ABSTRACT
As described in Chapter 1 of this book, public innovation is moving to the top of the political agenda in most Western democracies. The dominant innovation approach, however, suffers from two shortcomings: it over-emphasizes the role played by competition in driving public innovation while paying limited attention to collaboration, and it pays little attention to the fact that public innovation involves policy innovation in addition to service innovation. These shortcomings are a product of New Public Management (NPM) reforms (Hood 1991; Osborne and Gaebler 1993) and the way that NPM’s theoretical protagonists framed their call for a more innovative public sector (Downs 1967; Olson 1968; Mueller 1989; Buchanan 1986; Niskanen 1975 1987). Inspired by a private sector market model, they viewed innovation as the outcome of competition between service providers.
