[Originally published on the Australian Government Public Sector Innovation Network under a Creative Commons 3.0 BY AU licence]
One of the things I have discovered over the past three years of working on innovation is that it involves a lot of reading.Yet as we all know, information overload is now a continual risk, and particularly for those trying to add innovation to an otherwise already full schedule and constant workload. Hence we provide the weekly bits of interest posts to try and distil some of the core titbits of the vast amount written on innovation every week, and we are working to develop the Innovation Toolkit modules to capture the core information about the different tools and approaches. We read so you don’t have to … well, not quite as much anyway.
But we are certainly not the font of all wisdom when it comes to public sector innovation and there’s a wealth of useful books, articles, blogs and resources out there. We’ve listed some of them to do with public sector innovation on the website, but there are many more.
Some of the best works on public sector innovation I’ve read are:
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- Leading Public Sector Innovation: Co-creating for a better society by Christian Bason
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- If We Can Put a Man on the Moon: Getting Big Things Done in Government by William Eggers and John O’Leary
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- Innovations in Government: Research, Recognition and Replication edited by Sandford Borins
There are many others, but I know my preferences can be a little dry for some. So I’d also include this clip which I think aptly shows that innovation can be fun and make a difference, even if it is only small.
If you could name one article/blog post/book/video/etc that had helped you the most in understanding innovation, relating to the public sector or more generally, what would it be? If you met someone just starting out on the innovation journey and they asked you for some reading/resources, what would you recommend to them?
We’ll look to incorporate your suggestions into the Innovation Toolkit as a suggested reading list.