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Jonathan WaltersStaff CorrespondentGoverning Magazine

Understanding Innovation:

What Inspires It?

What Makes It Successful?

D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 1

The PricewaterhouseCoopers Endowment for

The Business of Government

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Understanding Innovation: What Inspires It? What Makes It Successful?

N E W W A Y S T O M A N A G E S E R I E S

Jonathan WaltersStaff CorrespondentGoverning Magazine

December 2001

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UNDERSTANDING INNOVATION

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T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S

Foreword ..............................................................................................5

Executive Summary ..............................................................................6

Introduction: An Inclination to Innovate..............................................8Analyzing Innovations and Innovators: A Note on the “Science” of Change Management ..............................................10

What Inspires Innovation? ................................................................11Driver One: Frustration with the Status Quo ................................12Driver Two: Responding to Crisis ................................................15Driver Three: Focusing on Prevention ..........................................17Driver Four: Emphasizing Results ................................................18Driver Five: Adapting Technology ................................................20Driver Six: Doing the Right Thing ................................................22

What Makes Innovation Successful? ..................................................25Keep It Simple in Concept............................................................26Make It Easy to Execute ..............................................................27Shoot for Quick Results................................................................28Be Frugal......................................................................................29Make It Appealing........................................................................30Keep It Apolitical ........................................................................32

Personal Observations: 13 Years of Chronicling Innovators ..............34

Bibliography ......................................................................................38

About the Author ..............................................................................40

Key Contact Information....................................................................41


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December 2001

On behalf of The PricewaterhouseCoopers Endowment for The Business of Government, we are pleased to present this report by Jonathan Walters, “Understanding Innovation: What Inspires It? What Makes ItSuccessful?”

We wish to thank Gail Christopher, executive director of the Institute for Government Innovation atHarvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, for suggesting this study to The Endowment.She thought it would be useful to analyze the characteristics of the more than 300 Innovations in AmericanGovernment award winners since the Innovations program was created in 1986. We were pleased to recruitJonathan Walters, staff correspondent for Governing magazine, to undertake the study. As a journalist,Walters has had the unique opportunity to interview many Innovations award winners over the years.

The Walters report builds on other research reports supported by The Endowment in recent years. Earlier this year, The Endowment published Sandford Borins’s report, “The Challenge of Innovating inGovernment,” which also studied the Kennedy School Innovations in American Government award win-ners, as well as two other international innovation award programs. Another 2001 report, “Creating aCulture of Innovation: 10 Lessons from America’s Best Run City” by Janet Vinzant Denhardt and Robert B.Denhardt, examined how Phoenix, Arizona, created a management culture that encourages and fostersinnovation among all employees.

This report substantially increases our understanding of what drives innovation in organizations and theelements of successful innovations that have stood the test of time and have been replicated in other gov-ernment organizations across the nation. We trust that this report will be a useful resource for all govern-ment managers and leaders who wish to foster innovation in their organizations.

Paul Lawrence Ian LittmanPartner, PricewaterhouseCoopers Partner, PricewaterhouseCoopersCo-Chair, Endowment Advisory Board Co-Chair, Endowment Advisory [email protected] [email protected]


F O R E W O R D



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Public sector innovation may be considered an oxy-moron, but for 15 years the Ford Foundation andJohn F. Kennedy School of Government at HarvardUniversity have been identifying innovative publicsector programs at the state, local, federal, andtribal government levels through the Innovations inAmerican Government Awards program, funded byFord and administered by the Kennedy School.What the initiatives identified through the programtell us is that despite government’s well-deservedreputation for being unfriendly to new ideas andchange, government has actually proved to beremarkably—even resiliently—innovative.

But where does innovation come from? What drives people to innovate? And in a political worldwhere program survival is often a matter of havingthe right political patrons—rather than programresults—what characteristics make for sustainable,replicable, results-based innovation?

In analyzing the hundreds of initiatives identifiedthrough the Innovations award program, certainkey “drivers” of innovation sift out. They are:

• Frustration with the status quo

• A response to crisis

• A focus on prevention

• An emphasis on results

• Adaptation of technology

• An inclination to do the right thing

But the attrition rate for good ideas in governmenttends to be high. Initiatives tend to come and gobased on such variables as what resources areavailable, what the politically popular initiatives ofthe day are, whether an idea has a well-connectedadvocate, and so forth.

Yet the initiatives identified by the Innovations pro-gram have shown remarkable powers of survivaland replication. Of the 150 winners identified bythe program from 1986 to 2001, only 14 aredefunct, and seven of those date back to pre-1990.Meanwhile, scores of those winning ideas havebeen picked up and replicated nationally and eveninternationally. And so clearly the programs identi-fied by the Ford Foundation and Kennedy Schooloffer solid lessons to would-be innovators when itcomes to designing successful—that is resilient andreplicable—innovation.

What characterizes programs with those kinds ofpowers of survival and replication?

• They are simple in concept.

• They are relatively easy to execute.

• They yield quick results.

• They don’t cost huge amounts of money toimplement.

• They have broad appeal (and few or noentrenched enemies).

• They are not tied to one political party or person.


E X E C U T I V E S U M M A R Y

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There are, of course, exceptions to all these rules.But in analyzing winning programs, it is remark-able how many have one, some, or all of the pre-ceding characteristics.

But while it is useful to analyze what drives innova-tion and what characterizes successful innovation,ultimately such initiatives are all about the directaction of people, people who are tired of being partof systems that are focused more on preserving turf,longevity, and resources than on achieving results.


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As has frequently been noted by those who followgovernment, the public sector in the United Stateshas never been known for its inclination to inno-vate. The list of disincentives to those brave soulswho may be tired of the status quo and interestedin new ways of conducting the public’s business islong and familiar. Items on that list range, on theone hand, from a general culture of risk avoidanceand a lack of rewards for those who try to innovate,to the political timelines and political pressures thatwork against long-range efforts at basic change, onthe other. And on and on the list typically goes,and legitimately so to be sure.

Many of those obstacles are discussed in “TheChallenge of Innovating in Government,” publishedby The PricewaterhouseCoopers Endowment for TheBusiness of Government. In that report, SandfordBorins, professor of public management at theUniversity of Toronto, culls lessons about innovatingin the public sector by analyzing winners from threeprograms set up to recognize government innova-tors. The one domestic program—the FordFoundation/Kennedy School Innovations inAmerican Government Awards—is the focus of thisreport; the other two programs are international.

As part of his analysis Borins investigates twoaspects of innovation: He looks at the characteris-tics of innovative organizations and he analyzes theform that innovation takes (more on both of thesein a moment). The goal of this report is to build onBorins’s observations by focusing exclusively on theInnovations in American Government Awards pro-gram. The two questions this paper will delve into

based on lessons gleaned from the Innovationsaward winners are very straightforward:

• What inspires innovation?

• What makes it successful?

The Ford Foundation and Kennedy School’sInnovations in American Government program hasproduced a bountiful list of programs and peoplewho are trying to change what government doesand how it does it. Since 1986—with a one-yearhiatus in 1989—the program has recognized 150“winning” programs, which have each beenawarded $100,000. In addition, the program hasrecognized 207 “finalists,” which are now awarded$20,000. Winners and finalists come from all levelsof government—local, state, federal, and tribal—and across all program and policy areas, from edu-cation to criminal justice.

In the process of identifying prize-worthy innova-tors, the program has sifted through thousands ofapplications. There have undoubtedly been manyinnovative programs not selected that were worthyof awards (and many others worthy of being setaside). This year the Ford Foundation endowed anInstitute for Government Innovation at Harvard'sKennedy School. The Institute will administer theInnovations in American Government program, aswell as serve as the hub of a global network forgovernment innovation, linking the Innovationsprogram with five other Ford-funded award pro-grams for American Indian tribal government andgovernments in Brazil, Chile, the Philippines, andSouth Africa. In linking programs devoted to recog-


Introduction: An Inclination to Innovate

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nizing innovative government, the Institute hopesto become the preeminent portal to information oninnovation and innovative programs in governmentworldwide.

In answering the questions of what inspires innova-tion and what makes it successful, this paperfocuses heavily on the award-winning innovationsthemselves; that is, it scrutinizes the ideas thatproved to have the power to change governmentoperations for the better. Borins’s cut at innovation,on the other hand, focuses more on identifyingcharacteristics of innovative organizations, recogniz-ing pathways to innovation, and investigating wherein organizations innovative ideas seem to comefrom. Specifically, Borins identifies seven character-istics of innovative organizations along with five“building blocks” of innovation. In the “WhoInnovates” section of his report, he also uses hardnumbers to illustrate what those of us who followinnovation have known for a long time: that innova-tive ideas spring up from all over the place—bothinside and outside of organizations, and from themiddle, bottom, and top layers of an organization.Innovation, it turns out, has little regard for title.

It’s worth focusing for a moment on Borins’s list ofthe seven characteristics of innovative organizations,however. It’s useful because it’s not hard to read theinverse into each of those characteristics when think-ing about the typical state, local, or federal depart-ment (and in considering how remarkable thepeople who push innovation in government—what-ever their title—really are). Innovative public sectororganizations, according to Borins, typically evincethe following virtues:

• They support innovation from the top (timidityfrom the top, especially around election time,is all too typical in U.S. government).

• They reward individuals who push change(public sector risk takers are often punished).

• They specifically dedicate resources to innova-tion (discretionary cash for experimentation israre in the public sector).

• They harbor a diverse workforce (public sectorpersonnel systems are notorious for their inflex-ibility in allowing managers to hire on thebasis of organizational synergy).

• They evince a basic organizational curiosity(“but we’ve always done it that way” is thecommon rallying cry in government).

• Bureaucratic layers are closely connected (an obvious contradiction in concepts in government).

• They exhibit a general inclination to experiment(see all six previous parentheticals).

Add to all that the fact that politicians at everylevel frequently seem to be enamored of the “solu-tion du jour” versus “what actually works” when itcomes to tackling public problems. Witness thestampede to embrace military-style boot camps foroffending youth, or the universal inclination toadopt across-the-board hiring freezes and budgetcuts as a way to balance budgets, as evidence ofelected officials’ remarkable ability to ignore policyand administrative reality, all the while missing theopportunity to really innovate.

All that being said, there’s clearly something verycurious going on in U.S. government when itcomes to innovation, something that has beengoing on for a very long time. Despite the formida-ble forces arrayed in opposition, there are people atall levels of government—local, state, and federal—who do figure out new ways of doing things. Infact, given the constraints and disincentives, giventhe entrenched attitudes and the frequently counter-vailing political imperatives and timelines, onecould argue that government in the United Stateshas proved to be remarkably, even resiliently, innov-ative. In the face of overwhelming odds, innovativeideas continue to bubble up out of government—from the smallest local government to the mostbloated federal bureaucracy—pushed by everyonefrom frontline staff, to middle management, to loftypoliticos, to outside agitators.

In going through the list of initiatives identified bythe Innovations program, one could certainly quib-ble about how innovative some of them really are.As Borins notes in his paper, real sticklers make adistinction between “invention,” which is the cre-ation of a new idea, and “innovation,” which is theadoption of an existing idea by a new organization.But while some of the winners might seem repetitiveof previous winners (programs aimed at early child-hood education and alternatives to incarceration, for


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example, have been regular staples of the Innova-tions program), it’s impossible to argue that theydon’t, collectively, represent a rich body of workworth mining for lessons in new ways of addressinghow government does its myriad and often very difficult jobs.

Borins starts some of that mining in his February2001 report. Besides using award winners to pindown key characteristics of innovative organiza-tions, he also uses them to identify what he callsthe “building blocks” of innovation. He might aseasily have called them “modes” of innovation. The five he teases out are:

• Changing whole systems (federal welfarereform would fall into this category)

• Using information technology

• Pursuing process improvement

• Enlisting the help of the private or voluntarysector

• Empowering communities, citizens, or staff

Between the two papers—this one and Borins’s—there is no doubt ample room for multiple alterna-tive analyses of the lessons that award-winninginnovation programs in the public sector have tooffer; this topic can be sliced and diced in a lot ofways. But together it is hoped the two papers willcontribute at least a bit more to the understandingof what elements go into creating, sustaining, andreplicating innovation in government. In theprocess, it is also hoped that the papers will inspirethose who care about government—both thoseworking inside and outside of government—andwho are tired of the status quo to perhaps thinkabout pushing government to do the public’s busi-ness in a new way.

Analyzing Innovations andInnovators: A Note on the “Science”of Change ManagementThe observations and conclusions in this paper arebased less on the rigorous social-political scienceof innovation (if a “science” of innovation can evenbe said to exist) than on observations accumulatedthrough years of close observation of innovation ingovernment. The author has spent more than twodecades covering management and change man-agement in government, generally, and 13 yearscovering the Innovations in American GovernmentAwards program, specifically.

Since 1988, the author has covered the Innovationsawards intensively, reading hundreds of applica-tions and site visit reports for programs (more than200 in the last five years alone), while conductinghundreds of interviews with principals of winningprograms, outside experts, critics, and other ana-lysts. Such interviews have been bolstered bynumerous visits to the scenes of innovation them-selves, ranging from housing projects in Chicago togovernment office buildings in Atlanta. Sometimesthese visits were arranged specifically as part ofaward-winner coverage; sometimes they were forseparate stories on particular state and local pro-grams and initiatives for Governing magazine orother publications.

Also contributing to this paper is a recent set ofsurveys sent out by the Institute for GovernmentInnovation to all winning programs from the past15 years asking about program sustainability andreplication. Those surveys have also been aug-mented by follow-up phone interviews with repre-sentatives of particular programs.


