Innovation

Over the last decade, public leaders and managers, along with academics, have become attracted to concepts and practices of “innovation” and “governance,” and the result is a burgeoning amount of policy reports, strategy papers and scholarly works. With so much written about innovation and about governance relevant to the public sphere, it is surprising that so little academic work has explored their connections. In order to compensate for this neglect this chapter asks two questions: How can various governance arrangements and processes enhance or inhibit innovation, and with what consequences? How can innovation processes change institutional forms of governance and thus lead to “governance innovation”? By answering these questions we aim to explore the impact of governance on innovation and the role of innovation in transforming governance.