Radical innovation: crossing knowledge boundaries with ...

The need for and management of intervention
Can innovation be directed toward intended outcomes, even if it has arisen from
unexpected interactions between domains of knowledge? Our expert witnesses from
government/public policy contexts were concerned about the identification of a
‘lever’ for policy intervention in a complex situation, about the alignment of
stakeholders and about how the choice of lever depends upon the process and
outcome of a shared debate about the situation.
Starting from the narrowest definitions of innovation, and considering incremental
innovation, then there are many examples of directed innovation. New product
development, new service development and development of new organisational
processes abound. Many commercial organisations have management processes and
actively shape corporate cultures to achieve effective innovation. The public domain,
typically encompassing multiple stakeholders, need frameworks and processes that
allow exploration of context to enable a shared definition of an issue and the mapping
of the incremental steps by which innovation could address the issue. The creation of
entities such as the Strategy Unit 11 are one approach, an organisational structure,
including many disciplines, empowered to lead a debate and marshal resources,
experience and perspective. Other public domain approaches include working groups
such as those to address obesity. Again the focus is to create a shared view of the
problem. Only then can incremental innovation be envisaged.
Turning to the more ambitious radical innovation then several observers, the most
quoted being Clayton Christensen, offer explanations by which radical innovation
occur and, indeed, how to predict and manage it. In the commercial sphere,
innovation is typically directed at a commercial agenda with a relatively narrow
definition of success. The focus is on the profitability of a new product or services,
with perhaps market share gain as an alternative measure of success.
The real issue about government / public policy contexts is their complexity. There is
a very wide range of stakeholders, each community of which will define success in
different ways. Hence measures of overall success are elusive. Worse still there is
little agreement of the causal mechanisms by which any intervention may lead to
success, while skirting the adjacent disbenefits. If, as is often the case, advantage for
one stakeholder group entails disadvantage for another then the trade-offs become
complicated and, with no ‘objective’ measure of value, intractable.
In these environments, ‘innovation’ has become a term articulating a desire for a
novel, so far unseen approach that will cut through the Gordian knot of policy
complexity. So the search for an ‘innovative policy measure’ is an expression of hope.
The desire to find an optimal ‘lever’ may well be equivalent to searching for a ‘silver
bullet’, the single intervention that will provide an optimal (in some undefined sense)
solution for all stakeholders.
11 Expert witness report
Innovation and Interdisciplinarity 31