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There are good reasons why someone might bereluctant to want to lead change in a public sectorsetting; it’s widely regarded as a high-risk, low-reward enterprise. In her essay, “The Mysteries ofInnovative Government,” which accompaniedGoverning’s coverage of the 1991 Innovations inAmerican Government award winners, Governingfounding editor Eileen Shanahan quotes none otherthan the dark prince of government machinationhimself, Nicolo Machiavelli, as he muses aboutpushing change in government. Considering howsome of the more creative innovators go about get-ting the job done, it’s probably not inappropriatethat Mr. Machiavelli has his say here: “There isnothing more difficult to take in hand, more per-ilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success,than to take the lead in the introduction of a neworder of things.”

Why the skittishness around change? There are lotsof reasons, but one of the most obvious is that oneconsequence of trying to do things in a different wayis sometimes mistakes and failure. And as WilliamD. Eggers and John O’Leary point out in their bookRevolution at the Roots: Making Our GovernmentSmaller, Better, and Closer to Home (Free Press,1995), making mistakes in a public sector settingcan have some unsettling consequences. “No publicmanager,” note Eggers and O’Leary, “wants to drinkhis morning cup of coffee reading a headlinedescribing his latest screwup in 12-point type.”

With such perils in mind, the questions are worthasking:

• What triggers innovation in U.S. government?

• Where does it come from?

Don Kettl, professor of public affairs and political science at the La Follette Institute of Public Affairs atthe University of Wisconsin in Madison, notes thatbetter ways of doing things don’t tend to just springup in government; they need a push. “New ideasdon’t tend to get adopted simply because they wouldbe easier, better, smarter, or cheaper,” said Kettl.“They almost always need some kind of driver.”

In poring over the hundreds of programs recog-nized by Ford and the Kennedy School through itsInnovations awards program, six drivers of innova-tion ultimately sift out. Some of the programs cer-tainly fit into more than one of the categories,reflecting the complexity of the innovation picture.But in looking at all the winners, each was theresult of one or more of the following:

• Frustration with the status quo

• A response to crisis

• A new emphasis on prevention

• A new emphasis on results

• Adaptation of technology

• A moral imperative


What Inspires Innovation?

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The obvious question is the extent to which identi-fying these categories can help potential innovatorsget their organizations—or another organization—to start moving off the dime. The hope is that inhighlighting what inspired—or allowed—winnersto make change, others might more readily identifyopportunity when it comes along—or maybe theywill flat out try to create it themselves. At the veryleast, in reading about the origins of innovation, itmight bolster would-be innovators’ resolve to carryon the good fight, Messrs. Machiavelli’s, Eggers’sand O’Leary’s observations notwithstanding.

Driver One: Frustration with theStatus QuoWhen Stephen Goldsmith was elected mayor ofIndianapolis he posed a straightforward question tohis public works department: “How much does itcost to fill a pothole in Indianapolis?” Nobodycould answer the question, and that would start thecity down a whole new path when it came todelivering city services.

Goldsmith’s curiosity was born of a suspicion thatcertain city work could be done much more effec-tively and efficiently than it currently was if openedup to competitive bidding. But with Indianapolisbeing a heavily unionized town, the likelihood thatthe new mayor would be able to buck entrenchedlabor interests and start putting things like fleet andstreet maintenance out to competitive bid seemedhighly unlikely.

It took Goldsmith’s resolve, coupled with enlight-ened—and by no means weak—labor leadership ina fiscally constrained environment, to create theCompetition and Costing Program, which netted thecity an Innovations award in 1995. Under the pro-gram, a host of basic city services—like streetrepair—were opened up to the bidding processwhereby city departments would compete with theprivate sector for the work. It’s worth noting that aspart of the deal that Goldsmith struck with his laborunions in pushing the new order, middle manage-ment would actually end up taking the hardest hit,not frontline labor. Labor successfully argued thatsuperfluous layers of management would make cer-tain city operating units non-competitive whenstacked up against lean, mean private sector outfits.Goldsmith agreed and bureaucracies were flattened.

One might naturally conclude that the Indianapolisexample bolsters the “strong leadership” argumentas critical to successful innovation. No rational per-son would argue that strong leadership isn’t a hugehelp when it comes to making big organizationalchange. But it’s not a prerequisite to change; thereare ample examples of the same sort of frustrationand dissatisfaction exhibited by Goldsmith bubblingup from sources outside of leadership positions andinspiring—even requiring—big change.

Take, for example, Georgia Civil Service Reform, a 2000 finalist. It wasn’t David Osborne’s observa-tion in Reinventing Government that “the only thingmore destructive than a line item budget system is apersonnel system built around civil service” thatinspired Georgia to dump civil service. Nor was itany exhortation by then-Governor Zell Miller to histroops that they should march toward a more pri-vate sector model of personnel administration. Itwas fundamental frustration among the various gov-ernment departments with the unresponsive, byzan-tine central personnel office that ultimately led tothe change.

Among the most frustrated and least satisfied of thecentral personnel office’s “customers” was theGeorgia Department of Transportation (GDOT).GDOT had been unhappy with the civil servicesystem for a while, but one incident in particularsent the department over the brink. To get ready forthe 1996 Summer Olympics, GDOT requested


Competition and Costing Program, Indianapolis, Indiana

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some new job titles in areas of transportation thatwould be critical to the smooth flow of traffic dur-ing the Atlanta games. In particular, GDOT wantedto create a roving band of tow truck drivers whocould roam local streets and highways and quicklyremove disabled vehicles to prevent traffic back-ups. When GDOT asked the state civil servicedepartment for permission to create the new jobtitles necessary to do the work, the word cameback that it probably wouldn’t be able to approvethe titles until after the games were over. Frustrated,GDOT officials actually went to the legislature andwon a special exemption to state civil service lawso they could create the positions without havingto go through the central personnel office. It wasthe hole in the dike that predicted the entire per-sonnel system’s eventually being washed away.

There’s no arguing that Governor Miller was instru-mental in then pushing the plan for dismantlingGeorgia’s civil service system. But his efforts wouldhave gone nowhere had it not been for the deepfrustration and eager testimony of disgruntleddepartment officials. A quote in a 1997 Governingstory on the sunsetting of civil service in Georgiacaptured the depth and breadth of that grassrootsfrustration. “My dream is that ultimately there is noposition in the department covered by civil service,”said Department of Natural Resources DirectorLonice C. Barrett. Barrett’s dream—shared by manymanagers in the state—is now coming true: UnderGeorgia’s new system, individual agencies have thesole responsibility for finding and hiring people,and all state employees hired after July 1, 1996,exist outside of civil service as “at-will” employees.

Frustration doesn’t only impact governmental sys-tems or departments from the outside. There aredozens of examples from the Innovations programannals where insiders have become so impatientwith business as usual that they push change. Andas it turns out, insiders as change agents have aspecial kind of power inasmuch as there are somesystems that are so convoluted and complex, onlythose on the inside really understand what it wouldtake to fix them.

The Child Care Management Services program, a 1993 Innovations award winner from Texas, is a perfect example of that kind of change. The pro-gram was an attempt to streamline and coordinate

all state and federal child welfare programs, aneffort that was pushed by a small handful of persis-tent inside bureaucrats who were seeing firsthandthe dissipated—even harmful—effect that multiple,fragmented services were having on single motherswith kids. It ultimately took five years (and the cre-ative use of technology, it should be noted) to cre-ate a more seamless system of one-stop shoppingfor all child care services. It wasn’t perfect, but itwas certainly better. It was also prescient. As with a number of Innovations award winners from thelate 1980s and early 1990s, the Texas program pre-dicted the wholesale “block grant” approach tosocial services that would come with federal wel-fare reform in 1996.

Another 1993 winner, Government Action onUrban Land—from Cuyahoga County in Ohio—was likewise the result of internal frustration, inthis case with the long process required to con-demn code-deficient and tax-delinquent property.The basic problem: the impact on cities of ram-shackle buildings owned by absentee landlords,which were serving as little more than safe harborsfor criminals and targets for arsonists. Such build-ings have long been the bane of urban redevelop-ers for two reasons. First, they serve to discourageanyone who might actually be interested in pursu-ing improved housing or commercial life in ablighted neighborhood. Second, they frequentlyget in the way of urban redevelopment projectsthat depend on acquiring the large parcels of prop-erty necessary for viable redevelopment projects.

But, again, it makes sense that it was insiders bothin the city of Cleveland and in Cuyahoga County’scommunity development and legal arenas whopushed the change, because they were the oneswho really understood the problem in terms of theadministrative and legal complexities that had forso long stymied a solution. It took insiders to


Innovations in AmericanGovernment Award Winners

To obtain more information about each of the winners profiled in this report, visit the Innovations award site at: www.innovations.harvard.edu/prog.htm

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design a system for quickly and legally seizing tax-delinquent or chronically code-deficient property.

“We frequently see innovations being driven bypeople who’ve been in a system for a long time,”said Gail Christopher, executive director of theInstitute for Government Innovation. “They have a drive born of years of frustration, and a wisdomabout the complexity of the problems that makethem particularly adept at mapping out and push-ing change.”

Insiders don’t always act alone, of course. Whiletaking the clear lead in pushing change, they fre-quently reach to outside stakeholders to collaboratein making that change. Those kinds of combina-tions seem to be particularly important when itcomes to dealing with very volatile, emotional, andlong-standing conflicts—particularly in the regula-tory arena. The 1998 award-winning Northern NewMexico Collaborative Stewardship Project out ofthe U.S. Forest Service is one where insider frustra-tion with business as usual in combination withstakeholder dissatisfaction finally built to the pointwhere the system moved in a new direction.

The collaborative was inspired by long-standing con-flicts around the timber claims of local residents,logging companies, and environmentalists in theCamino Real Ranger District in northern NewMexico. The conflict had resulted in almost com-plete gridlock around logging, and even threats ofviolence. And so District Ranger Crockett Dumasquite literally climbed on horseback to begin mak-ing door-to-door contact with all the combatants.In Dumas’s case, he was diplomat enough to bringall the parties together to work out logging plansthat satisfied—at least more or less—all parties.And while his brand of multiple-party/combatantcollaboration has proved effective in other situa-tions and settings, it is a style of innovation thatseems to depend as heavily on the personality ofthe insider pushing the change as it does any setformula for resolving such long-standing and emo-tionally charged conflicts.

Massachusetts, which has had three award-winningenvironmental programs (in 1991 the state won forthe Blackstone Project, in 1999 for its Toxics UseReduction Program, and its Environmental ResultsProgram was a 2001 finalist), frequently employs

this insider-outsider approach to resolving long-standing conflicts and to developing more strategicways to regulate.

The Blackstone Project was initiated by agencyinsiders in the state’s Department of EnvironmentalProtection who were tired of the old-style, frag-mented, disjointed, end-of-the-pipe approach topermitting and inspections. The program proved tobe a successful experiment in prevention-focused,one-visit, multi-media inspections of companiespermitted to discharge pollutants. Using cross-trained inspectors armed with the ability to offerextensive technical assistance in prevention strate-gies and technologies, the program relied heavilyon the regulated community for support and coop-eration (and certainly in the business community,Massachusetts environmental regulators had a setof frustrated outside stakeholders). The programeven seemed to satisfy its toughest customer, theenvironmental community. A spokesman for theNational Toxics Campaign Fund at the time cited itas a model in the then-incipient national pushtoward pollution prevention.

It’s not uncommon, however, for the dissatisfiedparty pushing change to come from outside gov-ernment altogether. In 1999 New Jersey won anInnovations award for developing a new and sepa-rate set of more flexible building codes to beapplied in the case of rehabbing older structures.The initiative was a direct response to the significantfrustration among builders who were interested inrehabbing existing commercial buildings, but who


Rehabilitation Subcode, State of New Jersey

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found retrofitting 50- to 100-year-old structures tostringent new codes to be hugely expensive andimpractical—and of virtually no added value fromthe standpoint of public safety. Those builders, notincidentally, had strong allies in the local govern-ment officials who wanted to see derelict—and frequently historically and architecturally signifi-cant— buildings brought back to life, as well.

Seattle’s Community Voice Mail for Phoneless/Homeless Persons, a 1993 winner, was likewiseborn of outside stakeholder frustration with the sta-tus quo. The idea for voice mail for people with nohomes or phones came out of a small, not-for-profitsocial services provider in Seattle that realizedhomeless people were missing out on jobs becausethere was no way for prospective employers toreach them. They took their idea to the city, and thecity turned it into a formal program.

But probably the best example of the “outside gad-fly as change agent” among the Innovations awardwinners is Norma Hotaling, a former prostitute whohad clearly run out of patience with how traditionalcriminal justice systems were dealing with prosti-tutes and their customers. To Hotaling, the lawenforcement status quo around soliciting amountedto nothing more than a revolving-door world whereneither women nor their customers were offeredany real positive alternatives other than to go backto the same behavior that had put them in troublewith the law in the first place. And so sheapproached the San Francisco district attorney’soffice with an idea: Treat both the women and cus-tomers involved in prostitution as people who needhelp, not as criminals needing punishment.

To its credit, the San Francisco prosecutor’s officelistened, working with Hotaling on developing theFirst Offender Prostitution Program, under whichmen caught soliciting for the first time are offeredthe chance either to go to court or to attend classestaught by, among others, ex-prostitutes—classes thathighlight the fundamental harm that the sex industryhas done to women, men, families, and personaland public health. Instead of jail time, prostituteswere offered counseling, medical care, and helpgetting their lives together. The program proved tobe remarkably effective, particularly in getting malecustomers to stop re-offending. The First Offenderprogram won its Innovations award in 1998.

