workers; discretion somehow connotes a lack of accountability.
For Americans the fear of possible abuse overshadows interest in
positive achievements. When abuses do occur, the response tends to
be to impose more controls.
Despite this
clash between what is expected and what is permitted, many
talented, committed people continue in government service. For them
the challenge is to make something happen despite the constraints,
or better yet, within the bounds of public accountability, to break
through those constraints, come up with a new vision of what
government can do, and find practical means of achieving it.
INNOVATION
The Latin root
of innovation means "to make new." The word is often
associated with new discoveries or inventions that transform the
quality of life. It has come to describe the link between a fresh
idea or insight and a practical problem or objective. Altshuler and
Zegans define it as "novelty in action." The result is a way of
doing things fundamentally different from that which went
before.
In the last
decade, private corporations and management theorists have been
increasingly concerned with innovation. Successful firms are
thought to have found a way to create a corporate climate in which
continual innovation is valued and rewarded. Meanwhile, management
specialists study the ways in which that innovation occurs.
In the last
decade as well, the voluntary sector—nonprofit organizations
that specialize in tackling new social problems—has come to
see itself as a separate, distinctly innovative sector of society.
Many programs and institutions now considered to be integral to the
public sector—kindergartens, for example, or
libraries—had their origins in the voluntary sector.
Meanwhile, more recent innovations—hospices, for
example—are gaining wide acceptance.
The incentives
for innovation differ. Among private, for-profit innovators,
increased profit margins and market shares are the main incentives
for "novelty in action," and immediate rewards tend to correspond
to the bottom line. Private nonprofit innovators, by contrast, tend
to be motivated by the desire to achieve specific objectives in the
public interest. Their rewards derive from the personal
satisfaction of working toward goals they see as important to
society.
INNOVATIONS IN STATE AND LOCAL
GOVERNMENT
What about
innovation in government? When Ford Foundation staff began to
discuss this question in 1982, they were familiar with the range of
negative attitudes toward government—for example, that
government achieves little, that it is part of the problem, that
the sources of innovation