Governments around the world are facing increasingly wicked problems: climate change, digital disruption and AI-technology, pandemics, and demographic shifts. This requires not only new policies, but new modes of thinking and operating within public administration. In response, public sector innovation has become a central topic of academic debate, and a practical strategy increasingly employed by governments to navigate complexity and uncertainty. Although widely used, contesting definitions remain. Broadly, public sector innovation refers to the development and implementation of something novel in context (policies, processes, services, technologies, or organisational models), which aims to create public value (e.g. Moore & Hartley, 2008). However, meaning and application vary widely across contexts. This paper investigates how public sector innovation in Germany is conceptualised in the academic literature, and what drivers are associated with it. Thus it offers a structured contribution to both national and comparative public administration research.
Germany presents a particularly compelling national case for such an inquiry. On the one hand, the country is long associated with stability-oriented governance traditions, and a rule-bound administrative culture. The federal structure distributes authority across municipal, state/regional (“Länder”), and federal levels, adding further complexity to how innovation efforts must be coordinated. On the other hand, the proposed creation of a new Federal Ministry for Digitalisation and State Modernisation, following the 2025 general election, can be seen as a strong political appetite for public sector innovation at the national level.
Especially at a time when innovation is seen as one of the few viable approaches for addressing today’s most pressing challenges, we need to explore how it is being understood and described, starting with how it appears in academic discourse. This paper is guided by two core questions:
(1) How is public sector innovation conceptualised in the academic literature on Germany?
(2) What are the perceived drivers for the public sector to be innovative?
To address these questions, a systematic literature review was conducted in February 2025 using EBSCO Webhost and Scopus, selected for their interdisciplinary coverage of peer-reviewed journal articles. The Boolean search query targeted “innovation” in the title and variations of “German,” “public sector,” “administration,” or “government” in the abstract. The resulting literature was mapped against the OECD’s Public Sector Innovation Facets (2022) as a guiding framework. This model identifies four interrelated types of innovation: enhancement-oriented, mission-oriented, adaptive, and anticipatory. Each facet was operationalised into a custom codebook with inclusion/exclusion criteria, illustrative keywords, and thematic guides. Articles were read in full and coded based on their alignment with these facets, allowing for synthesis across conceptual patterns, and innovation drivers.
Findings indicate that most academic discussions in the German context focus on mission-oriented and enhancement-oriented innovation. These forms reflect a structured, low-risk governance culture that prioritises effectiveness, efficiency, and fulfilment of predefined goals. Adaptive innovation, involving iterative change and crisis responsiveness, and anticipatory innovation, grounded in foresight and proactive future-planning, are significantly underrepresented. While this does not necessarily imply their absence in practice, it suggests that current academic literature either does not capture or does not label these innovation types accordingly. The multidisciplinary nature of innovation, which spans from digital service delivery to green energy technologies, may further obscure classification and lead to gaps in research visibility.
Another key observation is the ambiguity surrounding the concept of public value. While innovation is frequently discussed in positive terms, references to its actual contribution to public value often remain implicit. Only a few studies in the review clearly define what constitutes success, or how innovation outcomes are evaluated and sustained over time. In the discussion, this paper draws on recommendations by the OECD, which encourages a balanced innovation portfolio across all four types, and tailored to specific governance contexts.
Challenges identified in this study include the retrospective nature of literature reviews, which may overlook emerging trends and polices, or ongoing innovation initiatives that have not yet been captured in academic research. Moreover, the keyword-based search strategy is systematic, but may have excluded relevant studies that discuss novel public sector practices without explicitly labelling them as “innovation.” Germany’s federal structure adds further complexity: some studies focus exclusively on municipal-level innovations, others on regional/state (“Länder”) or federal levels, and some on combinations. This fragmentation complicates generalisations, and makes consistent classification across disciplines and governance levels difficult.
This study argues for a shared language in evidence-based innovation approaches, especially concerning adaptive and anticipatory forms. Future directions include empirical case studies on foresight-driven governance, comparative analyses, and deeper exploration into how innovation contributes (or fails to contribute) to long-term public value creation. The goal is not only to map what has already been studied, but also to help shape a more forward-looking and actionable research agenda.
The findings may offer relevant insights for policymakers engaged in shaping Germany’s future public sector agenda, particularly in light of the proposed new Federal Ministry and its focus on modernising governance through innovation. For practitioners, these findings offer a basis for reflecting on the balance and intent behind their own innovation strategies. By better understanding how innovation is framed and evaluated, they can develop more strategic, future-oriented approaches, which are scalable across governance levels, and aligned with meaningful public value outcomes.
As a second-year DBA student at Heriot-Watt University, this review forms part of a broader doctoral project exploring innovation in the public sector. While not part of the doctoral monograph itself, this paper supports the broader thesis by identifying patterns and gaps in how public sector innovation is understood, rather than offering a definitive conceptual map. I hope to contribute to an open, comparative dialogue on innovation in public administration, connecting academic insight with the challenges and possibilities faced by governments today.
