Governments worldwide struggle to remove policy deadlocks and enact much-needed reforms in organizational structure and public services. In this book, Jacob Torfing explores collaborative innovation as a way for public and private stakeholders to break the impasse. These network-based collaborations promise to multiply the skills, ideas, energy, and resources between government and its partners across agency boundaries and in the nonprofit and private sectors. Torfing draws on his own pioneering work in Europe as well as examples from the United States and Australia to construct a cross-disciplinary framework for studying collaborative innovation. His analysis explores its complex and interactive processes as he looks at how drivers and barriers may enhance or impede the collaborative approach. He also reflects on the roles institutional design, public management, and governance reform play in spurring collaboration for public sector innovation. The result is a theoretically and empirically informed book that carefully demonstrates how multi-actor collaboration can enhance public innovation in the face of fiscal constraint, the proliferation of wicked problems, and the presence of unsatisfied social needs.

In this path-breaking book, Torfing shows how collaborative innovation is an important component of new public governance and an essential approach to dealing with wicked societal problems that inescapably cross organizational boundaries. His work will be of abiding interest to both scholars and practitioners -- Sandford Borins, Professor of Public Management, University of Toronto; Research Fellow, Harvard Kennedy School Collaborative Innovation in the Public Sector is a highly-recommended resource for researchers and informed practitioners interested in public sector governance networks. The book explores theories and research on how governance networks can and do produce innovations. Most importantly, readers learn how collaboration, activated throughout all phases of the innovation process, can increase the potential for innovation in governance networks to occur. The book's propositions set the agenda for the next generation of research on collaboration and innovation in governance networks. -- Nancy Roberts, Professor Emerita, Department of Defense Analysis, Naval Postgraduate School

About the Author
Jacob Torfing is a professor at Roskilde University and director of the Roskilde School of Governance. He is also a professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences at University of Nordland and has been a visiting professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the coauthor of Theories of Democratic Network Governance and Democratic Network Governance in Europe.

Reviews
Makes an important and comprehensive contribution . . . [and] a major impact on the literature of public administration. * CHOICE *
Has a noble and vital purpose, and it succeeds very well in accomplishing its goal. . . . Anyone who is genuinely interested in positive or even palliative change will do well to read this authentically pioneering work. . . . A remarkable achievement. * The Innovation Journal *


Awards
Winner of Outstanding Academic Book of the Year and Outstanding Academic Book of the Year 6 (United States).



Book Information
ISBN 9781626163607
Author Jacob Torfing
Format Paperback
Page Count 368
Imprint Georgetown University Press
Publisher Georgetown University Press
Weight(grams) 499g