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The present study is an attempt to identify the determinants of innovation in public agencies, i.e., the degree to which they adopt and emphasize programs that depart from traditional concerns. Innovation is suggested to be the function of an interaction among the motivation to innovate, the strength of obstacles against innovation, and the availability of resources for overcoming such obstacles.The significance of the research can be viewed in terms of Hyneman's observation nearly twenty years ago that bureaucratic agencies “… may fail to take the initiative and supply the leadership that is required of them in view of their relation to particular sectors of public affairs. …” His concern was the responsiveness of the public sector not only to expressed wants but to public wants that may go unexpressed, or be only weakly expressed, and whose utility is much more easily recognized by the informed bureaucratic official than by the ordinary citizen.While the results and conclusions to be reported appear to be largely valid for organizations in general, the empirical focus will be local departments of public health which, as a class, have had a rather dramatic succession of opportunities to respond to new public problems over the past twenty-five years. A brief introductory paragraph will orient the reader to the applied setting.

The purpose of this article is to eliminate further conceptual obstacles to the development of a workable theory of innovation and to move toward a better theoretic statement. The approach to overcoming the conceptual problems centers primarily around four ideas: (1) building a theory around the "innovation decision" as the unit of analysis, rather than either innovations or adopters: (2) lifting the level of generality of independent variables so that a great deal of statistical interaction is avoided;(3) splitting the act of innovation into two stages, diffusion and adoption, to eliminate the confounding effects of time of awareness in studies of innovation; (4) introducing the idea of a "fair-trial point" into the conceptualization of innovation, solving several additional problems at once. Theory-building in many social science subfields has apparently reached an impasse. The ability to make the kinds of generalizations and predictions that are typically associated with science and models is consistently being undermined by the phenomenon of complexity (cf. Campbell, 1973). The essence of complexity is interaction, or nonlinearity, many varieties of which make it impossible to specify the effect of a at Monash University on April 11, 2015 aas.sagepub.com Downloaded from 380 variable without so qualifying the statement with contingent conditions that simple, comprehensible generalizations are not possible. This article is about one particularly troubled area of investigation-innovation research.Little space will be used here in trying to convince the reader that interaction effects are important in social science as a whole or in innovation research in particular. Powerful evidence that interaction is effectively blocking progress in a variety of fields has been presented elsewhere (Cronbach, 1975;Rabkin and Struening, 1976;Medawar, 1977), and the hallmark of its existence (coefficient instability) is omnipresent in innovation research. Instead, the focus will be on those characteristics of the current paradigm that exacerbate the difficulties posed by interactive relationships.In the final section we present a provisional, largely heuristic model which we believe represents the sort of strategy that must be pursued if any &dquo;general&dquo; theory of innovation is to be developed. However, it is not our purpose to sell a particular model of innovation. For this to be done convincingly will require a large amount of data and extensive refinement of concepts and indices. Rather, it is our aim to describe the necessary conditions for formulating a theory of innovation and to develop a model that satisfies these conditions. Naturally, the validity of the model is important, but the general message is more significant than particular variables or parameters. Should the basic issues be ignored, it is unlikely that a general theory of innovation will ever emerge.To date, research into the determinants of innovation in complex organizations has yielded voluminous findings but the development of no real theory that ...

The present study is an attempt to identify the determinants of innovation in public agencies, i.e., the degree to which they adopt and emphasize programs that depart from traditional concerns. Innovation is suggested to be the function of an interaction among the motivation to innovate, the strength of obstacles against innovation, and the availability of resources for overcoming such obstacles.The significance of the research can be viewed in terms of Hyneman's observation nearly twenty years ago that bureaucratic agencies “… may fail to take the initiative and supply the leadership that is required of them in view of their relation to particular sectors of public affairs. …” His concern was the responsiveness of the public sector not only to expressed wants but to public wants that may go unexpressed, or be only weakly expressed, and whose utility is much more easily recognized by the informed bureaucratic official than by the ordinary citizen.While the results and conclusions to be reported appear to be largely valid for organizations in general, the empirical focus will be local departments of public health which, as a class, have had a rather dramatic succession of opportunities to respond to new public problems over the past twenty-five years. A brief introductory paragraph will orient the reader to the applied setting.

No abstract