In collaboration with Nadia Arab (Collab. Lab'Urba) and Jean-Marc Weller (Resp Lisis)
This research project focuses on innovations aimed at transforming administration in ways that are intended to be novel, apparently alternative to the managerial reforms carried out until now, and characterized by their use of design methods. These actions take many different forms: discussion forums, the design of communication media (blogs, documentary films, photographic exploration, etc.), "rapid prototyping" of new services, etc. As for the concrete effects, these would also need to be described. But that doesn't matter. The fact is that today, in a scattered but nevertheless recurring manner in a number of national public services in Denmark, England, Finland, Canada, the United States, and France, we are seeing unprecedented attempts at reflection and action. They seem to bear no resemblance to anything we are used to seeing in established public bureaucracies: new communication media, field visits with an "embedded" photographer or cameraman, collective projects involving designers, architects, researchers, and creative professionals, public exhibitions using artistic processes, etc.
In short, these forms of public innovation are intriguing. Are they an alternative form of what public services have been familiar with for the past 30 years? How should we understand their claim to be based on design approaches? Are we dealing with genuine organizational innovations, a source of inventions and unprecedented action? Or, on the contrary, are they merely sympathetic but nevertheless harmless attempts? Unless, in truth, they are simply a continuation of unchanged rationalization projects, cleverly packaged, of course, but with the aim of gaining greater acceptance. Without prejudging the reasons that led to their emergence, and without any a priori consideration of their content or effectiveness, this project proposes to explore these FIPs (forms of public innovation). What is their origin? Can we specify the model(s) that bring together their essential features? Can we evaluate their effectiveness and, more generally, their effects? Do these PIFs constitute credible alternatives to the doctrines that underpin the current "public modernization" initiatives?
These are the issues that this project aims to explore, based on an investigation of a variety of PIFs and a research partnership with 27eRégion, which is a key player in France in the phenomenon we are seeking to understand.
The work program proposes and is based on three distinct areas of focus: the first consists of mapping the forms of public innovation (FPI) currently being developed in France and in various European countries, based on an initial corpus of interviews and documentary research; a more in-depth investigation of a limited number of FIPs in order to rigorously qualify them by looking at their methods, the actors involved, and the expected results based on a corpus of interviews and observations of FIPs "in progress"; a third axis invites us to explore the conditions for the sustainability and deployment of these original actions. In this context, and taking into account the insights gathered during the investigation, we will ask whether public innovation can and should be institutionalized in one or more structures, as seems to be encouraged by the creation of "public innovation laboratories" at the regional or national level in various countries.