Public Governance for Innovation

Public administrations are facing major challenges in the environment of accelerated changes that globalization and technological disruption have created and that affects all sectors of economic activity. A part of these challenges arises from the negative externalities that some of these changes entail and the need to provide stability, certainty and protection to individuals and societies as far as possible. Another part of these challenges is related to the huge opportunities for progress that the new scenarios bring with them and the irreplaceable leadership role that the public sector is called to assume in order to take full advantage of them. Both challenges force the Administration to undertake an ambitious and radical innovation agenda. The scope of this agenda force the public sector to reconsider and redesign some of the basic institutional arrangements that characterize the current status quo. This paper analyzes the necessary basic transformations, the required intervention instruments and the dilemmas to be managed. It also presents the basic features of a new approach to governance capable of enabling governments and their organizations to pursue the path of exploration, experimentation and openness to collaboration with stakeholders outside of the public system, while also upholding high demands to respond and be accountable to society.