Driver Two: Responding to CrisisThe change described above tends to be driven byyears of pent-up frustration. It’s not an acute eventthat drives such change so much as it is a buildingrealization that a particular way of doing businessisn’t working very well—and hasn’t been for awhile. By contrast, there is a whole different classof innovation that is inspired by some acute eventthat quickly turns people to a new way of doingbusiness.

It’s no revelation that crisis creates opportunity toinnovate—or in many cases outright forces it.Arguably, U.S. Forest Service Ranger CrockettDumas’s foray into the field described above was in some part crisis driven. Things had gotten so badin his district that it was clearly time to try some-thing radically different.

In looking over 15 years’ worth of innovative pro-grams, it is clear that acute crisis is a powerful driverof fast change. In Innovating With Integrity: HowLocal Heroes Are Transforming American Govern-ment (Georgetown University Press, 1998), SandyBorins cites three Innovations identified programs ashaving obvious roots in immediate disaster:

• Seattle’s comprehensive push toward recycling(the Seattle Recycling Program, a 1990 win-ner), which had been inspired by environmen-tal conditions at two of its landfills that were sohorrendous they had to be shut down.

• An Arizona program to find and close aban-doned mines spurred by the accidental deathof a young man who’d fallen into a mine.

• The Florida Department of EnvironmentalProtection’s adoption of a geographic informa-tion system (GIS) to manage environmentalcrises in its waterways after a disastrous oilspill near Jacksonville in 1987.

As Borins points out in his book, a significant num-ber of Innovations award winners had some ele-ment of acute crisis underpinning their creation—infact, he puts it at as high as 30 percent. It’s obviouswhy crisis is such a powerful catalyst. “Peoplewithin a public sector organization may know thatits performance is not up to par, but this problembecomes a crisis only when it is manifestly visibleto the public,” writes Borins. The professor is to be


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credited for his artful understatement. As any goodpolitician who has watched some tale of disaster asit unfolds on the 6 o’clock news will tell you, crisisdemands an immediate and highly visible response,whether it’s the right response or not.

But in reviewing the Innovations award winners, it’sclear that crisis, disaster, and bad news have inspiredsome fairly creative and coherent efforts to fix things.Without putting too fine a point on it, such programstend to fall into two categories: programs inspired bycrisis and designed to fix a problem, and programsdeveloped to blunt the consequences of inevitable(usually natural) disasters. In fact, a number of the2001 Innovations programs fall into these two sub-categories of crisis-driven innovation.

One of them is A Secret Safe Place for Newborns,developed by the Mobile County, Alabama, DistrictAttorney’s Office. The Safe Place initiative—a 2001finalist—came about as the result of truly sadevents—a series of six infant and toddler homicidesin 1998. Prompted by a local reporter’s suggestionthat desperate parents—mothers in particular—beoffered the option of safely giving a newborn awaywithout fear of prosecution, the DA’s office decidedto try the idea. While a recent front page New YorkTimes article (“Few Choose Legal Havens toAbandon Babies,” Aug. 31, 2001) raises questionsabout the ultimate effect of such programs (35 statesnow have so-called “safe haven” laws, according tothe article), the DA’s office in Mobile County, atleast, reports no homicides and only one unsafeabandonment since adopting the new policy.Whatever the ultimate effect of the Safe Place pro-gram, its intent is clear: to forestall future tragedy.

Likewise, a 2001 award winner, the National Centerfor Patient Safety, developed by the U.S. Departmentof Veterans Affairs, was inspired by crisis: Expertsestimate that preventable medical errors lead to hun-dreds of thousands of deaths and injuries a year. In 1997 the VA started encouraging staff at all VAhospitals to voluntarily and confidentially reportmedical mistakes in order to hone in on possiblesystem flaws leading to injury and death. The theorywas that bad systems, not careless people, aremostly responsible for mistakes. As a result, the VAhas been awash in new reports of mistakes and nearmisses, allowing it to adjust and hone a variety ofsystems to make hospital stays considerably safer.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administrationwon a 1995 Innovations award for its worker safetypilot program launched in Maine, precipitated by a high per capita incidence of worker death andinjury. Under the Maine Top 200 ExperimentalTargeting Program, especially dangerous industrieswere targeted for special attention—inspectionsand cooperative efforts to improve working condi-tions. Again, the idea was inspired by bad newsand aimed at fixing problems once and for all.

It’s worth noting that all three programs—A SafePlace, the Center for Patient Safety, and Maine Top200—have strong elements of prevention andresults driving them. Indeed, the VA program couldeasily fit into the “results-driven innovation” cate-gory below because of its wholesale push tochange bureaucratic thinking based on improvingresults. But, clearly, it was a crisis in the medicalworld that prompted the program.

Then there are those Innovations award programsthat were set up to actually blunt the impact ofinevitable disaster, similar to the disaster thatspurred Florida’s GIS system, mentioned above.Oklahoma’s 2001 award-winning OK-FIRST initia-tive fits this model, and also includes a strong ele-ment of technology and prevention. OK-FIRST is a weather early-warning system that pulls togethera variety of forecasting technologies (some primi-tive, like human observation, some quite advanced,like Doppler radar) and through a statewide web-site puts all that information at the fingertips ofpublic safety officials. They can then use it to dothings like evacuate towns that appear to be in thepath of developing (or developed) tornadoes orclose down roads in imminent danger of flashflooding. State officials have credited the systemwith saving numerous lives already, particularlyfrom tornado damage.

PulseNet, a program developed by the U.S.Department of Health and Human Services and a 1999 Innovations award winner, can also beincluded in this sub-category of crisis-driven inno-vation aimed at blunting the impact of inevitabledisaster. It’s a technology-based system that aims torapidly identify the type and source of significantfood poisoning outbreaks so that those sufferingfood poisoning can be quickly and correctlytreated, and the source of the poisoning identified


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and shut down. The system was developed inresponse to the cases of widespread food poison-ing—however sporadic—that periodically hit vari-ous regions of the country. Since its creation, thesystem has been credited in several instances withkeying in on and closing down the source of poten-tially serious listeria and salmonella poisoning out-breaks before they caused serious harm.

In 1996, the Federal Emergency ManagementAgency (FEMA) won an Innovations award forConsequence Assessment Tool Set (CATS): DisasterDamage Prediction and Mapping, a comprehensivesystem for disaster pre-planning in areas that are atchronic and high risk of trouble at the hands ofnature, including earthquakes and hurricanes. It isinteresting to note that the essential methodologyused by FEMA was adapted from pre-plans it haddeveloped at the behest of the Defense Departmentfor dealing with the aftermath of nuclear war. Callit a peace dividend.

Driver Three: Focusing onPreventionChange in response to crisis is, of course, all too typ-ical of government, given its reputation for beingreactive rather than proactive. Which is why Borins’sestimate that 30 percent of all Innovations awardwinners are crisis inspired isn’t all that surprising.

There is another class of Innovations award winner,though, that does have at its core the whole notion

of prevention. But even in the case of efforts aimedat nipping some problem in the bud, frequentlythey’re not launched until the problem has firsttaken a good bite out of government or the public.

Prevention is not an easy track for government totake. As a focus on results has begun to infuse (atleast rhetorically, if not always in fact) public policyand administration in the United States, a typicallament among public sector policy makers, bud-geters, and managers is that it’s hard to measurewhat hasn’t happened. It is, therefore, difficult tojustify spending public resources on preventionabsent some way to judge the effects of suchspending.

It’s not an argument that everyone—or even mostpeople—buy, but it still manages to get in the wayof funding for preventative programs, nonetheless.It would be much more honest of public officials tosimply admit the political difficulty involved inspending money on programs where the goal is fornothing (bad) to happen—a prospective, less-than-flashy, and sometimes downright invisible result.

In Revitalizing State and Local Public Service:Strengthening Performance, Accountability andCitizen Confidence, edited by Frank J. Thompson(Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1993), authors MichaelSparer and Lawrence D. Brown spend an entirechapter on one of the most expensive governmentprograms in history—Medicaid, which provideshealth care to the indigent. It’s a program that haslong been the subject of heated debate about thevalue of early intervention as a way to reduce costs.Allowing government to spend hundreds of dollarsup-front on something like quality pre-natal carepotentially forestalls the need to spend thousands ofdollars on intensive—or chronic—intervention lateron. Using such an argument, Medicaid moneymight quite wisely be spent on something like leadpaint abatement in apartment buildings. Instead,Medicaid has become one of the most convoluted,rule-bound, and as mentioned above, expensiveprograms in the history of U.S. government, andcosts continue to escalate.

As Sparer and Brown point out, there is a long andimpressive list of forces arrayed against innovatingin Medicaid, from bureaucratic infighting andparalysis, to political wrangling, to legitimate legal


PulseNet, U.S. Department of Health and HumanServices

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and fiscal concerns. And so far, the whole programhas proved so large and politically charged as todefy real reform.

Yet the Innovations program offers numerous, albeitmore modest, examples of government willing toinvest now to save later, both in the area of healthcare policy and outside of it.

In 1986, for example, St. Paul, Minnesota, was rec-ognized for its Block Nurse Program, which wasdesigned to provide quality, home-based care tothe elderly to avoid much more expensive institu-tional solutions. In 1996, Florida won for itsHealthy Kids Program, an effort to extend healthinsurance to all children in a single state. HealthyKids was a clear precursor to the federal Children’sHealth Insurance Program (CHIP) passed byCongress in 1997, which is aimed at significantlyexpanding health insurance coverage for young-sters nationwide.

As with health, education has always been a cate-gory that invited prevention-based strategies, theprototype probably being Georgia’s Voluntary Pre-kindergarten Program, a 1997 winner, aimed atallowing every child in the state access to earlyeducation. The approach is based on the long-standing maxim that investing money in educationnow pays off handsomely in better socialization,higher achievement, and lower costs (indeed, moreproductive tax-paying citizens) down the road.

Dozens of Innovations winners in other policyareas have prevention at their heart, particularly inthe criminal justice and social services areas. CaseManagement for At-Risk Children, a 1986 winner,takes a comprehensive social services approach toyouthful offenders as a substitute for the more typi-cal punitive strategy on the theory that kids sittingin juvenile detention are not getting the kind ofhelp they need to improve their lives. Again, theidea is that investing in an admittedly more expen-sive range of interventions now will keep troubledkids out of deeper trouble later, which lowers ulti-mate costs to society, fiscal and otherwise.

In 1987, Illinois won an award for Parents Too Soon,described as “a comprehensive, statewide effort tostem teenage pregnancy through health, social, andeducational services for males and females ... to

raise awareness about the consequences of becomingparents at a very young age.” Efforts aimed at reduc-ing teen pregnancy have since become a staple ofstate and local government across the United States,and, according to state and national public healthstatistics, are now paying off in significantly reducedteen pregnancy rates.

The city of Boston won an Innovations award in1997 for Operation Ceasefire, an aggressive, pre-emptive approach to gang violence involving ahost of players, from the police department to thefaith-based community, in an effort to identify anddefuse gang trouble before it sparks. The program’sfocus on stopping trouble before it ever startsproved so effective that Operation Ceasefire pro-grams have sprung up all over the country.

Environmental protection, too, seems to invite amore proactive approach to public policy andadministration. In 1999 the Massachusetts Depart-ment of Environmental Protection continued itsstring of Innovations awards with its Toxics UseReduction Program, an effort to work with manufac-turers on new and creative ways to prevent pollu-tion in the first place, rather than treat it at the pipeduring discharge. “Our basic thinking,” noted GinaMcCarthy, assistant secretary in the state’s ExecutiveOffice of Environmental Affairs, “was, with all thetechnology advances and all the Yankee ingenuity atour disposal, is it really necessary to create all thispollution as part of the production process?”

It’s a sentiment that sums up the ethic behind quitea few of the Innovations program’s prevention-based winners—that is, applying a little inventive-ness to treating the problem at the front end isultimately much cheaper and much more effectivethan treating it at the back end.

Driver Four: Emphasizing ResultsAs mentioned above, some argue that prevention-focused programs can be a tough sell because it’shard to measure what hasn’t happened (and there-fore makes it hard to argue for or justify expendi-tures). On the other hand, an increasing number ofaward-winning programs are based on the wholenotion that government programs and initiativesought to be much more soundly based on resultsthat can be measured. Indeed, much of the re-inventing government literature revolves around


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what advocates describe as a profound new shift infocus for government: from an obsession withprocess to the pursuit of results.

It’s an intoxicatingly simple-sounding approach todoing the public’s business. An entire chapter inReinventing Government is devoted to the topic:“Results-Oriented Government: Funding Outcomes,not Outputs.” In it, Osborne and Gaebler argueeloquently for this new focus for government poli-cies and programs, and offer a host of examples ofresults-driven government transformation. Theauthors predict big changes like welfare reform(based on their observation that the old way ofdoing the public assistance business wasn’t work-ing), and they compliment the Fund for The City ofNew York on more down-to-earth work like moni-toring the Big Apple’s spending in relation to itsperformance in some key and highly visible areassuch as street cleaning.

