Overview: The role of government management in fostering public sector innovation

The nature and scale of public sector challenges require governments to develop a response that goes beyond incremental process improvements, but rather introduces new ways to frame problems and develop solutions. Because public sector innovation does not happen by itself, governments have a key role to play to promote innovative behaviours and create conducive environments for innovation. This chapter starts by discussing the change of trajectory of public sector innovation, from “green-field” to “disruptive” and what this entails in terms of governments’ capacity to respond to a changing context and the citizens’ needs. It discusses the key policy tools governments can use to support public sector organisations to accelerate their innovation activity. It introduces the innovation lifecycle as a useful framework to map the use of different policy tools for overcoming innovation barriers and strengthening organisations’ capacity to innovate. The chapter concludes with the key factors that explain the innovativeness of public sector organisations: capability, motivation and opportunity to innovate.