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In 2005 we carried out a Value for Money (VFM) study on behalf of the National Audit Office focusing on 'Achieving Innovation: Routes to Progress and Common Barriers in the Public Services'. Achieving Innovation aimed to provide a related authoritative account of why innovation is so difficult to achieve in the delivery of public services, and how successful innovation takes place.

This report was published in July 2006 and can be downloaded below.

We conducted a wide-ranging survey of different types of innovation in government departments and agencies. This work was supported by case study examples of innovation in the public sector, comparator cases from other areas of the public sector, and cases of successful innovation drawn from other countries including Holland, Canada, and Denmark. We focused on all types of innovation, such as:

developing different funding mechanisms, such as the Invest to Save and the Capital Modernisation funds, and finding means to release funding from low salience current activities to facilitate innovations;
planning and applying research and development in careful ways;
piloting projects imaginatively and speedily;
'debugging' public service delivery chains by taking action to remove small blockages whose cumulative influence is deleterious;
realigning the incentives of units and staff so as to create greater commitment to key policy goals;
designing appropriate rewards and incentives, for instance, to make modest unsuccessful innovations less risky for officials to pursue;
building high levels of organizational and stakeholder agreement with a strategic direction;
encouraging stronger 'agile government' responses in time-sensitive policy areas;

and

creating linkages from one build-and-learn innovation step to successive steps, so as to avoid the dangers of 'big bang' planning and possible large-scale failure risks.