Center for Public Administrators
A civil society organization that strengthens democratic checks and balances .
If you will be teaching Innovation, Open Government, or Civic Activism in the fall, consider our teaching case on Independent Demonstration Projects, published in JPAE at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15236803.2023.2188150?journalCode=upae20
It’s serious and also fun, featuring the “passive-aggressive sheet cake” pictured here. We also have free class slides—just ask.
Independent Demonstration Projects is a strategy to innovate in government without first getting support from officials. My new teaching case in Journal of Public Affairs Education explains the strategy and illustrates it with a real-life case of making Virginia’s records of who owns business entities available to the public.
The case is at https://doi.org/10.1080/15236803.2023.2188150.
If you hit a paywall, you can use this free link for friends of Center for Public Administrators https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YDJE8ZZKS9MM2XTSQFKX/full?target=10.1080/15236803.2023.2188150
I presented a teaching case on Independent Demonstration Projects at the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) Social Equity Leadership Conference on June 10, 2022. NAPA will post a video of the presentation, but in the meantime my slides are at social-equity-leadership-conference-.pdf
Thank you to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development for publishing a blog post about our research on Independent Demonstration Projects. https://oecd-opsi.org/blog/independent-demonstration-projects-a-bottom-up-strategy-for-innovation/
Are you looking for sessions about innovation at the ASPA 2022 national conference? I started a list. If you’re presenting a paper about innovation, then please add it. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1v8RdUWd5QlttrXLHD9hQLKCdE5Z06P7h6CnVrtry-VQ/edit?usp=sharing
I have developed a teaching case about Independent Demonstration Projects, which is a successful strategy to implement innovations in government without prior approval of agency officials. The case is currently pending peer review for publication. I would be pleased to send a copy of the draft case materials to any faculty member who wants to examine it for possible use in their teaching. I can be reached at David.Reed@PubAdmin.org
A new paper in the International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management by S. Jimmy Gandhi, Colleen C. Robb and Ana Lee examines how entrepreneurial competencies can be used to encourage intrapreneurship in organizations. They cite my work on public sector workers using effectuation to implement innovations. Their new paper is at https://www.inderscience.com/info/inarticle.php?artid=115049
The standard advice to government innovators is:
“First make sure you have the support of agency officials.”
That’s like advising soldiers:
“First make sure the enemy has run out of ammunition.”
It would be great, but if you wait for it to happen then you may never act.
Independent Demonstration Projects is a successful strategy to innovate in government without prior approval of officials. The innovator implements her idea as a minimum viable product, using whatever resources are available to her. Once the innovation is implemented, it creates pressure on officials to sustain or expand it using government resources.
If you’re registered for the ASPA 2021 conference, you can see our panel on-demand at https://www.engagez.net/ASPA2021?snc=707858#lct=conferencecenter–824468
It explains how the passive-aggressive sheet cake pictured here created government innovation.
My slides are open access at https://pubadmin.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/reed-independent-demonstration-projects-slides-for-aspa-panel.pdf
If you want to find the papers about public sector innovation that will be presented at the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) conference in April, then look at the overlay track I compiled: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lscHPoUQfFCD4ya6uzplabf4UPpXxvlBf65IzL6DUho/edit?usp=sharing
What’s an overlay track? An overlay journal curates papers that have been published elsewhere, so readers can see which papers will be worth their time. My overlay track is a spreadsheet that lists papers at the ASPA conference that are about innovation, regardless of which of the conference tracks they are in.
If you will be presenting at ASPA about innovation, or if you know a paper about innovation that will be presented at ASPA and isn’t on my overlay track yet, then please let me know so I can add it.
Center for Public Administrators 