Governments worldwide struggle to remove policy deadlocks and enact much-needed reforms in organizational structure and public services. In this book, Jacob Torfing explores collaborative innovation as a way for public and private stakeholders to break the impasse. These network-based collaborations promise to multiply the skills, ideas, energy, and resources between government and its partners across agency boundaries and in the nonprofit and private sectors.
Torfing draws on his own pioneering work in Europe as well as examples from the United States and Australia to construct a cross-disciplinary framework for studying collaborative innovation. His analysis explores its complex and interactive processes as he looks at how drivers and barriers may enhance or impede the collaborative approach. He also reflects on the roles institutional design, public management, and governance reform play in spurring collaboration for public sector innovation. The result is a theoretically and empirically informed book that carefully demonstrates how multi-actor collaboration can enhance public innovation in the face of fiscal constraint, the proliferation of wicked problems, and the presence of unsatisfied social needs.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Collaborative Innovation in the Public Sector
1. Defining and Contextualizing Innovation in the Public Sector
2. Collaborative Interaction as a Source of Public Innovation
3. Towards a Theory of Collaborative Innovation
4. Triggering Innovation and Collaboration
5. Mobilizing and Empowering Actors and Institutionalizing Interaction
6. Enhancing Mutual, Expansive, and Transformative Learning
7. Making and Implementing Bold and Creative Decisions
8. Diffusing Public Innovation through Collaborative Networks
9. Enhancing Collaborative Innovation through Leadership and Management
10. Reforming Public Governance, Enhancing Collaborative Innovation
Conclusion: Summary Propositions about Collaborative Innovation
References
Index
About the Author
Reviews
"Makes an important and comprehensive contribution . . . [and] a major impact on the literature of public administration."—CHOICE
"Has a noble and vital purpose, and it succeeds very well in accomplishing its goal. . . . Anyone who is genuinely interested in positive or even palliative change will do well to read this authentically pioneering work. . . . A remarkable achievement."—The Innovation Journal
"In this path-breaking book, Torfing shows how collaborative innovation is an important component of new public governance and an essential approach to dealing with wicked societal problems that inescapably cross organizational boundaries. His work will be of abiding interest to both scholars and practitioners"—Sandford Borins, Professor of Public Management, University of Toronto; Research Fellow, Harvard Kennedy School
"Collaborative Innovation in the Public Sector is a highly-recommended resource for researchers and informed practitioners interested in public sector governance networks. The book explores theories and research on how governance networks can and do produce innovations. Most importantly, readers learn how collaboration, activated throughout all phases of the innovation process, can increase the potential for innovation in governance networks to occur. The book’s propositions set the agenda for the next generation of research on collaboration and innovation in governance networks."—Nancy Roberts, Professor Emerita, Department of Defense Analysis, Naval Postgraduate School
Awards
2017 Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine
About the Author
Jacob Torfing is a professor at Roskilde University and director of the Roskilde School of Governance. He is also a professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences at University of Nordland and has been a visiting professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the coauthor of Theories of Democratic Network Governance and Democratic Network Governance in Europe.
