Designing Public-Private Partnerships; a Practitioner’s Guide to Innovation

Governments, businesses and society in general are under considerable pressure to adapt their management structures, business models and forms of creating wealth and prosperity. Innovation, improvement and adaptation are essential in guaranteeing sustainability. Private sector firms have been working on this for some time, and have thus been able to develop their capacity for innovation gradually. In the public sector there are many opportunities for innovation, but the process of change needs to be accelerated if the sustainability of the welfare state is to be assured. There are at least two improvement and innovation practices learned from the private sector that have already been successfully applied in the public sector: innovation guided by lean practices and innovation guided by information technology. This paper outlines the basics of these two practices and their application in the private and public sectors, and makes a number of methodological recommendations for their use in the public sector.