This author argues (less eloquently, to be sure) forthe same shift in government thinking in MeasuringUp: Governing’s Guide to Performance Measure-ment for Geniuses and Other Public Managers.Except that in Measuring Up, an entire chapter isdevoted to the reasons why government can’t possibly shift its focus to results. That chapter,“Eight Reasons Why You Can’t Do PerformanceMeasurement and Then the One Reason Why YouHave No Choice,” outlines a list of excuses thatpublic officials frequently turn to for why they can’tpursue results-based government. Those reasonsrange from a fear of being held accountable forresults—bad ones—over which they might have lit-tle or no control, to trend fatigue, characterized bya deep cynicism toward any new management bro-mide being hyped by higher-ups. Both chapters, intheir own way, discuss the cluttered path leading toresults-based government.

Of course, all the Innovations winners are arguablyabout “results.” In some cases Innovations awardwinners sell themselves specifically as being exem-plary because they have focused government ontracking results, generally. In other cases, winningprograms simply represent a new way of conduct-ing business based on that age-old adage: “If theold way of doing something isn’t working, then trysomething new”—preferably something that actu-ally works.

The best example of the former is the OregonBenchmarks program, a 1994 winner, which repre-sented an ambitious and explicit effort to collectand monitor data on results—the theory being thatdoing so would then drive policies and programs to change in ways that make them more effective.Under Oregon Benchmarks, the state developed a whole set of measures by which to judge theprogress and success of Oregon, its citizens and itsgovernment, in a host of socioeconomic, health,and public safety categories—from the health ofresidents to their annual incomes. The OregonBenchmarks program has had its ups and downs,but there’s no arguing that it helped set off a revo-lution in how state, local, and even the federal gov-ernment, at least, talk about what they do.

A couple of other noteworthy Innovations programfinalists were also aimed at changing governmentalbehavior by monitoring results. In 1998 and 1999Florida was a finalist for its Environmental Perfor-mance Measurement System, which collected state-wide data on everything from air to ground-waterquality as a way to gauge the need for and effect ofcleanup efforts, and perhaps retarget resourcesbased on need and impact. Also in 1999—a bigyear for results-based finalists—Philadelphia wasrecognized for its Program Development andEvaluation System for Juvenile Offenders, a longtitle for a program essentially aimed at trackingjuvenile offenders to see if any patterns could bedeciphered around their individual backgrounds,on the one hand; and which government or gov-ernment-funded interventions seemed to have themost (or least) success in steering kids straight, onthe other. Again, both the Florida and Philadelphiaprograms were specific efforts to collect data onresults that could then be used to assess and pre-sumably steer programs, policies, and resources.

The other subset of results-based award winners arethose aimed less at monitoring results than achiev-ing them. The now nationally renowned ProjectMatch, which won its Innovations award in 1988for its new approach to welfare to work, is thearchetype. Project Match is just as much aboutresults as Oregon Benchmarks, just at a differentlevel (call it results with a small “r” versus Resultswith a big “R”).


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Project Match, which started out as a demonstrationprogram funded by the Illinois Department of PublicAid, won national recognition for its patient andenlightened—but clearly hard-nosed—approach tobreaking the cycle of welfare dependence. Thebasic motivation for Project Match was the realiza-tion that welfare as we knew it wasn’t working verywell; that moving single women from welfare toindependence (or at least less dependence) wouldtake a lot more than simply writing checks and thenhoping people would get on their feet. It would taketime, considerable effort, repeated failure, and mul-tiple support services.

Project Match was a clear harbinger of theWisconsin Works program, a 1999 winner, whichhad its roots in 1987 reforms that essentially tookthe theories behind Project Match and formedthem into a statewide welfare-to-work strategy.Both programs predicted the sweeping 1996 wel-fare reforms that would come out of Washington.

The 1995 Innovations award-winning HamiltonTerrace Learning Center—an alternative high schoolfor troubled teens and welfare mothers, developed inthe Caddo Parish School District in Louisiana—waslikewise an experiment in helping break the cycle ofwelfare dependence inspired by the fact that paststrategies to help welfare recipients achieve educa-tionally just weren’t yielding good results.

Environmental cleanup is another area that seemsto have inspired a host of small “r” results-basedInnovations award winners. In 1994 Minnesota

won for its Voluntary Investigation and Cleanupprogram, through which state officials worked withdevelopers in cooperative, nonpunitive ways to getcontaminated land cleaned up, back into produc-tive service, and back on the tax rolls. Minnesota’sis one of a host of “brownfield” programs that havebeen recognized by the Innovations program for ashift in focus on (some would say “obsession with”)regulation and process toward facilitation andground-level results.

But, again, every one of the Innovations finalistsand winners is ultimately about results. TheInnovations application hits hard on accomplish-ments, asking specifically for the “single mostimportant achievement of your program or policyinitiative to date,” and then asking for the “threemost important measures you use to evaluate yourprogram’s success.” If you don’t have good data onresults, it becomes very hard to make theInnovations award cut.

Driver Five: Adapting TechnologyA frequently asked question by those observing theresults-based governance phenomenon is why afocus on results seems to have all of a suddeninfused public sector thinking. What magic hastaken hold that now has government obsessingabout results? In fact, the idea of applying mean-ingful performance measures to what governmentdoes has been around for generations. What hasallowed it to take root so quickly of late is that thetechnology necessary for comprehensive and thor-ough tracking and analysis of data on results hasonly just recently been developed—and is nowevolving with incredible rapidity.

But the technology revolution has had a powerfulinfluence across all of government, not just in howit measures what it does, but in how it actually getsits myriad of jobs done. Which is why adaptingnew technology to old jobs is an increasingly per-vasive theme among the applications received bythe Innovations awards program. In its own break-down of categories of winners—including “socialservices,” “environment,” and “justice system”—theawards program has created a separate categoryaltogether for “technology.”

In fact, these days the program is so flooded withapplications that involve adapting technology to


Wisconsin Works, State of Wisconsin

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the business of government, it’s becoming tougherand tougher for judges to sift out real innovationfrom straightforward—even if appropriate andeffective—adaptation of technology to the basicwork of government.

It can also be tough to judge whether some innova-tion occurs because of technology or whether tech-nology is simply part of the new program. Arguablya program like Oklahoma’s OK-FIRST could be eas-ily shifted into the “technology-inspired” categoryof innovator. Yet the program at its core is reallyabout rapidly responding to inevitable crisis.

Which is why the category of technology-driveninnovation, like crisis-driven innovation, can alsobe divided in two. There are those programs, likeOK-FIRST and the aforementioned CATS andPulseNet, that represent good ideas that rely ontechnology to work. Then there are those innova-tions that are more purely technological in theirmakeup. Thirteen years ago, the Innovations awardsprogram recognized Vermont for what wasarguably one of the earliest attempts at so-called“e-government.” The state hooked up hundreds oflibraries by computer, allowing single-source elec-tronic access to all their collections—or at least tolistings of what materials were in their collections.

Since then the list of technology-specific innovationsrecognized by the program has been rapidly expand-ing. Two alone have been handed out in the LosAngeles area, both of them for technology-depen-dent programs aimed at reducing traffic. In 1992 thecity of Los Angeles won an award for its AutomatedTraffic Surveillance and Control program, a high-tech, sensor-driven system for keeping cars, trucks,and buses moving throughout downtown by alteringthe pattern of stoplights according to traffic flow andcongestion. (The program also contributed one ofthe more colorful terms of art to the traffic controllexicon. When congestion got particularly horribleon a specific stretch of road, officials would executewhat they called “a royal flush”—a string of greenlights along a single transportation corridor aimed atemptying out a serious backlog of idling vehicles.)The very next year, Los Angeles County won for itsTelecommuting Program, whereby thousands ofcounty employees were granted permission to stayhome and work via telephone, fax, and the Interneton days when it made sense.

Among other programs that have technology attheir core: In 2000, Perry High School in Perry,Ohio, won for Perritech, a school-based computerrepair and consulting firm staffed entirely by stu-dents. And in 2001, the ultimate in e-government isrecognized as a finalist by the Innovations awardprogram: FirstGov. FirstGov is the U.S. GeneralServices Administration-administered web portal tothe world of U.S. government, allowing directaccess to federal services and products like taxforms and passport applications, while also provid-ing direct links to state and local government sites.

Needless to say, a string of winners falls into thecategory of applying technology to long-standingpublic jobs. In 1986—the first year of the awardsprogram—Rochester, New York, won an Innovationsaward for using videodiscs to administer its propertytax rolls. In 1988, Kentucky won for using videoand sound recording in place of court stenogra-phers. In 1990, Ramsey County, Minnesota, won forits use of “smart cards” to dispense welfare cashbenefits. In 1991 Kentucky won again, this time forinitiating a broadcasting-based distance learningprogram to remote rural school districts.

In 1993, Oregon won for its Vendor InformationProgram, whereby the state began posting“requests for proposals” and accepting bids overthe Internet. New York City won in 1996 for itswidely praised and widely replicated “Compstat”program, a tactical policing tool whereby thepolice use computer-collected data to analyzecrime patterns, allowing more effective deploy-ment of resources based on the measurable impactof intervention. And in 1999, Pittsburgh won for itsElectronic Bond Bidding Initiative, which allowedthe city to cut out the middleman—bond bro-kers—and sell bonds via the Internet directly toinvestors, saving the city and investors money.

One Innovations awards winner even applied tech-nology to technology. The Center for Technology inGovernment, a 1995 winner from the state of NewYork, was created in part to allow state and localgovernment agencies to experiment with computer-based ways to do the work of government on asmall scale before investing big money to roll outsuch systems for real.


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Driver Six: Doing the Right ThingBy direct contrast to those awards driven by tech-nology, there are some that are arguably based onsomething else altogether: their essential humanity.There is a whole class of Innovations award win-ners that are hard to explain in any other way thanthat they are flat out about doing the right thing.

Obviously—as one would hope—all the winnersare imbued with a clear sense of positive purpose.But even with such laudably noble efforts as theFirst Offender Prostitution Program (FOPP) or A Secret Safe Place for Newborns, there wereextenuating imperatives that helped drive the initia-tives. In the case of First Offenders, it was clear evi-dence that the old way of conducting the businessof criminal justice wasn’t working very well.(Although a strong case can certainly be made forputting FOPP into the “doing the right thing” cate-gory, Hotaling was such a force to be reckonedwith that it fits perfectly under frustration with thestatus quo). In the case of the Safe Place initiative,it was a string of shocking headlines that finallymoved people to action.

But take a program like Racial Integration Incentives,a 1988 Innovations winner, which sought to activelymaintain racial balance in the neighborhoods ofthree Cleveland suburbs. Absent the program, thoseneighborhoods would simply follow the same coursethat had been followed in dozens of neighborhoodsfor dozens of years: They would naturally segregate.

Or why embark on an initiative to offer aid andcomfort to lone citizens in the throes of personaltragedy, as the city of San Diego did back in theearly 1990s through its Trauma Intervention Program(TIP)? Without such a program, few would be anythe wiser and only a tiny handful any the sadder.There would certainly be no front-page news decry-ing the lack of compassion coming out of city hall ifTIP hadn’t been invented.

In scouring the literature on innovation, one findsfar ranging and detailed discussion of risk takingand rewards, empowerment and flexibility. Hardlyanybody talks about innovation in terms of simplydoing what’s right. Even Daniel Yankelovich’s first-rate book Coming to Public Judgment: MakingDemocracy Work in a Complex World (SyracuseUniversity Press, 1991) winds up being more of atechnical primer on dispute resolution and collabo-rative decision making than a disquisition on theGolden Rule.

Yet in 1985, three suburbs outside of Clevelandembarked on a program to fight the “tipping” thatsocial scientists have identified occurs when a par-ticular neighborhood begins to go one way oranother in racial makeup. Under the program, localcommunity services offices actively tried to steerwhites toward black neighborhoods and blackstoward white neighborhoods, offering variousfinancial incentives to those who agreed to make“pro-integrative” moves. It’s no surprise to learnthat the Racial Integration Incentives program,which was focused on Shaker Heights, ClevelandHeights, and University Heights, Ohio, is no longeraround. And a quote from an interview with one ofthe program principals back in 1988 was certainlyprophetic. “People would rather stick their heads inthe sand than take the political heat,” said WinstonRichie, an African American and executive directorof one of the community services groups pushingthe program. (We will take up Racial IntegrationIncentives again in the next section of this paper on survival and replication.)

San Diego’s Trauma Intervention Services, mean-while, was designed to team volunteers with sur-vivors of acute tragedy—most frequently peoplewho’d lost family members to work or traffic acci-dents. Those volunteers arrived on the scenewithin minutes to offer emotional comfort to sur-


Electronic Bond Bidding Initiative, Pittsburgh,Pennsylvania

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vivors and to help them connect with social ser-vices programs when appropriate. But mostly thevolunteers simply served as someone to offer com-fort and sympathy in the absence of a trauma sur-vivor’s own family or friends.

The integration and trauma programs were earlyexamples of Innovations winners that emerged,more often than not, by dint of pure goodwill andwillpower by some individual or small handful ofindividuals intent on doing good. Those types ofprograms continue to pepper the Innovationsawards list.

Not all of them are as emotionally charged as TIPor the pro-integration program. For example, theDepartment of Defense (DoD) won an Innovationsaward in 1998 for its Best Manufacturing PracticesProgram (BMPP). Under BMPP, experts visit willingbusinesses to analyze best practices—from manu-facturing techniques to personnel management.What those teams learn is then posted on a websiteavailable to any company interested in improvingtheir own processes. It’s tough to explain the pro-gram in any other terms than that the DefenseDepartment was simply trying to help companiesrun better. Arguably there was some enlightenedself-interest involved—more efficient companieshad the potential to become more reliable, cost-effective suppliers to the DoD. But really the pro-gram boils down to simply being a good idea thathas the potential to help a lot of people.

