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Commentators have taken to referring to ‘two parliaments of pain' – the time it will take to bring UK public borrowing back into some sort of order. The efficiency orthodoxy of the past few years will not be sufficient to deal with the scale of the problems we face. Yet again, there is a growing call for local government to embrace innovation as the way to deal with difficulties. Innovation – the introduction of something new. Not necessarily unique or creative – or inventive, merely new to the organisation. Taking ideas and approaches from elsewhere, adapting and trying them out in our own context, is at the heart of innovation. So why do so many people struggle to do this? In the private sector, life seems simple. Good companies innovate as a matter of practice. And their approach to renewal is continuous and opportunistic, rather than episodic and crisis-driven. What they seem to recognise is that those innovations need to be carefully controlled to manage cost and they, mostly, fail. Learning from the failures is important, but it is the value in the successful that really counts. Now, contrast this with the usual public service experience. To get something new introduced takes an age. Reports are written and rewritten, business cases produced, full costings worked out and justified. As if we can really predict all these things in advance? By the time anything gets the go ahead, it has the full political and managerial weight of the organisation behind it. And, meanwhile, the opposition and media are waiting to pounce on the slightest sign that it isn't working and, even if it is, will look for ways to be critical. No wonder new approaches are so slow to arrive, then continued beyond the point at which they aren't working. Too many people have too much interest in defending failures or attacking successes. Martin Horton is a director at SOLACE Enterprises

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WHITEHALL

Soap Box: The sluggishness of innovation

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