Innovation Agents in the Public Sector: Applying Champion and Promotor Theory to Explore Innovation in the Australian Public Service

Innovation is critical to organisational success and is a process steered, and potentially thwarted, by individuals. However, despite the importance of public sector innovation given the complexity of policy issues faced and the sector's specific contextual features, our understanding of innovation processes in government requires expansion. This study, using in‐depth case analyses of three Australian Public Service agencies, focuses on understanding the ‘human component’ of the innovation process by drawing on both innovation champion and promotor theories to explore, through the lens of organisational power, how multiple human agents progress public sector innovations. The results highlight the key, and often tandem, roles of individuals at multiple organisational levels who work to inspire and motivate others to progress an innovation (champions) and those with specific power bases who help overcome organisational barriers to innovation (promotors).     

Innovation and Alliances

Explanations for national success in science and technology typically focus on domestic institutions and policies. However, that line of research has yet to identify any particular set of institutions or policies that explain variation in national innovation rates across cases or over time. This article offers new evidence that the problem with domestic institutions approaches stems from their failure to consider international security factors. Specifically, this article finds a positive effect for U.S. security alliances on innovation. This finding is robust across different specifications and periods of analysis. While countries that ally militarily with the United States are found to realize benefits in economy‐wide, indigenous innovation, such an effect is not observed in military technologies. This suggests that alliances may substitute for being on the frontier in military technologies. Therefore, this article contributes not just to debates over S&T competitiveness, but also to alliance formation.     

A Concurrent Analysis of Three Institutions that Transform Health Technology‐Based Ventures: Economic Policy,Capital Investment,and Market Approval

Drawing on institutional theory, this article articulates qualitative insights from a program of research on Canadian health technology‐based ventures to examine the rules that characterize economic policy, capital investment, and regulatory approval as well as the way these institutions enable and constrain the development of ventures at an early stage. Our findings clarify how economic policy integrates these ventures into the entrepreneurial domain, how capital investment configures them for economic value extraction, and how regulatory approval fully releases their market value. These findings help to revisit current policy modernization initiatives by calling attention to the convergence among the three institutions. Rather than operating solely as a source of constraints, these institutions provide a highly integrated market‐oriented space for health technology‐based entrepreneurial activities to unfold.     

论招录培养体制改革中的公安院校实践教学

公安院校招录培养体制改革试点工作已经正式启动。公安部试点工作文件中明确提出,应以培养和造就政治业务素质高,实战能力强的应用型、复合型专门人才为目标,更加注重专业特色和职业能力的培养。在公安院校招录培养体制改革背景下．公安教育工作者应该对公安院校的实践教学进行深入的思考。     

整体性基层党建何以可能:空间治理的工作路径

城市基层党建存在社会参与不足、合作治理乏力的现实困境.基层党组织如何通过空间治理路径促进整体性党建发展,实现共建共治共享社会治理格局是当前基层党建创新的重要议题.通过构建"结构—过程—绩效"分析框架,从上海市J街道党建空间治理实践入手,探究空间治理实现整体性党建的实现机制.从而发现,党组织、政府组织和社会主体的多元行动...     

Social Innovation and Crisis in the Third Sector in Spain. Results,Challenges and Limitations of ‘Civic Crowdfunding’

Based on the evolution and institutional transformation of the Welfare State and its relationship with the Third Sector of Social Action, the present article describes and analyzes the aspects of the financial crisis and resources that the sector is currently suffering. In regards of these structural transformations the evolution, characteristics, limitations and opportunities offered by ‘civic crowdfunding’ in Spain between the years 2011 and 2015 as an innovative social practice for the increase of the own funding between the entities of the Third Sector of Social Action and the changes that must be experienced by the sector in order to optimize and improve its self-funding ratios through this mechanism are examined. The high index of success of financing social projects (96.5%) through this tool, and the annual growth during the analyzed period shows the potential of civic crowdfuding. On the other hand, the small size of the bankable projects (95.2% less than 10,000 euros), as well as the low total amount collected (2,665,384 euros) indicates that civic crowdfunding is still an insufficient mechanism to mitigate the severe public resource cuts suffered by the entities of the Third Sector of Social Action and also to bring these entities closer to the objective of self-financing. Finally, we formulated a series of recommendations aimed at improving the self-financing ratios of the Third Sector of Social Action, including a more efficient and cooperative use of civic crowdfunding.     

