Innovation for sustainable urban development – a new local leadership required

Innovation in public sector is an issue that all nations have great confidence in; there almost seems to be a belief that all new societal challenges could be solved by innovation. Hence, there is an increasing pressure from... [ view full abstract ]

Innovation in public sector is an issue that all nations have great confidence in; there almost seems to be a belief that all new societal challenges could be solved by innovation. Hence, there is an increasing pressure from external stakeholders in business, academia and the civil society that local public bodies should participate in - as well as lead- collaboration processes aiming for new and innovative working methods, products and services.
However public sector is dominated by a bureaucratic culture in which standardization and formalization are important values; often manifested in laws and regulations. Therefore, leadership has been perceived as one of the cornerstone of innovation, playing an important role in changing status quo and path dependence.
Our case is an urban megaproject in the city of Gothenburg, Sweden, consisting of multifaceted sustainability demands and challenges. And our concern is under which circumstances municipalities and private enterprises can engage in close and effective collaborative practices and how these practices can be encouraged and facilitated. The paper is based on extensive interviews with key managers, document reviews and embedded studies of key processes which aim create an innovation capacity within the city. Besides orchestrate a vision driven urban development leaders also need to cope with widely spread resistance and skepticism, both within public bodies as well as among external stakeholders.
Since policy challenges/problems always are a struggle between different rationalities we claim that it is important for leaders to read the situation and catch the momentum; to be able to switch between a rather revolutionary perspective on innovation and a more incremental one. We also argue that the demand for innovation in urban development challenges traditional leadership principles in the public sector, since it requires leaders to collaborate with and create shared values together with external stakeholders, such as companies, NGOs and researchers in academia. We link our discussion to Bekkers, Edelenbos and Steijn (2011) and Bason (2011).