Innovating within existing public sector rules, processes and procedures

Rules, processes and procedures enable large organisations to accomplish co-ordinated tasks in standardised ways, and therefore have a significant impact on the kind of work and innovation that an organisation can undertake. Clarifying and simplifying rules and regulations, and ensuring a minimum of red tape to ensure compliance with important protocol can open up space for innovation and ensure that employees share a collective understanding of where that space lies. The rules that control spending also have a strong impact on the ability for organisations to resource innovation, with more budget agility assumed to provide more opportunity to finance innovation projects. Additionally, the project management approaches themselves are processes that can either support or hinder effective innovation in public sector organisations. Various experimental approaches to project development that include piloting and prototyping may challenge traditional approaches to organisational transformation and require a different regulatory framework to reap potential innovation benefits.