are generally elsewhere. Public bureaucracies are seen to be
preoccupied with avoiding mistakes rather than with finding ways to
be more effective. Elected officials are rarely seen to have a
political or personal interest in improving the bureaucracy's
capacity to act.
Scattered
evidence, in the form of applications for a Foundation grant, for
example, indicated that innovative programs were under way in state
and local governments across the country, but there was no
immediate way of knowing how widespread the phenomenon was; nor was
there enough information even to describe the way innovation worked
in the public sector.
Foundation
staff therefore began to consider ways of recognizing innovations
that had occurred in state and local government. They hoped that
publicizing stories about such innovations would encourage
replication and that, by sparking the public imagination, ideas
about what could be achieved through government could be enlarged.
They also hoped to stimulate the study of public-sector innovation.
If the conditions that promote innovative behavior could be
identified, innovation in government might be initiated on a broad
scale. Finally, they hoped to attract a new generation of students
of public administration to apply their talents to the work of
government.
THE SEARCH
FOR SUCCESSFUL INNOVATIONS
After
consulting with scholars and public officials on these questions,
Foundation staff decided to ask the John F. Kennedy School of
Government at Harvard University to administer the Foundation's new
Innovations in State and Local Government Awards Program. A
national committee was established, chaired by former governor of
Michigan William G. Milliken, to help choose the award-winning
programs. Governor Milliken's fellow committee members included
elected officials, journalists, scholars, and civic leaders. It was
decided that the program would recognize innovative ideas that had
some track record of success. At the outset, it was a
straightforward competition in which state and local governments
were invited—by announcements in public media, house organs,
and various journals—to submit descriptions of their most
innovative activities.
The response
was overwhelming—1,300 applications in 1986, the program's
first year. Early media coverage of the program was sometimes
misleading, and applicants were sometimes too eager to read their
own needs into the program's purposes. For instance, a newspaper
article headlined "Cash for Good Ideas" resulted in a shower of
applications from inventors hungry for capital.
Faculty and
staff from the John F. Kennedy School of Government processed the
entries through a rigorous selection procedure that resulted in a
group of 75 semifinalists. In a second round of reviews,
Kennedy