By Justin Leifso and Sarah Stilwell
Abstract
In Canada and beyond, governments seek to be more “innovative.” Informed by expansive bodies of academic and gray literature, elected and professional public officials invoke “public sector innovation” as a potential solution to almost any policy issue, from housing to health care to Indigenous-setter reconciliation. In this article, we seek to interrupt the apparently self-evident sensibility of public sector innovation by investigating its emergence, which we argue was the result of the convergence of ‘market innovation’ and policy experimentations conducted by mid-century bureaucrats as they built out the Canadian welfare state. Through a Foucauldian genealogical approach, we trace how the concept we describe as ‘market innovation’ — a term we use to describe an inter-scalar capitalist condition of individual entrepreneurial improvements and the atmosphere of competition they create — emerged through the work of Smith, Marx, and Schumpeter as they reflected on the nature of capitalist change. We then examine how that concept was actualized in Canada beginning in the 1960s, through both the burgeoning “innovation studies” and debates surrounding Canadian economic dependence on both the United States and resource extraction. Following that, we review how market innovation came to subsume policy experimentation in the 1980s and 1990s. We seek to challenge the self-evident ubiquity of public sector innovation in Canadian state institutions and open up critical space for conceptualizing change and improvement at a time when this discourse remains saturated by the next disruptive innovation’s potential to be the one that solves the most pressing issue of the day without having to make actual political choices.