RAMOSHIDI RAMOGAYANE: Government should make innovation a cornerstone of modern public policy

Modern society expects government to deliver better services and development outcomes. Fiscal and institutional capacity constraints aside, the 20th century approaches and solutions are outdated and unfit to address ever-growing public needs and expectations as well as complex societal challenges of the 21st century.

Government therefore needs to think differently and innovatively about contemporary challenges and solutions outside a traditional public sector management framework. Embracing public sector innovation could help government imagine novel or innovative solutions to complex contemporary societal problems.

Making innovation a cornerstone of public policy and management would enable government to deliver better outcomes for the citizens. While innovation drives business strategy in commerce, innovation should inspire public policy in the public sector to achieve national development outcomes.

Public policy innovation in the broader economy and society should begin with internal administrative innovation within government bureaucratic machinery. However, for this to happen some measures are required to cultivate and institutionalise innovation culture and practice in government.

First, government needs to assess and implement internal structural and institutional reforms to address existing barriers to public sector innovation. In his book Leading Public Sector Innovation, Christian Bason asserts that “the very DNA of bureaucratic organisations is resistant to innovation”.

Second, government needs to reform and modernise its traditional  human resources policies and practices to attract, develop and retain top talent, incentivise and reward employee innovation, including cross-functional collaborative innovation.

Third, innovation should be embedded within the departmental strategic plans, annual performance plans, operational plans and budgets as well as organisational, functional, team and individual performance metrics. Such reforms should happen in conjunction with budget reforms to create sustainable funding instruments to support public sector innovation projects.

Other institutional innovation could include the creation of government modernisation office to drive governmentwide institutional reforms to modernise and de-bureaucratise the state, reduce red tape, eliminate waste, and improve administrative and regulatory efficiencies as well as continuous public sector operational and productivity improvements, leveraging modern technologies, design thinking and lean management practices.

This should include digital innovation to digitalise public services and automate routine business processes and workflows to enhance operational efficiency and performance to meet evolving citizens’ needs and expectations. Existing public sector innovation agencies also need to be enhanced and repositioned to play a leading role in facilitating, scaling and diffusing innovation across the whole of government.

Done well, public sector innovation could improve government productivity and effectiveness, and yield better outcomes and public value for the citizens. However, public sector innovation should not be confined to internal operations and administration of government.

Moreover, government has a major strategic role to support innovation in the broader economy and society to address complex societal and developmental challenges, and promote economic growth and job creation. In her seminal book The Entrepreneurial State, Mariana Mazzucato underscores the strategic role of the state in catalysing and derisking breakthrough innovation in the economy, citing an example of the US government’s investment in some of the key technologies driving the current global hi-tech revolution.

Lessons from other countries demonstrate the importance of investing in the national innovation ecosystem to stimulate the development of new technologies, products, services, markets and sectors. For this reason, government needs to embrace and support the national ecosystem approach to innovation. Such an ecosystem would require public-private-community collaborative partnerships, supported by well-orchestrated physical, intellectual and financial capital as well as various forms of public policy incentives and regulatory enablers.

This should be anchored on a coherent national innovation strategy, buttressed by an enabling policy and regulatory environment, to support the development of financial, institutional, intellectual and entrepreneurial infrastructure and capabilities required for innovation-led economy.

In this regard, key support measures should include dedicated funding for university research chairs in innovation; the creation of more innovation labs, hubs, incubators and accelerators across the country; enactment of special-purpose legislation and funding facilities to support R&D and innovative start-ups; promotion of knowledge exchange and technology transfer between academia and the industry to spur knowledge and innovation economy; and special programmes to support commercialisation of intellectual property across all economic sectors.

Attracting and incentivising top talent, innovators and entrepreneurs from other countries — including major global tech companies and start-ups — to invest or set up their regional innovation hubs in SA, would bolster the country’s innovation capacity and performance.

A well-designed governance framework would be central to effective innovation ecosystem orchestration, thereby ensuring proper co-ordination of both demand-and supply-side measures by various institutions and stakeholders in the national innovation ecosystem, including policy, regulation, funding, R&D, intellectual property, commercialisation and diffusion of innovation.

Culture shift

To succeed, public sector innovation would also require a paradigm shift from existing silo-based and compliance-driven bureaucratic mindset to an entrepreneurial, experimental, learning and citizen-centric performance culture. This culture shift should also embrace co-creation and co-delivery collaborative partnerships with business and civil society to improve public governance and service delivery.

Experimenting with novel ideas or innovative solutions, learning and improving from failure should become a new public sector practice in SA. In his book Innovation Ecosystems, Martin Fransman, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Edinburgh, contends that “innovation does not happen automatically; it must be made to happen”.

Special policy measures are therefore vital to promote socially responsible and environmentally sustainable innovation to propel our nation to higher levels of productivity, global competitiveness, economic growth and job creation.

• Dr Ramogayane is chief director: municipal performance, monitoring & evaluation in the Gauteng department of co-operative governance & traditional affairs. He writes in his personal capacity.