The sustainability of public sector innovations: the role of feedback, accountability and learning

The study of organizational change and innovation has been criticized for focusing too much on the early days of innovations and too little on the later stages of their development. This paper tries to contribute to the body of literature by studying the development of organizational innovations throughout time. As a proxy for innovations, our research focuses on administrative projects or practices which were recognized as ‘best practices’ by specific awards and conferences. The focus of our research on the dependent side of the equation is on the subsequent life courses of these projects and practices after their recognition as best practices. On the independent side of the equation, we present a conceptual framework with three main dimensions: feedback, accountability, and learning. Our expectation is that different constellations of these three dimensions at the level of the organization will lead to different patterns of change and innovation. To test this, we have developed a survey tool. The first part of the questionnaire was designed to inquire about the subsequent life courses of the best practice cases. The remaining parts of the survey try to measure the different (sub-)dimensions of our conceptual framework at the level of the organization. The bulk of this paper is devoted to the elaboration of our conceptual framework. The analysis of the survey data falls outside of the scope of this paper.status: publishe