Most agree that public sector innovation matters. Fewer are confident that we know how to do it well or to govern it intentionally.
These tensions were on full display at a recent ANZSOG public lecture in Sydney, where Professor Sir Geoff Mulgan joined public sector leaders, academics and practitioners to ask a deceptively simple question: what’s next for public innovation?
Sir Geoff’s answer was characteristically provocative. He argued that effective public innovation requires a little more “paranoia, hunger and theft”. Not literally, but as habits of mind that subtly — but surely — shift practice. A healthy alertness to risk. An appetite to learn. And both the confidence and humility to borrow and adapt good ideas from wherever they are found.
Behind the provocation lay a serious challenge: governments operate in an era of extraordinary external volatility while too often remaining internally rigid. The danger is not a lack of ideas, but institutions that struggle to absorb, scale, and sustain them.
The challenge of building and sustaining a culture of public sector innovation goes to the heart of ANZSOG’s refreshed mission: public governance that people trust.
Innovation is not a side project
One of the strongest threads running through Sir Geoff’s decades of work is the insistence that innovation is not an optional extra. It’s a core responsibility of government.
OECD research shows that the innovation climate is the strongest driver of overall organisational performance, yet most public sector employees struggle to find evidence of such a climate in their agency or department.
Many of the most transformative innovations of the modern era, from the internet to dramatic improvements in child and maternal health, were driven by capable public institutions investing for multi-generational benefit. Other sectors helped to scale interventions, but they built on foundations laid by governments willing to experiment, invest and learn.
Yet today, trust surveys routinely show the government is perceived as less competent and less ethical than other sectors. In that context, innovation can become performative: pilots that never scale, labs that sit at the margins, announcements that feed the media cycle but disrupt the “back of house” of delivery.
Good government, Sir Geoff suggested, is a blend of “poetry, prose and plumbing”. The poetry is the narrative. The prose is the policy. But without plumbing, the systems, incentives, capabilities and routines that make things work, neither poetry nor prose delivers results.
From ideas to institutions
So, what does it take to change at speed without compromising performance or losing legitimacy?
Drawing on examples from Estonia, India, Ukraine, and elsewhere, Sir Geoff showed that successful public innovation follows a recognisable arc: sensing emerging challenges, generating ideas, testing them, scaling what works, and ultimately changing systems. The hardest part, he argues, is embedding new approaches into institutions so that capability endures after individual leaders move on.
This point was powerfully taken up by respondent Dr Vafa Ghazavi from the University of Sydney, who highlighted a persistent asymmetry in public organisations: failure is punished severely, while experimentation is rarely rewarded. In such systems, caution becomes rational, even when leaders espouse rhetoric of innovation.
If we want different behaviour, we need to rethink accountability, not only for present performance, but for the future capability leaders leave behind.
Ghazavi also issued a broader challenge: innovation agendas must grapple seriously with inequality. Too often, the energy and investment flow toward problems affecting the powerful, while innovation to support marginalised and stigmatised communities struggles to attract sustained attention. A successful public innovation agenda must ask not only how we innovate, but for whom.
Trust, culture and the everyday work of change
Deborah Jenkins brought a practitioner’s lens to the conversation, drawing on deep experience in senior public sector roles.
Her reflections cut to the cultural heart of innovation. Sometimes, she suggested, the very word “innovation” can alienate. Reframed, effective innovation often looks like doing something slightly differently from the norm: sharing information earlier, codesigning with stakeholders, reducing duplication, or telling the story of public value more clearly.
The former DEWR deputy secretary also highlighted the importance of trust within government. Departments and jurisdictions frequently replicate work rather than build on each other’s efforts — a costly pattern that raises uncomfortable questions about confidence, incentives and collaboration. At a time when the public sector faces fiscal pressure and complex challenges, learning to trust and reuse is itself a form of innovation.
Governing innovation, not just encouraging it
A theme that quietly underpins this entire discussion is recognising innovation as a governance question.
Governments increasingly expect innovation but remain less clear about how to govern it. Labs, pilots, and sandboxes matter, but without adoption, scale and institutional ownership, they can become no more than footprints in the sand. Innovation that sits at the margins does not rebuild trust.
So how can government institutions be re-designed to govern for innovation responsibly and persistently?
Governing innovation demands clarity about responsibility and legitimacy. We must be explicit about the risks of both action and inaction, and about who bears those risks. Leaders must also build fluency around major disruptors such as AI, recognising these not simply as technical tools, but as exercises of public power.
Innovation also requires legitimacy. Institutions that exclude people from understanding or shaping the systems that affect their lives are unlikely to secure the social licence needed for innovation to endure.
Governing for innovation, therefore, means designing institutions that are noticeably different: more open, capable of learning, able to flex and adapt as political priorities shift.
The work ahead
For ANZSOG, grappling with these questions is not an abstract debate. As we enter the next phase of our strategy, our mission is clear: to support public leaders and institutions across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand to be capable, adaptive and worthy of trust.
Events and conversations like this matter because they sharpen the right questions. Public innovation is not about novelty for its own sake. It is about renewing the capacity of government to deliver, to learn, and to earn the confidence of the communities it serves.
Not risking anything and hoping problems will go away is not a viable strategy. In demanding times, the courage to try new things and to iterate and learn from failure is not optional. It is the work.
For more on ANZSOG events, visit https://anzsog.edu.au
For more on Geoff Mulgan’s work, visit https://www.geoffmulgan.com