The persistence of innovation in government

In his latest book, The Persistence of Innovation in Government, Professor Sandford Borins continues twenty-five years of research analysing winners of, and applicants to, the Innovations in American Government Awards program run by the Ash Centre for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS). ‘Within the public sector, innovation awards programmes, most notably, the HKS Awards, are still in operation and continue to receive hundreds of applications, providing scholars with an ongoing source of qualitative and quantitative information’ (p. 5). This book provides a comparison between the applications received in the 1990s (from 1990 to 1994) and those received in 2010. Borins acknowledges that this book is a return to a subject, to a methodology and to data contained in his 1998 book Innovating with Integrity: How Local Heroes are Transforming American Government, but he underlines that it is not a simple replication of that book. The Persistence of Innovation in Government is written for two types of readership: both academic and practitioner audiences. Borins outlines that ‘the intended academic audience is particularly scholars exploring public sector innovation. The practitioner audience is more diverse, including would-be innovators at the political and civil service level in any government, public servants with a mandate for innovation (for example, those involved in the growing number of innovation units or labs, particularly, in local government in the United States), and public servants who are involved with innovation awards, either as applicants, judges, or managers’ (p. 7). The book ‘employs rigorous statistical analysis, aggregating data to identify trends and anomalies and using regression analysis to test hypotheses about the relationships among characteristics of public sector innovations’. Borins also emphasises that, underpinning this statistical analysis, ‘the book conveys, using secondary, disaggregated, qualitative observation, to identify something of the character and specificity of individual innovations, innovators, and their processes’ (p. 2). To ensure the book satisfies both types of readership, Borins has included, either in