Innovation and the State: Thinking of Government as “Technology Maker” and Implications for Public Administration Research

Abstract

In this essay we summarize the historical roots and development of public sector innovation research and discuss its main current weakness - lack of explicit evolutionary perspective. To remedy this weakness, we develop a co-evolutionary perspective on public administration, technological development and innovation. Relying on Christopher Pollitt’s framework of government as “placemaker”, we propose a complementary framework of government as “technology maker”. In the concluding section, we discuss the implications of the proposed framework for PA research.