ABSTRACT
In the public and business psyche, the notion of innovation is often tied to the role of the private sector, partly in response to the notion that government is a barrier to innovation and enhanced productivity. This attitude is, perhaps, personified by the statement of Ronald Reagan, at his first inaugural address as president of the US in 1981, that ‘government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem’. Such a perspective equates government’s capacity to innovate with the necessities of bureaucratic decisionmaking, and is akin to what Williamson (1975) referred to as a ‘program persistence bias’ with a supposedly inherent ‘anti-innovation bias’. Programme persistence refers to the funding of programmes beyond levels that can be sustained on their merits, and follows from the influence of programme advocates in the resource allocation process (Teece 2000). Such a pattern of bureaucratic behaviour can have the countervailing effect of reducing funds available to new programmes, which are unlikely to be as well represented in decision-making processes. This perspective on public decision-making was strikingly expressed by Downs (1967: 160) when commenting that
the increasing size of the bureau leads to a gradual ossification of operations – since each proposed action must receive multiple approvals, the probability of its being rejected is quite high – its cumbersome machinery cannot produce results fast enough and its anti-novelty bias may block the necessary innovation.
