“Creative bureaucracy festival”: how important is innovation in public administration education?

As everything around us is changing, in an increasingly interconnected environment, the field of public administration and public administration education cannot be away from the need to innovate and improve. Public administration education is affected by various reasons in Turkey and the world. These reasons are the structure of public administration and politics in the country, the higher education system in the country, and the public personnel policy. Advances in technology, the rapid spread of information along with the use of technology, and most importantly, the way we access and share information, appear as other factors affecting the public administration education. In an era of rapid change, while essential public services are not likely to disappear any time soon, how their administrative functions are carried out and evaluated is expected to change considerably. Public administration makes use of several other disciplines such as organizational behavior and theory, finances, human resources, politics, law, and even ethics and philosophy. At this point, the paper underlines that the courses regarding innovation, entrepreneurship, leadership and information technologies, etc should be part of the public administration education, along with the courses from political science, business science, economics, public policy and analysis, history, sociology. Innovation is not limited to making a concrete invention only in the technological sense, and not only companies make innovation. Examples such as renewing the organizational structure of an institution private or public, re-designing processes in their services provided and changing approaches in their decision-making processes could be subjects of innovation. Innovation is crucial to the continuing success of any organization. Public sector entities also innovate by introducing new approaches to provide quality public services and better respond to society’s needs. However, innovation in the public sector is hard to achieve. Because innovation also needs adaption (to context) and flexibility (of execution). Silo-based and vertical administrations are not at ease with the practice of experimentation to foster more collaborative ways of working. So, the concept of innovation in the public sector has been mentioned in the literature within the framework of NPM as a result of the analysis of successful private sector practices after the 1980s. Scholars and practitioners have become increasingly interested in innovation in the public sector. Many embrace the idea that innovation can contribute to