first article, I included this definition from an innovation guide I wrote for the Singapore public service. This was its working definition for staff:

**“Innovation is more than improvement. Improvements are important but innovations are like a quantum improvement that breaks new ground to create value in new ways.”  **

The key elements are, “_breaking new ground”… “creating value in new ways”. _Both terms are worth exploring:

• **Breaks new ground **– this change in the service or system must be meaningful to users; this is about unique, different and truly novel solutions.
• **Create value in new ways **– the change must lead to unexpected benefits created by the solution as defined by the users of the solution. If the benefits are expected, it was basic problem solving.

The OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation issued a model for public service innovation called The four facets of innovation**. **

The facets are an all-encompassing model. Does this help our practical understanding of innovation? I have worked in this field for many years. I can barely make sense of the different approaches. (I suggest reading the longer explanations). This is taken from the OPSI document:

1. Enhancement-oriented – what could be characterised as innovation for the purposes of doing existing things better.
2. Mission-oriented – innovating to achieve an explicit goal or outcome.
3. Adaptive – playing with, testing and trying new approaches in order to respond to a changing operating environment.
4. Anticipatory – exploring and engaging with emergent issues that might shape future priorities and future commitments.

To simplify the language, you could also suggest…

1. Enhancement-oriented innovation is an improvement Strategy for efficiency and effectiveness.
2. Mission-oriented innovation could be strategic planning and project management.
3. Adaptive innovation could be traditional change management.
4. Anticipatory innovation sounds like a true innovation strategy but I struggle to understand the use of the word “anticipatory”.

All four are useful and necessary to consider for any department.

**Is digital change innovation or improvement?  **

A discussion we need to have for digital change is: if a department turns an analogue process into a digital process, is this innovation?

For example, New Zealand turned passport renewal into a digital process in 2013. The new system allows people to access a website, enter key information, upload a digital picture, and pay. The internal systems ensure you are a citizen in good standing to approve the application, and then print and assemble the passport. As such, it begs the question, is this innovation or just improvement?

What matters most?

Jocelyne Bourgon, former Clerk of the Privy Council Office in Canada authored **A New Synthesis of Public Administration: Serving in the 21st Century. **She wrote: “Governments around the world are inventing solutions to society’s problems. State intervention and public innovation are inseparable entities. Public innovation is both the goal and the process of generating innovative solutions. The difficulty is preparing government to improve its capacity to generate interventions.” Governments must pursue two areas of expertise:

1. **Innovation in public services: **creating innovative solutions to solve challenges, improving systems, practices and service delivery functions.
2. Building capacity of public servants for innovation: the capacity of public servants to invent solutions to the current and future challenges facing society. This involves innovation skills training, models, tools, collaboration and internal support services.

The public sector must develop both areas of expertise. The capacity to innovate is necessary to create innovations and improvements. My belief, from observations in various countries, is that we focus too much on the first, “innovation in public services”, and not enough on the second, “building the capacity for public service innovation”.

I will conclude with my opening analogy. The skill, focus and resources needed to conceive and design a unique building are not the same as those needed to renovate an existing building. If you keep this analogy in mind, I believe we can make sense of our definitions of innovation and build the capacity to innovate in all staff as they solve problems every day. All Governments must be innovative in the way they design and implement change. The product of our efforts may lead to improvements or innovations. Both are useful.

Photo credit: Pawel Czerwinski, Unsplash