Innovation in the UK public sector

The public sector accounts for approximately 40% of the economy and is under great pressure to improve efficiency. The Transformational Government Strategy and Sir David Varney’s Service Transformation Review both set out a wider case for change in the delivery of UK public services.

There is a need to deliver better outcomes faster and for less, to become much more “citizen-centric” and to achieve synergies across tens of thousands of separate organisations.

At the same time, the public sector has to respond to additional challenges, such as climate change, migration, changing demographics and globalisation. To do all this, the public sector has to find new ways of doing things. It needs to innovate to be leaner, greener and keener.

While there are real dilemmas, our overall view is that public sector organisations and the sector as a whole have significant in-built strengths. These include their natural diversity; their ability to access multiple sources of ideas; and the sheer scale of their potential impact.

These strengths do not by themselves make innovation easy but together with recent research about “innovation archetypes”, they provide positive and powerful pointers on how best to accelerate and sustain innovation.

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