More frequently, though, winners in the “right thingto do” category involve much tougher and moreemotionally charged issues.

In the year 2000—with Innovations applicationsbased on hard technology pouring into the pro-gram—two of the winners that emerged were sin-gled out mostly for their essential human decency.In Hampden County, Massachusetts, SheriffMichael Ashe bent over backward in arguing thepractical public health benefits of Better InmateCare Improves Public Health, a program that offersinmates comprehensive health care coverage andcounseling. Ashe notes that healthier and morehealth-conscious inmates are much less of a threatto public health when released, and that is nodoubt true. But Ashe pushes that argument as hardas he does because he is well aware that any pro-

gram identified as being humane (read “soft”)toward criminals has a high probability of becom-ing a political target. At the end of the day, though,Ashe is simply doing the right, if less than politi-cally popular, thing.

Pennsylvania, meanwhile, won for its MentalHospital Seclusion and Restraint Reduction policy,whereby the use of chemical and physical restraintsin its nine state mental hospitals has been dramati-cally scaled back. As in Hampden County, the newpolicy has paid multiple dividends, not the least ofwhich is evidence of the therapeutic benefits of amore humane approach to restraint. But the pro-gram has proved to be expensive to administer andtime-consuming to carry out, and no gubernatorialcandidate in Pennsylvania is ever going to climb upto a public podium and bellow the praises of thestate’s efforts to treat a group of virtually invisible,mentally ill constituents in a nicer way.

The Pennsylvania program, like the First Offenderprogram, might also easily be shifted to the cate-gory of “frustration with the status quo.” The drivingforce behind the change in policy was a womannamed Mary Ellen Rehrman, who says she becamea mental health advocate the day she first saw herhospitalized schizophrenic son in a four-pointrestraint. “It wasn’t therapeutic, it was humiliating,”said Rehrman. “I thought that enough disabilitycomes with the illness without a patient being leftso devalued and vulnerable.” So the Pennsylvania


Mental Hospital Seclusion and Restraint Reduction,Commonwealth of Pennsylvania

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program clearly has feet in both the “frustration”and “doing the right thing” categories.

In 1994, the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, won anaward for its Sexual Assault Nurse ExaminersProgram, which represented a whole new andmore humane way to treat victims of rape andother sexual crimes. This program also wound uppaying multiple dividends. It turns out, for exam-ple, that victims who are led into the warm con-fines of a counselor’s office rather than the harshspotlight of a police precinct tend to be much morewilling to testify against assailants. But at its heart,the program flat out represented a more compas-sionate way to deal with people who had just beenthrough hell.


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There are three explicitly stated goals of theInnovations in American Government Awards program:

• To celebrate innovation and innovators.

• To blunt cynicism about and improve the imageof government by highlighting examples ofeffective government.

• To help sustain innovation and replicate it inother jurisdictions.

Clearly the program does a good job of celebratinginnovation and innovators. Finalists are invited toWashington, D.C., where they enjoy the heady sur-roundings of the National Press Club’s storied brief-ing and conference rooms. There they make theirfinal oral presentations to a national selection com-mittee. The awards are presented the next day at afestive luncheon, attended by a who’s who of pub-lic sector change management experts. Winners aresometimes even accorded visits to the WhiteHouse. A special supplement covering the finalistsand winners is published in subsequent issues ofboth Governing and Government Executive maga-zines (a supplement that, by way of full disclosure,has for the past four years been written by thisauthor). So, from the standpoint of celebratinginnovators, the program seems to hit the mark.

As for the program’s goal of reducing cynicismabout and boosting confidence in government, eventhe program’s most ardent supporters will admit thatthat’s a hard one to measure. It is taken on faith that

the program will have some positive impact. Thereis a measurable flurry of media coverage of thefinalists and winners immediately after their desig-nation, usually by local market newspapers, televi-sion, and radio. Judging by the responses to thequestionnaire recently sent out to all winning pro-grams by the Institute for Government Innovation aspart of the Innovations’ 15th anniversary activities,quite a few of the programs have received extensivemedia coverage. Being named by the KennedySchool and the Ford Foundation as an innovator nodoubt has helped many of them in that regard.

But the real hope of the Innovations program is thatit supports both the survival and the disseminationof good ideas. Both the Innovations program appli-cation and the grilling that finalists take from thenational selection committee during oral presenta-tions hit hard on each. The aforementioned surveyrecently sent out to every winning program focusedextensively on program survival and replication, aswell as the extent to which being recognized bythe Kennedy School and the Ford Foundation hadsome positive influence in each regard.

It’s understandable that the Innovations programwould be curious about its own impact on innova-tors and the seeding of good ideas around thecountry and world. But trying to decipher causeand effect in that regard is an uncertain proposi-tion, and it’s probably better left to the Institute tomake its own calls about its impact as it sees fit.The more profitable line of inquiry for the purposesof this report is to look at those programs that have


What Makes Innovation Successful?

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been “successful”—that is, they have survived andperhaps been replicated elsewhere—and try to fig-ure out the characteristics of those programs as aguide to others who might want to follow on theinnovation path.

To do that, this report examined the list of 30 pro-grams that the Innovation Program identified ashaving particular staying and multiplying power.But this section doesn’t restrict itself to those 30 byany means. It will consider a much wider range ofprograms based, again, on the author’s personalknowledge and extensive coverage of the awardwinners and also on other writings about successful(and unsuccessful) programs. This section alsorelies on follow-up phone calls to program princi-pals and stakeholders, close observers of theInnovations program, and those who follow innova-tion in the public sector more generally.

One of the most remarkable statistics associatedwith the Innovations in American Governmentawards program is the number of winning pro-grams that are still around. Of 150 winners identi-fied by the Innovations program between 1986 and2001, only 14 are defunct, and seven of those dateback to pre-1990. Meanwhile, scores of those win-ning ideas have been picked up and replicatednationally and even internationally. And so clearlythe programs identified by the Ford Foundation andKennedy School offer solid lessons to would-beinnovators when it comes to designing successful—that is resilient and replicable—innovations.

For those contemplating joining the ranks of inno-vators, the lessons that sift out in looking at both“winners” and “finalists” come through quiteclearly. When designing a program it’s best to:

• Keep it simple in concept

• Make it easy to execute

• Shoot for quick results

• Be frugal

• Make it appealing to the widest constituencypossible

• Keep it apolitical

Keep It Simple in ConceptInnovations award winners can be divided into twocategories: the ones that are easy to explain andthe ones that are hard to explain. There are farmore in the former than the latter category, to besure. But it’s clear from looking at those programsthat have caught on and those that haven’t, that themore straightforward the concept, the better a pro-gram’s chances of sticking around and beingadopted by other jurisdictions.

Take, for example, Compstat, the New York PoliceDepartment’s high-profile and widely replicatedeffort to turn information technology to the task ofmapping crime trends. Compstat has received somuch attention, people are probably sick of hear-ing about it. Well, from the standpoint of replica-tion, that’s a good thing. Jurisdictions from LosAngeles to New Orleans have adopted theCompstat approach. Indeed, it represents such abasic idea—tie resources to results—that the “stat”suffix is now being affixed to a wide range of otherpolicy and program areas, from finding welfarerecipients jobs—“jobstat” (also in New York City)—to a host of city functions. Mayor Martin O’Malleyhas launched “Citistat” in Baltimore, which appliesthe “stat” concept across city functions, from lawenforcement to building code enforcement, fromstreet sweeping to restaurant inspections. Ofcourse, the idea of using results to drive resourcedeployment is hardly a new one, but it’s possible toargue that the specific use of “stat” to identify thepractice has been a catchy, simple, and powerfulway to drive the idea into government.

Take, on the other hand, a program like “Here,Thayer and Everywhere,” a 1994 winner out of theWinchester, New Hampshire, School District. Itwas an effort, according to a description in theOctober 1994 issue of Governing, to “help otherschools grapple with issues raised by such practicesas team teaching, mixing students regardless ofability, scheduling subjects in blocks, orientinglearning around projects, and finding ways toensure that teachers get to know their students asfully as possible.” It was also meant to take on suchtopics as how to assess students and “personalizethe learning process,” and to do all that throughworkshops to be broadcast via satellite at 500 reg-istered sites around the country and over some


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cable and public television stations. Without deni-grating one iota the school’s sincerity about theprogram, it’s easy to see where such a diffuse planof action to be delivered in a way that wouldrequire such extensive planning, marketing, andorganization was not destined to either survive orthrive, and indeed the program is now defunct.

North Carolina’s Smart Start, a 1998 winner, has acatchy title, but when one digs into the guts ofimplementation, it’s a pretty complicated program,requiring counties to come up with elaborateaction plans to coordinate a host of educationaland social services to compete for the millions ofstate government dollars the program offers. Todate, Smart Start survives, but it hasn’t proved to bea popular selection at the innovations replicationvending machine.

One of the more perplexing characteristics of the2001 award-winning Mathematics, Engineering,Science Achievement initiative is that while it seemsto have been wildly successful in California—help-ing push thousands of minority kids into higher edu-cation—very few other states have seen fit to adoptsimilar programs. One explanation for that might bethe tough-to-explain system of parental, mentor,tutor, corporate, and teacher relationships on whichthe program’s success depends; it’s a hard initiativeto sum up in a sentence.

On the other hand, 1987 winner Parents as Teachersfrom the state of Missouri was as fundamental aneducational concept as has ever been identified bythe program: Train parents in some basic techniquesfor boosting their kids’ learning skills. The programdidn’t merely survive, it spread like wildfire, evengoing overseas.

Bill Parent, former executive director of theInnovations awards program, points out that manyof the innovations that show strong replicative pow-ers are in program or policy areas where there “areestablished, strong national networks of practition-ers.” And so good ideas that spring from the educa-tion and social services world tend to spreadquickly through what are traditionally fairly cohe-sive networks, whereas initiatives in an area likeenvironmental protection—a notoriously frag-mented policy area, both from the standpoint ofprograms and jurisdictions—don’t spread so quickly.

As a purely mechanical matter, it’s a point worthemphasizing: Communication networks are clearlyimportant to program replication, and the largerand more established those networks the better. Butregardless of how well developed the communica-tion network, complicated ideas just don’t seedwell. Parents as Teachers and Here, Thayer andEverywhere were both educational initiatives, yetone became an international phenomenon whilethe other disappeared. The only explanation forwhy that happened is that one was a very simpleidea; the other wasn’t.

Make It Easy to ExecutePrograms that seem to have natural powers of sur-vival and replication don’t require major legislationor huge administrative rule changes to create orimplement, nor do they force participation. That is,stakeholders can choose to be part of a new way ofdoing business of their own free will.

Operation Ceasefire, the preemptive approach togang violence out of Boston and a 1997 Innovationsaward winner, wasn’t predicated on the permissionof—or any official action by—the Boston CityCouncil. Furthermore, the program doesn’t forceanybody to do anything. It’s based on a voluntaryand collaborative approach to diffusing tensionamong gangs, essentially by trying to get people in aroom to talk. In fact, in Operation Ceasefire’s case, alarge part of its effectiveness is clearly because at-risk youth are asked to participate rather thanordered to fall into line. (To be accurate, the pro-gram does have a “stick” component: If gangs don’tdecide to ease up on their own initiative, the policepromise a swift crackdown.) The program is a strongsurvivor and has been replicated in cities fromBirmingham, Alabama, to Wilmington, Delaware.

Project Match, the ground-breaking welfare-to-work program out of Chicago, was a new strategyin helping break the welfare dependence cyclethat, likewise, required no one’s permission to tryand didn’t mandate participation. The program didbenefit from money set aside by the IllinoisDepartment of Public Aid for pilot projects. Butbecause Project Match wasn’t created by legislationor administrative rules, and because clients werecoming to the program voluntarily, it evinced astaying and replication power that has allowed it


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not only to survive right through federal welfarereform, but also to serve as a model for all of themandatory programs aimed at moving people offwelfare and into jobs that operate today.

Likewise, the long-running and 2001 Innovationsaward-winning Mathematics, Engineering, ScienceAchievement program out of California was not theresult of any lengthy hearings or detailed change inlaws or rules, and it does not mandate participa-tion. The program simply offers students the oppor-tunity to get some extra help in studying scienceand math in order to move forward academically.In 30 years the program has expanded from oneschool to more than 450 schools. And arguably, itis because of the program’s voluntary nature that itcontinues to thrive even after California’s sweepinganti-affirmative-action ballot initiative, Proposition209, which specifically prohibits the state fromestablishing programs or policies that make choicesbased on race.

On the other hand, Georgia’s successful effort tosunset its civil service system was directly dependenton legislation, legislation that, not incidentally,required a once-in-a-generation alignment of somevery state-specific political stars, along with the solidbacking of the system’s (former) internal “customers”—those state agencies the civil service system wassupposed to be helping. The initiative survives inGeorgia because it is now the law, but don’t look formany (if any) states to follow Georgia’s lead. In fact,as close as any state has come to doing whatGeorgia has done is Florida, which recently put alarge number of its management positions outside ofits merit system. Putting all employees outside of themerit system proved to be too tough an initiative topush through the legislature.

Similarly, Child Care Management Services, Texas’seffort to offer one-stop shopping for a variety ofchild welfare programs, was heavily dependent onthe permission of government officials—federalgovernment officials, in particular. In fact, the pro-gram finally was created only after a five-year fightwith the federal government over regulations andwaivers. For that reason, the whole effort becameas much a cautionary tale about tangling with thefederal welfare bureaucracy as it did a model forhow to do child welfare services more intelligently.According to the survey returned by the Texas pro-

gram to the Institute for Government Innovation,only four other states have followed Texas’s lead.Despite that, there were and continued to be spo-radic attempts (pre-1996 welfare reform) to inte-grate and streamline a variety of social servicesprograms in states and counties around the country,and some of those efforts were subsequently recog-nized by the Innovations program. But eachseemed to have its own tale of woe about buckingentrenched interests in finally developing moreintegrated programs and systems.

