ABSTRACT
Citizens, their representatives and other clients of public services, such as immigrants or public servants in other nations, rely on public officials to improve their service delivery strategies to satisfy the demanding goals of today’s state. In recent years, innovation has come to be the symbolic term to describe excellence in service delivery, product improvement or public value engagement efforts in both the public and private sectors (Borins, 2008). However, change, or innovation, is more than merely a laudable goal, supererogatory act or felicitous outcome of high-performing agencies’ managers. Innovation is a form of applied research into improvements to the provision of public goods, particularly when coupled with the tasks of gathering and analysing performance data to judge the efficacy of the service changes, whether for the clients or for cost saving efforts. Within the public sector, quality improvement and innovation have become unwritten duties of public employees. What is the content of this duty and from when does this obligation come? And how might the discharge of this duty be policed, ex ante, by ethical principles?
