https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/sites/public purpose/files/final_innovation_bureaucracies_20_dec.pdf

Abstract

In this paper, we offer to redefine what entrepreneurial states are: these are states that are capable of unleashing innovations, and wealth resulting from those innovations, and of maintaining socio-political stability at the same time. Innovation bureaucracies are constellations of public organisations that deliver such agile stability. Such balancing acts make public bureaucracies unique in how they work, succeed and fail.

The paper looks at the historical evolution of innovation bureaucracy by focusing on public organisations dealing with knowledge and technology, economic development and growth. We briefly show how agility and stability are delivered through starkly different bureaucratic organisations; hence, what matters for capacity and capabilities are not individual organisations, but organisational configurations and how they evolve.

Summary Entrepreneurial states are capable of unleashing innovations, and of creating wealth resulting from those innovations, and of maintaining socio-political stability at the same time. History tells us that governments create capacity for innovation through new organisations or new organisational forms, often led by charismatic outsiders or networks of such people. Yet, this agility is not enough, the new strengths need to become part of ‘the routine’, part of what governments do in daily life — this capacity for rejuvenation is at the heart of innovation bureaucracy. Without it we can’t change the restrictive narrative that limits the public sector to just being a market fixer — and this means that we will risk losing the important innovations of tomorrow. But innovation bureaucracy needs to deliver in the mid and often long-run as well, sometimes more sometimes less depending on the context. Hacking alone cannot accomplish that.

We argue that innovation bureaucracies are configurations, constellations of public organisations that deliver agile stability. Such balancing acts make public bureaucracies unique in how they work, succeed and fail — a difficult task indeed, but in the case of innovation bureaucracies, one that is vital for the overall success, now and in the future, of human living-together in time and space.