introduction Sophia Parker
In their foreword, Lucy de Groot and Jonathan Kestenbaum outline why innovation is so critically important for local government. Recession coupled with shifting patterns of demand and growing pressure on public services, mean that the sector is going to need to play a pro-active role in achieving significantly better outcomes, for significantly lower costs. One response to this dual challenge of better outcomes and lower costs would be to retrench and focus on ever greater efficiencies in the quest to make the figures add up and to ensure that limited resources can go further. Of course, efficiency and productivity are both deeply important issues. But in themselves, they will not be sufficient to meet the changing and increasingly complex issues that government is now expected to tackle. If the pressure on budgets is growing, so too is the pressure on local government to tackle a wider range of issues than ever before: where current policies are not working well enough (for example youth crime, cutting carbon emissions or public health), or where new issues are emerging that have not been on the agenda in the past (for example an ageing population, childhood obesity).
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All of these problems share one characteristic: they are defined by an uncertainty about what works. In other words, there is no best practice that exists and can simply be shared – instead the local government sector needs to develop next practice: it will need to innovate in order to achieve better outcomes. Local government leaders and politicians probably know this better than anyone. As the sector has grown in confidence over recent years, an increasing number of councils are recognising that slicing existing budgets ever more thinly is not enough in today’s world, and that competition and outsourcing alone will not do the trick. An altogether bolder approach is needed, focused on searching out, incubating, and sustaining much more radical and game-changing innovations. This shift in mindset can be illustrated by imagining the difference in tactics one might use depending on whether you were told to shave 2 per cent of your budget every year for 10 years, or to strike 25 per cent of your budget off the balance sheet in a single year. In the second scenario, your options necessarily become more radical. And, given the nature of the problems