The future of our public services and the role they play in supporting a society where citizens, businesses and governments work together is a crucial debate. It is clear that more of the same is not a sustainable option. At the same time, a decade of austerity and longer-term technological and social trends are not only driving the need for innovation within public services but also making it more difficult to achieve.
In our recent research we have found that those acting entrepreneurially within the public sector are often doing so despite the constraints of working across complex systems and organisations that can crowd out innovative solutions to our social challenges. Our work seeks to identify how we can more systematically identify and share such practice that is demonstrating a new kind of civic entrepreneurialism.
We are asking a range of core questions in our work programme such as:
- How can we maximise entrepreneurialism by identifying and overcoming the enablers and barriers to an entrepreneurial culture in public sector organisations?
- Can we develop an action-based learning curriculum based on the core skillset and mindset of the public - and social - entrepreneurs?
- What is the toolkit of methods and approaches used by those acting entrepreneurially in our public services?
- How can public entrepreneurs use our 'invest to solve' framework to address problems like social isolation, mental health and wellbeing?
- Can the development and sharing of practice start to develop a movement for entrepreneurialism across public services?
