Innovation Landscape within Family Services Integration: Evidence from Australia

ABSTRACTThe aim of this research is to explore the utility of collaborative innovation landscape within the government Family and Community Services (FACS) organisation in Australia. Exploring the presence or absence of the collaborative innovation landscape within public sector organisations is important, as the organisation's objectives combined with the effective management of people working within the organisation define the productivity and efficiency measures of an organisation. The collaborative innovation landscape in FACS is investigated in line with the identified gaps in the existing literature by exploring the structure and function of the organisation, working relationships, team-based interactions and respondents' perceptions of the prevailing working environment. Qualitative in-depth interviews and Social Network Analysis (SNA) techniques were used in the present study to analyse the data obtained from the respondents. Respondents were employed within the divisions of FACS government organisation operating in Tamworth in regional Australia. The results obtained indicated that the respondents' lack of interdivision familiarity poses additional challenges in terms of understanding the nature of work, clarity of role and subsequent engagement with clients and personnel across divisions identified within FACS government organisation. The results obtained from the SNA indicated the presence of reciprocal relationships of the respondents with the other respondents working within their divisions. The findings suggest that collaborative type of innovation landscape is at a nascent stage within the FACS government organisation, and efforts need to be directed to strengthen the public sector innovations in Australia.Keywords: Collaborative Innovation Landscape, FACS, Vision, Participative Safety, Task Orientation, Support for Innovation, Regional AustraliaINTRODUCTIONInnovations within the organisations have been extensively studied. It is undeniable that innovations are regarded as a key to success in an ever-changing and competitively fierce environment (Sorensen and Torfing, 2012). Evidently, the extent of engagement in embedding innovations in practice varies depending upon the type of sector and the nature of business. For example, private businesses rely heavily on innovations as a source of differentiation to improve product offerings, reduce costs and open-up new markets. On the contrary, small and medium sized businesses tend to form strategic alliances with each other to remain and maintain a competitive position (Sorensen and Torfing, 2011). The innovations existing within the public sector seem to be limited and largely neglected by the academic researchers. The reasons for the less popularity of the public sector innovations include the complexity associated with the organisations operating within the sector, the uniqueness of the services offered by these organisations, ever-changing bureaucratic policies and prevailing red tape related mechanisms (Sorensen and Torfing, 2012). The four popular types of innovations include product innovation, process innovation, marketing innovation, and organisational innovation (OECD, 2005). Product and process type of innovations align with the technological advancements. Non-technological innovations relate to the marketing and organisational innovations (OECD, 2005). This study considers only the organisational type of innovations. Organisational innovation in practice involves several elements that focus on the best practice, collaboration, retention, decision-making and relationship management (Camison and Villar-Lopez, 2014). The identification of organisational innovation as a distinct and separate type of innovation is relatively new, and it has gained attention only in the last decade (Hamel, 2006). The knowledge surrounding the outcomes of the implementation of the organisational innovations remains limited in the existing literature (Damanpour and Aravind, 2012). …