The Three Orders of Public Innovation: Implications for Research and Practice

While the focus on public innovation is rapidly increasing, the public sector has not yet been transformed into a ‘serial innovator’ that pursues innovation permanently and systematically. To solve this problem, this article aims to broaden the theoretical perspective on public innovation to include generative processes and institutions. As such, it argues that the first-order focus on innovation of public policy, regulation and services should be supplemented by a second-order focus on the new and innovative processes of collaborative interaction through which innovative solutions are generated and a third-order focus on the new and innovative institutional designs that facilitate the scaffolding of these processes. The article finds that the conditioning relationship between the three orders of innovation can usefully be complemented by a transformative relationship between the three orders to foster a better understanding of the dynamic mechanism that may help strengthening the innovative capacity of the public sector.