The Innovation State
/us_puzzle_200x200_102809.jpg)
Governments at all levels face daunting challenges. The current economic meltdown has further increased the difficulties for governments, adding to a long list of preexisting problems. A growing range of issues, including falling revenues, increasing spending, an aging workforce and more demanding consumers, now demand the attention of government leaders. State and local governments are at the forefront of addressing these challenges: from dealing with citizen complaints and requests to getting urban schools to work, and from responding to emergencies and disasters to ensuring health and human services are delivered efficiently.
This means that state governments have to become more adept at innovation; they cannot depend on established, age-old practices to meet twenty-first century requirements. As state governments get ready to grapple with these challenges, they will need to answer three fundamental questions:
- How can they make innovation a part of the public sector DNA?
- How can they attract and retain talented people into the public sector?
- Who are their customers and what do they want?
Innovation is becoming increasingly critical, but the public sector has yet to embrace the idea that it is a necessary discipline of government, like strategic planning or budgeting.
Featured Insights
Attention to innovation tends to be piecemeal, short-term, and narrow — focused almost exclusively on trying to figure out a way to generate more good ideas, address a crisis or leave a legacy around a specific policy position. What’s needed is a more systemic approach to innovation in government.
Instilling a culture of innovation requires leveraging the tacit knowledge of employees and recruiting and retaining innovative-minded employees. State governments, however, face a talent gap barreling toward them: vast numbers of Baby Boomers are expected to retire in the next five years, leaving big holes in government organizations. And Generation Y — the generational cohort that is expected to replace the retiring Baby Boomers — often perceives public sector as a slow-moving, bureaucratic monolith. To make the public sector an employer of choice among the emerging Gen Y, governors and public sector leaders will have to engage in an aggressive program of attracting, nurturing and retaining talent.
State governments also must face the fact that taxpayers have gotten used to high levels of service from the private sector, and are demanding this from government as well. In their attempts to improve customer service by upgrading technology and introducing new processes, public sector agencies often forget to ask a very fundamental question: who are my customers and what do they want? Approaching service enhancement from this perspective and embracing new customer service models can generate more innovation in government service delivery.