Shoot for Quick ResultsMany of the Innovations award winners that havegone on to be widely copied have another thing incommon: They yield measurable results in a veryshort period of time. David Osborne puts it anotherway: “They have a good story to tell.” And in theinnovations business, a good story revolving aroundquick, easily communicated results is priceless.

The Oregon Vendor Information program, the 1993winner mentioned earlier that allowed the state toput up requests for proposals and to accept bids formaterials and services over the Internet, is a perfectexample of not just a good story but a great one.The Oregon program yielded its results almostinstantaneously. Virtually the moment Oregonstarted posting RFPs on the Internet, it started hear-ing from far-flung vendors ready to compete. It wasa twin win for the state. First, the new program wasa huge money saver just from an administrativestandpoint. According to Oregon officials, the pro-gram paid for itself within one year just in thereduced costs of doing RFPs the old-fashioned,paper-driven way. (The state was actually spendingnearly $150,000 a year in postage under the oldpaper-driven system.) Second, state officials esti-mate they saved $17 million the first year and aquarter from enhanced competition injected intothe purchasing process by electronic bidding. Infact, the electronic bidding process was such agood idea that had Oregon not gotten there first,someone else clearly would have. The electronicbidding process is how hundreds of jurisdictionsnationally and internationally now do business.

That same sort of instant success helpedCommunity Voice Mail for Phoneless/HomelessPersons root and flourish, having been adopted by


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dozens of other jurisdictions since the programwon its Innovations award in 1993. Besides beingrelatively easy to implement—it was a simple mat-ter of setting up phone mail accounts for clients—ityielded results almost immediately. As reported inGoverning’s coverage of the program in November1993, one unemployed power plant worker had sixjob offers within four days of the program’s initia-tion—job offers that would have never found himabsent the voice mail. Within a week the unem-ployed worker had a job. One month later, fullyemployed and getting back on his feet financially,he moved into his own apartment. Now that’s afast-acting program—and a great story.

A winner from 2000 that’s generating a lot of inter-est is Perritech, the high school-based computerconsulting firm run and staffed by students that wasalso mentioned earlier in this report. The companywas mostly set up to trouble-shoot and service theschool’s new computer system, but students—whoget advanced training and certification in a host ofcomputer software, hardware, and networking sys-tems—are now actually consulting to local busi-nesses, including, of all places, the local nuclearpower plant. There students helped set up hundredsof new desktop and laptop computers. “You havethis image of typical fly-by-night teenagers whocan’t even make change without using a calcula-tor,” said Bob Kundrat, supervisor of client servicesfor the plant. “These kids were really professional.They knew they were there to do a job and theydid it well.”

One of the Perritech’s first alumni, a 19-year-oldnamed Chris Hanus, is now working for one thestate’s largest law firms as its network analyst.Talking to Hanus on the phone is a joy; he’s smart,personable, and full of entertaining tidbits, includ-ing the fact that he recently bought a house.Meanwhile, the program itself is developing part-nerships with several other schools interested instarting similar programs, including an alternativeschool in Georgia for young offenders. Those areall great stories.

Be FrugalAs many have noted, one of the organizationalimperatives damping down innovation in the pub-lic sector is a general disinclination to spend newmoney on untested ideas, even ones ginned up byseasoned veterans who might know what they’re upto. This rule holds even for programs that extensiveresearch indicate are probably going to be a worth-while investment—eventually.

That would explain why a perfectly fine idea likeGeorgia’s Voluntary (note the “voluntary”) Pre-kindergarten Program hasn’t been widely repli-cated. The price tag in Georgia of $200 million ayear is clearly what’s keeping other states fromembarking on similar initiatives, even though it’saxiomatic that dollars invested in a child’s educa-tion early on pay dividends in educational achieve-ment and social adjustment down the road. Aninnovation like the Trauma Intervention Program,on the other hand, is never going to get deraileddue to lack of funds; it relies heavily on volunteersand costs relatively little to operate.

Kentucky’s massive educational overhaul,Recreating Public Education for Results, a 1997winner, has proved to be a virtual one-of-a-kindeffort. Although pieces of it have been adopted inother states, no state has undertaken a similarlycomprehensive reengineering of an entire educa-tional system. And it’s actually dubious whether thestate itself would have undertaken the multibillion-dollar restructuring and reinvestment program hadit not been for the fact that the Kentucky StateSupreme Court had ordered it to do so.

Any program that is flat out dependent on a regularcheck from a legislative body is always going to be


Perritech, Perry Local Schools, Ohio

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at risk. The Work Force Unemployment PreventionProgram—a 1990 winner out of Cambridge,Massachusetts, which placed inner-city youngstersinto after-school white-collar job settings—washeavily dependent on a regular state stipend.Before the program could even begin developing aPerritech-like track record, it was summarily de-funded by the state legislature.

This truth—that innovation’s replicability is fre-quently tied tightly to cost—seems so deeplyimbedded in the innovation ethic, it’s actually hardto find many Innovations award winners thatinvolve huge investments of money. This holds trueeven for the high-ticket world of health care.Indeed, many of the health-related programs identi-fied by the Innovations award program have beenpicked specifically for the fact that they extendedhealth care to some previously uncovered popula-tion and did it without significantly increasing ajurisdiction’s costs. For example, Medical Care forChildren, a 1990 winner out of Fairfax County,Virginia, was chosen in large part because it was avery successful effort to get medical and dental careto indigent kids without a huge influx of newcounty money. Likewise, Buncombe CountyMedical Society Project Access, a 1998 winner outof Buncombe County, North Carolina, won itsaward in part because it succeeded in expandingthe delivery of quality primary care to uninsuredadults countywide without a huge investment ofnew dollars. On the other hand, few jurisdictionshave followed the lead of Hillsborough County,Florida, which tacked a half a cent on to its salestax to fund managed health care for the poor, anidea that netted the county an Innovations award in1995 for the Hillsborough County Health Care Plan.

One of the most likable of the 2001 Innovationsaward finalists was Chicago Fitness Plus, an initia-tive aimed at getting older folks into the habit ofregular exercise as a way to promote independenceand general well-being. When asked what washolding the obviously incredibly popular programback from expanding into more health and eldercare centers, program officials cited that old refrain:money. If it costs a lot of money, survival willalways be a struggle and the idea will always be a hard sell.

Make It AppealingOne of the really interesting features of theInnovations award program is that it clearly doesn’ttend toward political pandering. Of course, itshouldn’t. But still, what easier way to recognizereplicable programs than to stick one’s finger in theair, see which way the political winds are blowing,and then choose an early “three strikes and you’reout” initiative knowing that 49 of them are boundto follow in rapid succession. In fact, the awardsprogram tends to attract—and reward—those whobuck conventional political “wisdom” and eschewsthe quick fix of the day.

This characteristic of the Innovations awards is par-ticularly notable in the whole area of criminal jus-tice. For example, a string of programs have beenrecognized for a focus on alternative ways to dealwith criminals. The first was Alternatives toIncarceration, a 1987 program out of Georgia thatemphasized probation over incarceration for non-violent offenders. And most recently, ReparativeProbation, a 1998 winner from Vermont, was cho-sen for its emphasis on community service overprobation—again, for non-violent offenders. Butwhile both might be considered trend-buckers atfirst glance, it turns out that one has actuallytapped into deep community sentiment, while theother really hasn’t. In other words, to put it mostsimply, one has proved readily likable, the otherless so, and the proof is in the replication.

If anything, the Georgia program preceded a wavenot of alternatives to incarceration but of unprece-dented “get-tough-on-criminals” laws, includingboot camp and mandatory sentencing initiatives.Needless to say, states haven’t fallen over them-selves in following Georgia’s lead, although thereis—and recently has been—a good deal of discus-sion and debate nationally about alternatives to jailtime for non-violent offenders. California’s recentballot initiative requiring that non-violent drugoffenders do counseling rather than hard time isevidence that, at least in some places, people areclimbing on this bandwagon. Still, few politiciansseem very interested in getting out in front on thealternatives to jail platform. Nor does there seem tobe enough of a groundswell of support for suchideas that Georgia’s or California’s efforts will bebroadly replicated. New York has been mired in a


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debate about easing up its tough drug sentencinglaws for years now; there’s no evidence that thelegislature or governor is getting anywhere nearenough grassroots pressure to move them.

On the other hand, Vermont’s Reparative Probationprogram seems to have struck a real populist, com-munity chord. Through the program, communitiesset up citizen boards to consider community ser-vice sentences for non-violent offenders who’vecommitted crimes against that community.Offenders have the option of pleading guilty andopting for alternative service (graffiti artists mightbe required to paint the trim on city hall, for exam-ple) over a trial that would then risk fines, jail timeand/or probation. Not only has the program grownwithin the state, but more than a dozen other statesand localities have started similar ones, accordingto Vermont officials.

The difference between the Georgia and Vermontinitiatives, and the lesson for would-be innovators:To survive and thrive the innovation doesn’t have topander, but it does have to, at some level, be onethat people can connect with. At the very least theyhave to be ideas that don’t draw sustained, focusedopposition in the absence of widespread commu-nity or stakeholder support.

For example, politically dicey programs like SheriffAshe’s jailhouse health campaign can probably sur-vive as long as they skim along below the radar.But the Hampden program doesn’t fall into the “lik-able” category, especially when compared to a hostof other Innovations award winners. Take, forexample, the Police Homeowner Loan Program, a1993 initiative out of the capital city of Columbia,South Carolina, aimed at encouraging city policeofficers to move back downtown and into dis-tressed neighborhoods. While it took some per-suading and real sweetening of the financial homepurchase and employment packages to get policeofficers’ attention, as a program there’s nothing notto like about it. And that’s clearly one of the rea-sons that it has been picked up in dozens of othercommunities. Such programs, it should be noted,have been dogged by charges of fraud in someplaces. An innovation lesson for another day is thateven the best ideas can be abused by creativethieves, but that shouldn’t stop people from pursu-ing good ideas.

In looking at the broad swath of Innovations pro-grams, a bunch of them are flat out likable. Gallery37, a youth-focused program out of Chicago and a1997 winner, pairs kids in paid apprenticeshipswith accomplished, professional artists. The kids’work is then displayed in various public places allover the city. It’s such a likable idea that it’s beenpicked up in more than a dozen jurisdictions, fromTuscon, Arizona, to Toledo, Ohio, and evenAdelaide, Australia, according to Gallery 37 offi-cials. Likewise, who is going to squawk about aprogram like the aforementioned Perritech, a nat-ural for replication? And chances are that evenChicago’s Fitness Plus program will start to seeditself in other cities, even if it does cost a littlemoney. It will likely do that because there’s anotherkind of math that enters into the replication equa-tion here: an aging voter population looking togovernment for likable ideas. Fitness Plus is onethat older folks seem to like a lot.

Likable, though, can be tough to predict at times.One program that seemed like it couldn’t possiblylose a civic popularity contest wound up sinking outof sight anyway. California’s much hyped and publi-cized Info/California, a 1993 winner, with its fleet ofpublicly placed touch-screen, interactive kiosks, fellflat on its face. The state had plans to buy and locate100 of the terminals at $30,000 a pop, but thoseplans were scrapped. It wasn’t that people necessar-ily hated the things, they just didn’t use them.

Meanwhile, those programs that touch off basic and sustained (or very effective acute) oppositionare obviously not destined for bright futures. Take,for example, Maine Top 200. Given the Occupa-tional Safety and Health Administration’s remark-able and measurable success in reducing workerinjury and death in key industries in Maine, OSHAdecided to take the program national. Its reward forits ambitious push was to be sued by the NationalAssociation of Manufacturers, which claimed thatrecord-keeping requirements under the new initia-tive amounted to new “rules.” The manufacturersargued that all such rules must go through the usualprocess of public hearings and comment, whichthey hadn’t. The manufacturers won their lawsuit,effectively killing the program. (To be accurate, theprogram lives on in a way: After its success inMaine, OSHA continues to use data on deaths andinjuries to target enforcement nationally. What was


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lost in the wake of the manufacturers’ lawsuit, ironi-cally, was the working-cooperatively-with-industrycomponent of the program.)

But of all the programs handed an Innovationsaward, there was probably none so doomed asRacial Integration Incentives, that star-crossed 1988award winner mentioned earlier. Dedicated to creat-ing and maintaining racial balance in the neighbor-hoods of three Cleveland suburbs, it did have thefierce support of a handful of both whites andAfrican Americans. But it was also fiercely attackedfrom both sides. Even the U.S. Justice Departmentunder Ronald Reagan investigated it for charges of“racial steering” in real estate sales (nothing came ofthe investigation). In the end, the program was asunpopular as it was honorable. Unpopular prevailed.

Keep It ApoliticalA small handful of the initiatives identified by theInnovations program have “star power” becausethey’re closely identified with a high-level electedor appointed public official.

Wisconsin Works (W2), which presaged federalwelfare reform by almost 10 years (it was launchedin 1987), was the hallmark of Governor TommyThompson’s long reign as governor, and probablydidn’t hurt him when it came to winning his newjob as Secretary of the U.S. Department of Healthand Human Services. Replication of W2 was swiftand pervasive; at least a dozen states pursuedwaivers similar to those granted Wisconsin underW2. And when Wisconsin finally won its Innova-tions award in 1999, the whole country was alreadythree years into federal welfare reform. But even ifW2 could be credited with having a huge influenceover other states—and even the 1996 federal wel-fare reforms—its survival and replication would bethe exception to the rule as far as innovation’slongevity is concerned.

