Public Innovation: The Opportunity and the Challenge

Abstract

Some wise guys will wag that the words public and innovation don’t belong in the same sentence, that talking about new ideas and processes, doing things differently, improving constantly and continuously in the context of government is naturally oxymoronic.

At Penn’s Fels Institute of Government, one of the nation’s oldest and most respected professional master’s programs for aspiring public leaders, we think the wise guys are wrong. In fact, there’s never been a more exciting time for public leaders, civic activists and entrepreneurs to join in common cause to bring innovation into government. Handheld computing power gets cheaper and more powerful by the day. Data—much of it public data once locked up in dusty file cabinets—are raining down in buckets from the cloud. Constituents clamor for more, more, more, all the while calling for government to spend less, less, less. Never before have effectiveness (doing the right thing) and efficiency (doing it right) been in such demand.