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Delivering innovation in the public service Head of Public Service Reform at the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform Philip McGrath speaks to eolas about delivering innovation in the public service and the formulation of Making Innovation Real, the Public Service Innovation Strategy. Contextualising the culture in which the Strategy was developed, McGrath clarifies the misconception of a public service that was not innovative in the past. “It is not to say that we never did innovation before in the public services. If you think back to the global financial crisis in 2008 and the first and second public service reform plans in 2011 and 2014, there were huge amounts of innovation involving massive structural changes. To say that we did not have innovation before would be wrong, maybe we just did not phrase it that way or call it innovation,” he observes. Reflecting on what was learned from the innovation strategies of the past, the Head of Public Service Reform outlines that many of the previous initiatives were “top-down when we really need them to be bottom-up or part of everyday life”. Following work with the European Commission and Deloitte to assess the public service’s innovation maturity and ambition under the European Structural Reform and Support Service, 12 key recommendations were put in place.
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Each of these have been implemented either fully or in part. “One of the key initiatives from that was that we put in place supports for public sector bodies, including guidance on how to innovate within an organisation, how to incorporate innovation into corporate strategies and plans,” McGrath says, adding: “We now have the Public Service Innovation Strategy in place and that has been incorporated into the next phase of Civil Service Renewal, and it will be incorporated into the next phase of public service reform. “Our vision is to harness the power of innovation to deliver world class public services in Ireland. We settled on an innovation definition — there is much debate in the literature about whether to attempt this because it can inadvertently stifle innovation — but we thought that if we were asking people to do something, it would be helpful to describe it. Our definition of innovation in public services is the creation of a new and viable offering that adds value. Adding value is particularly important for us.”