Typically programs recognized by the Innovationsprogram that have close connections to a politicianor political regime end up being swept out with achange of administration. Two in particular are rep-resentative. Minnesota’s Strive Toward Excellence inPerformance (STEP) program, a 1986 winner aimedat improving state administrative services, wastightly connected to political appointee SandraHale. When Governor Rudy Perpich’s administra-

tion went, Hale and STEP went with it. It’s worthnoting, though, that Minnesota continues to be aleader in performance-based governance, and it’sreasonable to argue that many of the ideas behindthe STEP program live on in other incarnations. Atthe same time, programs similar to STEP have pro-liferated, although results-based governance isclearly one of those broad trends whose origins arereally tough to pinpoint.

Maryland’s Smart Growth initiative, recognized in1999 as a finalist and in 2000 as a winner, will beinteresting to watch in this regard. Tightly tied tothe administration of Governor Parris Glendening,the sweeping sprawl-slowing initiative hasn’t beenpicked up by any other state, and there is plenty ofspeculation about the program’s survival onceGlendening moves along. If he is succeeded by afellow Democrat, then the program will probablycontinue to have the high-level support it needs tomaintain its integrity and impact. Moreover, thefact that it is embedded in legislation gives it a bet-ter chance of survival. But sweeping land use regu-lations and policies in other states—like Vermontand Oregon—have become targets for steady chip-ping away by opponents. If there is a change inparty in Maryland, look for Smart Growth’s profileas a target to rise considerably.

While Oregon Benchmarks was closely tied toGovernor Barbara Roberts, it was, in fact, a legisla-tive initiative, which is one of the main reasonswhy it manages to stay alive through continuing


Smart Growth and Neighborhood Conservation, State ofMaryland

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legislative appropriations. Its survival is a matter ofconstant vigilance, to be sure, because it does relydirectly on the munificence of the state legislature.But because Roberts won the buy-in of key legisla-tors in pushing the program, it wound up with amore solid foundation of support than if it hadbeen simply identified as a product of the Robertsadministration.

All in all, though, one of the interesting and fairlyconsistent characteristics of the programs high-lighted by the Kennedy School and the FordFoundation is that they very rarely rely on starpower or get tangled up in politics. For the mostpart, they are born quietly, and are pushed by peo-ple who weren’t famous when they stepped intothe innovations limelight and who haven’t becomefamous after they stepped out of it. And that, as itturns out, is a pretty good foundation for successfulinnovation.


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For all the millions of words written about innova-tion in government (and the private sector), and for all the long-winded attempts to analyze thealchemy of change management in government—this tome included—innovation, at the end of theday, is a pretty straightforward proposition: It’s apeople-driven business. And the people behindinnovation are a fascinating group.

It’s easy to attach to them all the typical adjectives:creative, persistent, even courageous. But thosewords are used so often they’ve lost a lot of theirpunch, as accurate as they might be. Besides, whatI’ve noticed about those who’ve been identifiedthrough the Innovations awards is something a littlesubtler: They are restless.

When it comes to how public jobs get done, there’sa group of people (many, to be sure, who’ve neverbeen recognized by any awards program and whonever will be) who just seem, like the mythicalPrince Valiant, to be perennially dissatisfied. Whichis why no change-management recipe book in theworld is ever going to capture the magic of innova-tion in the form of some immutable quasi-politicalor social-scientific math equation. In the end it’sactually more of a nurture-nature question best leftto psychologists—who, by the way, don’t reallyhave any answers, either.

Still, “experts” have been analyzing innovation inthe public (and private) sector for eons. Whether it’sBorins, Osborne, Light, Peters, or Walters, dozenshave gone through the exercise of putting innova-tive organizations and programs under the micro-

scope in hopes of finding that magic bit of geneticmaterial that will allow innovation to be cloned.

It’s not an easy thing to do. Yes, organizations canbe structured in a way that will encourage innova-tion. And certainly it helps to understand the inspi-ration behind certain types of innovation so thatwhen opportunity visits it can be turned to action.Characteristics of sustainable and replicable pro-grams are worth identifying so that once-and-futureinnovators at least have the benefit of knowingsome tricks of the trade as they embark on the fre-quently frustrating adventure of pushing change.

But if innovation were a matter of organizationaldynamic or just the right opportunity, it wouldhardly ever happen in the public sector, or proba-bly anywhere else, for that matter. It is people whopush it, people often working in dysfunctionalorganizations under miserable circumstances, andin spite of that, they try to change things.

Which is why in the 13 years of closely followingthe Innovations in American Government program,what I have seen collected is as much a gallery ofgood people as it is a database of good ideas. Asmentioned in the previous section, very few of theprograms recognized have been pushed by high-level, well-known public sector all-stars. For themost part, the programs are the product of insideand outside stakeholders who are simply tired ofdoing something one way when they suspect—orknow—there’s a better way; who are tired ofchronic mediocrity (or outright failure) when theyknow government should and could do better.


Personal Observations: 13 Years of Chronicling Innovators

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Trying to list all the people I’ve met and/or inter-viewed in the course of those 13 years who’veimpressed me with their dedication and creativity(not just from the standpoint of the idea, but alsofrom the standpoint of getting the idea imple-mented) is a hazardous enterprise only becausethere have been so many who stand out. I willmention a few; but I could easily list many more.

Let’s start with Donald L. DeMarco, one of the firstaward winners I ever met. He’s one of the princi-pals behind the ill-fated program aimed at main-taining racial balance in Shaker Heights, ClevelandHeights, and University Heights, Ohio. Even to agreen reporter (at least when it came to coveringinnovations), it was obvious that DeMarco’s questwas pure Don Quixote. Here was a guy who, inessence, was trying to buck the most fundamentalforces of social and economic behavior in ournation—if not the world. What was the payoff?Besides an Innovations award (much appreciated,certainly, but no antidote for the inevitable),DeMarco got nothing but resistance and attackfrom all quarters. He was even harassed by hisown government in the form of the U.S. Depart-ment of Justice. What DeMarco had going for himwas this startling, fearless, bulldog tenacity when itcame to doing what he thought was right. It wasn’tuntil I met DeMarco that I fully understood thesingle-minded dedication of purpose, the capacityfor action, and the courage of those who hadpushed for civil rights in the 1950s and ’60s. Itwas an eye-opener.

Or consider a guy like John Baldwin, principal ofthe Hamilton Terrace Learning Center, the 1995award-winning program aimed at helping shepherdtroubled teens and welfare mothers into higher edu-cation and toward independence. He comman-deered an empty school building (he talked acustodian out of his keys). He then won over hissuperintendent by promising to deliver an educationprogram that would become the “crowning star” ofthe district. Then—and on his own—he lined up thefinancial support needed to create the program.And, finally, he developed a whole new curriculumaimed at this jumbled-up and challenging studentmix. Keep in mind that Baldwin had no other ambi-tion here. He wasn’t running for anything. The workhe did wasn’t going to make him wealthy (to say theleast). He was never going to be on the cover of any

national magazine recognizing him for his finework and dedication. There was no large cash“genius” prize in his future that would allow him tolive easily for a while. All he got was the satisfactionof knowing that in the face of chronic failure, hewas trying something different to help a specificgroup of people who needed that help.

Two women, likewise, immediately come to mindwhen I think about the activists I’ve met or talkedto who had some connection to the Innovationsawards. Norma Hotaling, who pushed the FirstOffender Prostitution Program in San Francisco, is,to put it mildly, intimidating. She is an ex-prostitutewith an attitude. Not only did she pull herself outof a life on the streets, she’s now trying to make areal difference in other people’s lives by champi-oning a much more compassionate and commonsense approach to the all-too-human problem ofsexual exploitation of women and children. Largelybecause of her work and the work of like-mindedactivists, the ideas she supports do slowly seem tobe working their way into the law enforcementpolicies of other localities both here and overseas,in spite of frequently running up against politicalbrick walls.

Where Hotaling is a steamroller, Mary EllenRehrman is a tough, wisecracking lobbyist with ahuge heart and the ability to work with govern-ment insiders to make big change. Rehrman, likeHotaling, is also fueled by hard firsthand knowl-edge of public sector policy failure. After just a fewminutes on the phone with Rehrman—who now


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runs a Philadelphia-based clearinghouse advocat-ing more enlightened treatment for people in men-tal hospitals nationwide—it became quite clearwhy it is that her home state of Pennsylvania hascome to lead the country in its highly evolvedrestraint and seclusion policies for its public mentalhospitals. Rehrman flat out wouldn’t have it anyother way. Most simply put, people like Hotalingand Rehrman are the status quo’s worst enemies.

By contrast, but just as effective, is a chronic innovator like Joe Dear, who has bagged twoInnovations awards. He is one of those quiet,behind-the-scenes types who evinces a constantrestless energy that is focused on analyzing gov-ernment activity in relation to desired results.Where the two don’t seem to be matching up,Dear starts asking hard questions. He was behindOSHA’s Maine Top 200 initiative, which looked atdeath and injury rates in that state in relation totypes of work and then focused preemptive safetyefforts on the appropriate industries to remarkableeffect. He also pushed an award-winning initiativeto overhaul Washington State’s dysfunctionalworker compensation system. Bespectacled anddiminutive, Dear will chew over a questionyou’ve asked him about public sector manage-ment in Austin, Texas, in April and will continuehis answer when you bump into him a monthlater in Olympia, Washington. He’s very smart.Unfortunately for the public sector, Dear is nowworking for a private business. But I predict he’llbe back at some point; he seems to have toomuch fun doing public policy.

Just as restless and smart is someone like MaryEllen Skinner, one of the driving bureaucratsbehind the Texas Child Care Management Servicesinitiative, the effort to knit together diverse pro-grams aimed at helping kids in Texas. It goes with-out saying that persistence had more than a little todo with pursuing her five-year fight to bring somerationality and cohesiveness to social servicesdelivery there. But what she actually taught me wasthe value of a (very wry) sense of humor when itcomes to surviving that kind of grinding campaignagainst institutionalized irrationality. In a soft,Southern, almost whimsical lilt, she can deliversome wicked one-liners aimed at federal child carepolicy—and they are frequently right on the mark.

Then there’s a guy like Redlands, California, Chiefof Police James R. Bueermann, who is simply wayahead of the game. His program—Risk-FocusedPolicing—is a community health approach to crimeprevention and was a 2000 Innovations awardfinalist. The chief was clearly disappointed that hisprogram didn’t win. That’s understandable, but Iwas happy just to meet the brains behind the effort.Even in this day and age of community policing,top cops tend to come from the old-fashioned “bustheads” school of law enforcement. But Bueermannis a thinker, someone who really understands andcan articulate the value of prevention when itcomes to keeping communities safe. If more in lawenforcement thought the way he did, governmentswould be spending much more money on housingand community development and a lot less onhigh-powered handguns and bulletproof vests forpolice officers.

Again, it’s not just Innovations award winners whodeserve to be mentioned here; I could continue onwith dozens of people I’ve interviewed in the last20 years who embody all the same qualities andwho’ve never been formally recognized by anyonefor their achievements, large and small, and whoprobably never will be. Government is no differentin that regard from the private sector; it harbors thehapless and the wonderful alike. But I believebeing wonderful is considerably harder in the pub-lic sector, and it really means something.


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A perennial and probably futile hope is that themainstream press will start recognizing this; that itwill shake its obsession with disaster and celebrityand tune in more carefully to those in the publicsector who are out on a limb, trying to get some-thing good done, often against fierce odds andoccasionally failing spectacularly. Probably themost haunting thing ever told to me by an Inno-vations award winner was when I asked DonDeMarco what it was like to be pushing change on such a deserted, controversial, and unpopularfrontier: “For so long we’ve been the test,” saidDeMarco, “and it’s lonely out here.” Short of thepopular media figuring out who the real heroes inthis world are, such award programs as that fundedby Ford and run by the Kennedy School are atleast, I hope, making it a little less lonely.

Finally, if pressed to come up with my own formulafor how all this should work, and to borrow fromthe contemporary political lexicon, maybe we needto institute some sort of “two strikes” rule for inno-vation based on Mary Ellen Rehrman’s observation:If some policy or program is not humane and it’snot therapeutic (or, more broadly, if its not morallydefensible and it’s not working), then it’s a signal toeveryone that it’s time for change. Or maybe itought to be a “one strike” rule. But either way, it’sgoing to be people who decide that.


