FIP Explo

The ambition of this project is to study emerging practices in the public sector, which appear as being alternative to other managerial reforms currently conducted in public administrations. These practices are explicitly presented as innovations and claim that they could transform the administration through cultures and methods borrowed from design, open source, ethnography, etc. Their theoretical references, as well as actual effects, still remain to be described and analyzed. However, such renewed attempts of public reflection and action can already be found in a large number of national public services, e.g. in Denmark, England, Finland, Canada, United States or France. The actual forms taken by these actions seem multiple and do not resemble anything that researchers are used to face in established public bureaucracies: discussion forums, communication of media design (blog, documentary films, photograph exploration…), “rapid prototyping” of new services, field visits with “on-board” photograph or cameraman, collective projects associating designers, architects, researchers and artists, public exhibitions, etc. In short, these public innovation forms are puzzling. Are they only a new appearance of reforms that have already been engaged in public services for thirty years? Why do they claim to be based on a design approach? Are they actually truly innovative in their organizing public reforms? Or, on the contrary, should they be considered more as gentle but yet inoffensive attempts? Unless they perpetuate usual rationalization projects, covering them in a fashionable manner to impose all the better… Without prejudging the reasons that led to their emergence, nor considering a priori their content or efficiency, the purpose of this project is to explore these PIFs (Public Innovation Forms). We especially consider the following questions: What is the genesis of PIFs? Can we specify the model(s) that ground them? Can we assess their efficiency, and more generally, their effects? Do such PIFs constitute credible alternatives to established doctrines that have been driving “public modernization” reforms so far? Based on an investigation conducted among a diversity of PIFs, and a research partnership settled with La 27e Région - a central actor of this phenomenon in France - , this program will aim at three objectives: (a) to map the Public Innovation Forms (PIFs) currently developed in France and other countries; (b) to characterize the underlying model(s) of PIFs and their effects; (c) to analyze the organizational and institutional conditions in which such public innovation models are implemented. Expected results of this research are both theoretical – innovation processes have been much more explored in private firms than in the administrative sector, and it appears thus necessary to specify their forms and conditions of development in this particular setting -, and practical – public administration managers are today awaiting for new methods that could possibly “re-enchant” public modernization and better answer the needs of various categories of users and public servants.