Innovation Policy as Performativity—the Case of Sweden

This article analyzes how the idea of “innovationism” in Sweden has generated a new kind of idea-driven policy around the creation of innovative regional policy. In contrast to similar policies in this area, this policy does not manifest itself through traditional instruments, but evolves through symbolic and ritual performances, in particular through events and conferences. The article asks how this emerging idea has changed the existing institutional formation of sponsoring industrially relevant research. The vision of concerted action between decision-makers within modern innovationism reinforces territorial identity, but it also tends to devolve responsibility to the regional level since concerted action on the national level is hard to obtain. What emerges is a system of governing at a distance where different actors perform their roles according to often academic ideas of innovationism. The study is based on two qualitative studies in Sweden entailing both documentary sources and semi-structured interviews.     

African farmer-led irrigation development: re-framing agricultural policy and investment?

The past decade has witnessed an intensifying focus on the development of irrigation in sub-Saharan Africa. It follows a 20-year hiatus in the wake of disappointing irrigation performance during the 1970s and 1980s. Persistent low productivity in African agriculture and vulnerability of African food supplies to increasing instability in international commodity markets are driving pan-African agricultural investment initiatives, such as the Comprehensive Africa Agricultural Development Programme (CAADP), that identify as a priority the improvement in reliability of water control for agriculture. The paper argues that, for such initiatives to be effective, there needs to be a re-appraisal of current dynamics of irrigation development in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly with respect to the role of small-scale producers’ initiatives in expanding irrigation. The paper reviews the principal forms such initiatives take and argues that official narratives and statistics on African irrigation often underestimate the extent of such activities. The paper identifies five key characteristics which, it argues, contradict widely held assumptions that inform irrigation policy in Africa. The paper concludes by offering a definition of ‘farmer-led irrigation’ that embraces a range of interaction between producers and commercial, government and non-government agencies, and identifies priority areas for research on the growth potential and impact of such interactions and strategies for their future development.     

Partidos políticos e innovación democrática: más allá de purezas y perversiones

This article aims to review the conceptual import of the term “political mediation”, to shed light on the analytical reach of indirect politics, whose scope of possibilities has been usually thought of as confined within the opposites of political representation and clientelism. An analytical exercise is put forth as a possible and tentative means not only to establish a vocabulary which may be more sensitive towards present time demands, but also to –in Bunge's words– initially allow for the reinterpretation of older symbols of our political vocabulary. Towards this goal, besides a linguistic and conceptual itinerary of the term “mediation”, each of the three analytical dimensions of indirect politics is developed, favoring dialogue with theories of representation, which channels into an analytical model we call the “cube of indirect politics”. The article ends with a brief case-classification exercise aimed at showing the displacement produced by the model in the understanding of given experiences in indirect politics.     

在全面深化改革中更充分地 发挥工会组织的作用 一基于辽宁省工会创新工作模式的调查

辽宁省各级工会不断努力探索,构建工会创新工作新棋式,包括基层工会活力建设“3+×”工作模式 区域性与行业性叠加式工资集体协商模式、普遍推行基层工会主席直接民主选举模式。这些创新模式中的很多探索性 做法,比如设立自选项目、以职工满意度为标准、提高规范化程度以及建设量化评估体系等,都取得了很好的成效, 为全国工会创新工作的开展积累了大量经验。但工会创新工作的进一步推进还面临着诸如制度落地困难、代表性组织 缺失、劳动关系主体双方认识不够和相关制度衔接等制约性因素。对辽宁省工会创新工作模式的经验和制约性因素的 解析能够给全国工会创新工作的开展以启示。