38

Articles/Reports:Innovations in State and Local Government 1986,Ford Foundation, 1986

Innovations in State and Local Government 1987,Ford Foundation, 1987

Innovations in American Government, 1986-1996,Ford Foundation, 1996

Achieving Excellence, Building Trust, FordFoundation, 1997

“Government That Works,” Governing, October1988

“The Innovators Revisited,” Governing, October1989

“Innovators: The Year’s Best,” Governing, October1990

“The Mysteries of Innovative Government,”Governing, October 1991

“Renewing Government,” “The Best of ’92,”Governing, October 1992

“The Best of the Best,” “More Programs that Work,”“Masters of Public Innovation,” Governing,November 1993

“The Best of the Best,” “More Programs that Work,”Governing, October 1994

“The Innovators, 1995,” “More Programs thatWork,” Governing, October 1995

“So Long Civil Service,” Governing, August 1997

“Innovations 98; Achieving Excellence, BuildingTrust,” Governing special section, December 1998

“Innovations in American Government 1999,”Governing special section, December 1999

“Innovations in American Government; CreativeSolutions to Public Concerns,” Governing specialsection, December 2000

“Politics of Impatience,” Governing, April 2001

Kennedy School of GovernmentCase Studies:“Finding Black Parents: One Church, One Child,”1988; “‘Integration Incentives’ in SuburbanCleveland,” 1989; “The Electronic Benefits Systemin Ramsey County, Minnesota,” 1991; “The Ladderand the Scale: Commitment and Accountability atProject Match,” 1992; “Community Voice Mail forthe “Phoneless”: Starting Up in Seattle andMinnesota, 1993; “Preventing Pollution inMassachusetts: The Blackstone Project,” 1993; “A Community Responds: Boston Confronts anUpsurge of Youth Violence,” 1998


Bibliography

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Books:Ammons, David N., ed. Accountability forPerformance: Measurement and Monitoring inLocal Government. International City/CountyManagement Association, 1995.

Borins, Sandford. Innovating With Integrity: HowLocal Heroes Are Transforming AmericanGovernment. Georgetown University Press, 1998.

Dilulio, John J., Jr., ed. Deregulating the PublicService: Can Government Be Improved? BrookingsInstitution Press, 1994.

Eggers, William D. and John O’Leary, eds.Revolution at the Roots: Making Our GovernmentSmaller, Better, and Closer to Home. Free Press,1995.

Kettl, Donald F. The Global Public ManagementRevolution: A Report on the Transformation ofGovernance. Brookings Institution Press, 2000.

Kettl, Donald F. and John J. Dilulio, Jr., eds. Insidethe Reinvention Machine: Appraising GovernmentalReform. Brookings Institution Press, 1995.

Koehler, Jerry W. and Joseph Pankowski. ContinualImprovement in Government: Tools and Methods.St. Lucie Press, 1996.

Osborne, David and Ted Gaebler. ReinventingGovernment: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit isTransforming the Public Sector From Schoolhouseto Statehouse, City Hall to the Pentagon. AddisonWesley, 1992.

Osborne, David and Peter Plastrik. The Reinventor’sFieldbook: Tools for Transforming YourGovernment. Jossey-Bass, 2000.

Thompson, Frank J., ed. Revitalizing State and LocalPublic Service: Strengthening Performance,Accountability, and Citizen Confidence. Jossey-Bass, 1993.

Walters, Jonathan. Measuring Up: Governing’sGuide to Performance Measurement for Geniusesand Other Public Managers. Governing Books,1998.

Yankelovich, David. Coming To Public Judgment:Making Democracy Work in a Complex World.Syracuse University Press, 1991.


40

Jonathan Walters is a staff correspondent for Governing magazine.Walters has been covering state and local public administration and policy for more than 20 years, writing for publications including theWashington Post, the New York Times, and USA Today. For the past 10years he has been focusing on public sector management and administrationwith an emphasis on change management and results-based governance.Past articles for Governing have included stories on total quality manage-ment, performance measurement, activity-based costing, performance-based budgeting, the balanced scorecard, and management trends andinnovation in government.

For the past 13 years, he has been directly involved in covering the Ford Foundation/Kennedy School Innovations in American Governmentawards. He is also the author of Measuring Up! Governing’s Guide toPerformance Measurement for Geniuses and Other Public Managers. Walters frequently speaks on a widerange of subjects related to public sector policy and administration, from performance-based governance to civil service reform.

Besides covering government, Walters is actively involved in government in his hometown of Ghent, New York, where he serves as co-chair of the planning board and as the town’s freedom of information law officer. He is also active in his local volunteer fire company. Walters graduated from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1977 with a B.A. in English/Journalism.


A B O U T T H E A U T H O R

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To contact the author:

Jonathan WaltersStaff CorrespondentGoverning Magazine1923 Route 22Valatie, NY 12184(518) 392-5035fax: (518) 392-4878

e-mail: [email protected]

To contact the Innovations in American Government Program:

Institute for Government InnovationJohn F. Kennedy School of Government/Taubman CenterHarvard University79 John F. Kennedy StreetCambridge, MA 02138

e-mail: [email protected]: www.innovations.harvard.edu


K E Y C O N T A C T I N F O R M A T I O N

42

GRANT REPORTS

E-Government

Managing Telecommuting in theFederal Government: An InterimReport (June 2000)

Gina VegaLouis Brennan

Using Virtual Teams to ManageComplex Projects: A Case Study ofthe Radioactive Waste ManagementProject (August 2000)

Samuel M. DeMarie

The Auction Model: How the Public Sector Can Leverage thePower of E-Commerce ThroughDynamic Pricing (October 2000)

David C. Wyld

Supercharging the EmploymentAgency: An Investigation of the Useof Information and CommunicationTechnology to Improve the Serviceof State Employment Agencies(December 2000)

Anthony M. Townsend

Assessing a State’s Readiness forGlobal Electronic Commerce:Lessons from the Ohio Experience(January 2001)

J. Pari SabetySteven I. Gordon

Privacy Strategies for ElectronicGovernment (January 2001)

Janine S. HillerFrance Bélanger

Commerce Comes to Governmenton the Desktop: E-CommerceApplications in the Public Sector(February 2001)

Genie N. L. Stowers

The Use of the Internet inGovernment Service Delivery(February 2001)

Steven CohenWilliam Eimicke

FinancialManagement

Credit Scoring and Loan Scoring:Tools for Improved Management ofFederal Credit Programs (July 1999)

Thomas H. Stanton

Using Activity-Based Costing to Manage More Effectively(January 2000)

Michael H. GranofDavid E. PlattIgor Vaysman

Audited Financial Statements:Getting and Sustaining “Clean”Opinions (July 2001)

Douglas A. Brook

An Introduction to Financial RiskManagement in Government(August 2001)

Richard J. Buttimer, Jr.

Human Capital

Profiles in Excellence: Conversationswith the Best of America’s CareerExecutive Service (November 1999)

Mark W. Huddleston

Leaders Growing Leaders: Preparingthe Next Generation of PublicService Executives (May 2000)

Ray Blunt

Reflections on Mobility: CaseStudies of Six Federal Executives(May 2000)

Michael D. Serlin

A Learning-Based Approach toLeading Change (December 2000)

Barry Sugarman

Labor-Management Partnerships: ANew Approach to CollaborativeManagement (July 2001)

Barry RubinRichard Rubin

Winning the Best and Brightest:Increasing the Attraction of PublicService (July 2001)

Carol Chetkovich

Organizations Growing Leaders:Best Practices and Principles in thePublic Service (December 2001)

Ray Blunt

A Weapon in the War for Talent:Using Special Authorities to RecruitCrucial Personnel (December 2001)

Hal G. Rainey

A Changing Workforce:Understanding Diversity Programs in the Federal Government(December 2001)

Katherine C. NaffJ. Edward Kellough

Managing for Results

Corporate Strategic Planning in Government: Lessons from the United States Air Force(November 2000)

Colin Campbell

Using Evaluation to SupportPerformance Management: A Guide for Federal Executives(January 2001)

Kathryn NewcomerMary Ann Scheirer

Managing for Outcomes:Milestone Contracting in Oklahoma (January 2001)

Peter Frumkin

The Challenge of Developing Cross-Agency Measures: A CaseStudy of the Office of NationalDrug Control Policy (August 2001)

Patrick J. MurphyJohn Carnevale

The Potential of the GovernmentPerformance and Results Act as a Tool to Manage Third-PartyGovernment (August 2001)

David G. Frederickson

ENDOWMENT REPORTS AVAILABLE

To download or order a copy of a grant or special report, visit the Endowment website at: endowment.pwcglobal.com

43

Using Performance Data forAccountability: The New York CityPolice Department’s CompStatModel of Police Management(August 2001)

Paul E. O’Connell

New Ways to Manage

Managing Workfare: The Case of the Work Experience Program in the New York City ParksDepartment (June 1999)

Steven Cohen

New Tools for ImprovingGovernment Regulation: AnAssessment of Emissions Trading and Other Market-Based RegulatoryTools (October 1999)

Gary C. Bryner

Religious Organizations, Anti-Poverty Relief, and CharitableChoice: A Feasibility Study of Faith-Based Welfare Reform inMississippi (November 1999)

John P. BartkowskiHelen A. Regis

Business Improvement Districts and Innovative Service Delivery(November 1999)

Jerry Mitchell

An Assessment of BrownfieldRedevelopment Policies: The Michigan Experience(November 1999)

Richard C. Hula

Determining a Level Playing Fieldfor Public-Private Competition(November 1999)

Lawrence L. Martin

San Diego County’s InnovationProgram: Using Competition and aWhole Lot More to Improve PublicServices (January 2000)

William B. Eimicke

Innovation in the Administration of Public Airports (March 2000)

Scott E. Tarry

Entrepreneurial Government:Bureaucrats as Businesspeople (May 2000)

Anne Laurent

Implementing State Contracts forSocial Services: An Assessment ofthe Kansas Experience (May 2000)

Jocelyn M. JohnstonBarbara S. Romzek

Rethinking U.S. EnvironmentalProtection Policy: ManagementChallenges for a NewAdministration (November 2000)

Dennis A. Rondinelli

The Challenge of Innovating inGovernment (February 2001)

Sandford Borins

Understanding Innovation:What Inspires It? What Makes ItSuccessful? (December 2001)

Jonathan Walters

TransformingOrganizat ions

The Importance of Leadership: The Role of School Principals(September 1999)

Paul TeskeMark Schneider

Leadership for Change: Case Studies in American LocalGovernment (September 1999)

Robert B. DenhardtJanet Vinzant Denhardt

Managing DecentralizedDepartments: The Case of the U.S. Department of Health andHuman Services (October 1999)

Beryl A. Radin

Transforming Government: TheRenewal and Revitalization of theFederal Emergency ManagementAgency (April 2000)

R. Steven DanielsCarolyn L. Clark-Daniels

Transforming Government: Creatingthe New Defense ProcurementSystem (April 2000)

Kimberly A. Harokopus

Trans-Atlantic Experiences in HealthReform: The United Kingdom’sNational Health Service and theUnited States Veterans HealthAdministration (May 2000)

Marilyn A. DeLuca

Transforming Government: TheRevitalization of the Veterans Health Administration (June 2000)

Gary J. Young

The Challenge of Managing Across Boundaries: The Case of the Office of the Secretary in theU.S. Department of Health andHuman Services (November 2000)

Beryl A. Radin

Creating a Culture of Innovation:10 Lessons from America’s Best Run City (January 2001)

Janet Vinzant DenhardtRobert B. Denhardt

Transforming Government: Dan Goldin and the Remaking of NASA (March 2001)

W. Henry Lambright


44

SPECIAL REPORTS

Government in the 21st Century

David M. Walker

Results of the GovernmentLeadership Survey: A 1999 Surveyof Federal Executives (June 1999)

Mark A. AbramsonSteven A. ClyburnElizabeth Mercier

Creating a Government for the 21st Century (March 2000)

Stephen Goldsmith

The President’s ManagementCouncil: An Important ManagementInnovation (December 2000)

Margaret L. Yao

Toward a 21st Century PublicService: Reports from Four Forums (January 2001)

Mark A. Abramson, Editor

Becoming an Effective PoliticalExecutive: 7 Lessons fromExperienced Appointees (January 2001)

Judith E. Michaels

BOOKS

Memos to the President:Management Advice from the Nation’s Top CEOs(John Wiley & Sons, 2000)*

James J. Schiro

Transforming Organizations(Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2001)*

Mark A. Abramson and Paul R. Lawrence, editors

E-Government 2001(Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2001)*

Mark A. Abramson and Grady E. Means, editors

Managing for Results 2002(Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2001)*

Mark A. Abramson and John Kamensky, editors

Memos to the President:Management Advice from the Nation’s Top PublicAdministrators (Rowman & LittlefieldPublishers, Inc., 2001)*

Mark A. Abramson, Editor

* Available at bookstores, online booksellers, and from the publisher.


For additional information, contact:Mark A. AbramsonExecutive DirectorThe PricewaterhouseCoopers Endowment for The Business of Government1616 North Fort Myer DriveArlington, VA 22209(703) 741-1077, fax: (703) 741-1076

e-mail: [email protected]: endowment.pwcglobal.com

About PricewaterhouseCoopersThe Management Consulting Services practice of PricewaterhouseCoopers helps clients maximize theirbusiness performance by integrating strategic change, performance improvement and technology solutions.Through a worldwide network of skills and resources, consultants manage complex projects with globalcapabilities and local knowledge, from strategy through implementation. PricewaterhouseCoopers(www.pwcglobal.com) is the world’s largest professional services organization. Drawing on the knowledgeand skills of more than 150,000 people in 150 countries, we help our clients solve complex business prob-lems and measurably enhance their ability to build value, manage risk and improve performance in anInternet-enabled world. PricewaterhouseCoopers refers to the member firms of the worldwidePricewaterhouseCoopers organization.

About The EndowmentThrough grants for Research and Thought Leadership Forums, The PricewaterhouseCoopers Endowment forThe Business of Government stimulates research and facilitates discussion on new approaches to improvingthe effectiveness of government at the federal, state, local, and international levels.

Founded in 1998 by PricewaterhouseCoopers, The Endowment is one of the ways that PricewaterhouseCoopersseeks to advance knowledge on how to improve public sector effectiveness. The PricewaterhouseCoopersEndowment focuses on the future of the operation and management of the public sector.

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