Collaborative Innovation in the Public Sector

Governments worldwide struggle to remove policy deadlocks and enact much-needed reforms in organizational structure and public services. In this book, Jacob Torfing explores collaborative innovation as a way for public and private stakeholders to break the impasse. These network-based collaborations promise to multiply the skills, ideas, energy, and resources between government and its partners across agency boundaries and in the nonprofit and private sectors. Torfing draws on his own pioneering work in Europe as well as examples from the United States and Australia to construct a cross-disciplinary framework for studying collaborative innovation. His analysis explores its complex and interactive processes as he looks at how drivers and barriers may enhance or impede the collaborative approach. He also reflects on the roles institutional design, public management, and governance reform play in spurring collaboration for public sector innovation.The result is a theoretically and empirically informed book that carefully demonstrates how multi-actor collaboration can enhance public innovation in the face of fiscal constraint, the proliferation of wicked problems, and the presence of unsatisfied social needs.

Makes an important and comprehensive contribution . . . [and] a major impact on the literature of public administration., Has a noble and vital purpose, and it succeeds very well in accomplishing its goal. . . . Anyone who is genuinely interested in positive or even palliative change will do well to read this authentically pioneering work. . . . A remarkable achievement.

Jacob Torfing is a professor at Roskilde University and director of the Roskilde School of Governance. He is also a professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences at University of Nordland and has been a visiting professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the coauthor of Theories of Democratic Network Governance and Democratic Network Governance in Europe.