Which managerial reforms facilitate public sector innovation?

Abstract

A key question of public sector innovation (PSI) scholarship is: which factors influence innovation? This paper focuses on managerial practices as drivers of PSI and addresses two research questions. First, how have the main types of managerial reforms—pertaining to marketization, results-orientation, and collaboration—influenced PSI? Second, how have different features of public sector reform strategies influenced PSI? Using survey data from 19 European countries, we show that reforms focusing on collaboration and results-orientation facilitate PSI, while marketization-type reforms have no significant impact. Our study indicates that reforms initiated by public administration (rather than politicians) are more conducive to PSI. We also show that reforms that are crisis-driven and reforms oriented toward cost cutting have negative impacts on PSI. Overall, our findings demonstrate that New Public Governance-type reforms exert more positive influence on PSI than NPM-type reforms.