The public service can teach business a thing or two

Emerald Insight are global publishers of academic and practitioner research on business, society, public policy and education. They recently launched a new award for the Paper with the Best Practical Implications, based on the simple concept of 'research you can use', and it is under this category that two WBS professors, Loizos Heracleous and Bob Johnston are among the winners of this year's publications awards, just announced.

Their research report, Can business learn from the public sector? appears in European Business Review, Vol. 21 No.4, 2009.

It challenges the conventional view that the public sector is buried in red tape and lacks any sense of urgency or competition, while the private sector is agile and quick to adopt innovation and avoid disaster. Their conclusions are that business organisations can learn valuable lessons from leading edge public sector entities; for example, the need to employ technology not just to support existing processes but to reinvent themselves or to support unconventional strategies, to change proactively rather than be hit by a crisis, to strive for strategic innovation rather than simply incremental improvements, and to develop a heightened sense of competition to fight inertia.

The full article is freely available until the end of August on the link below.