Quality, innovation and measurement in the public sector

In most OECD countries, public organizations have made first experiences with quality management, performance measurement and innovations. So far, however, little efforts have been made to assess the result of these pilot projects. This book tries to address this issue in a customer-oriented way. It is the result of the 4th International Speyer Workshop at the Research Institute of Public Administration in 1994. The first part of the volume gives a comprehensive survey of new developments in quality management and performance measurement in the British, Belgian, Austrian, Finnish and German public administration. The second part focuses on the role of innovations in the public sector. Experts from Canada report the findings of empirical research about the impetus and obstacles to innovations. Other papers discuss the diffusion of administrative innovations and organizational learning in the case of IT innovations.