Governments are not renowned for being the most innovative of institutions, but their ability to innovate is crucial if public services are to be delivered efficiently and effectively.  A new report from New America explores what innovation looks like within government, and perhaps more pertinently, who it is that’s doing the innovation.

The researchers interviewed problem-solvers working across all layers of government in the United States.  As you might expect, this group is considerably smaller than those purely focused on business as usual, but it’s a growing cohort consisting of innovation teams, digital teams, policymakers and more.

The researchers initially hoped to interview people working in these kind of areas, and after aggregating them together try and find any common threads that bind them together.  Maybe even create an innovation playbook for government.  This focus on tactical issues quickly emerged as the wrong focus however, as the reality is that no one really has things figured out.  The ad hoc nature of innovation in government meant that most innovators struggle to answer even the most basic questions about their work.

“With so much work to be done, where do we start? What’s the best way to hire people? What’s the best way to keep them once they’ve been hired? How do we affect culture change? How do we get the work done? How do we know when we’ve succeeded? How do we know when it’s time to quit?” the authors say.

Inside government innovation

So, rather than compile a playbook for how to innovate inside government, the report instead merely reflects the things that innovators are concerned about.

One of the most interesting themes to emerge is that such is the diversity of innovators within government, such people are often highly dispersed.  It can therefore appear a very lonely endeavor they’re on, as they seldom meet or interact with fellow innovators.

What is clear is that innovation within government tends to be an ad hoc affair, with little in the way of the structures that perhaps other fields take for granted in place.  There aren’t any clear career paths, and professional development is poor.  There are also precious few opportunities to meet and share tips and stories.

The authors nonetheless found hope among the people they met, and conclude with a number of recommendations for how they can be better supported.  These include:

• Help to share – A resource or platform to help innovators to share resources and solutions among themselves.
• Help in crafting career trajectories – There needs to be a better pathway, all the way from entry points up to senior positions.  At the moment, too many people are working in temporary situations.
• Help with professional development – Especially in social learning opportunities where practitioners can meet and learn from one another.  The innovation field evolves rapidly so it’s vital that people are able to keep on top of the latest developments.
• Help with talking about the work – This may seem something that can be solved with a digital platform or something of that nature, but the authors go deeper and urge more thought to be given to a common language that describes what the innovators do.  There is no real common terminology, which makes scaling hard.

“Our interviews made clear there is a lot of room, and need, for improvement. Despite a year working on this project, and many years doing the work, even as we started writing this report we found ourselves making discoveries by happenstance,” the authors conclude.  “And yet for all of its challenges, the success stories are beautiful. When government works the way it should, we are all better off. We hope that this report has provided others with a sense of community and a way forward. As with everything else in this field, we know it is a small, slow step. But we see it as a meaningful, important one nonetheless.”