Introduction: Ethics and Innovation in Public Administration

The management of innovation, from conception to evaluation, is an important topic in economic and managerial literature, but it mainly concerns companies and is less studied in public administration (de Lancer Julnes & Gibson, 2015; Demir, 2022). Indeed, public organizations are more associated with a procedural form of bureaucracy, limiting the initiative of civil servants and little inclined to innovation: any improvement in service must first be validated according to a more or less lengthy decision-making process and above all little focused on real user satisfaction. The perceived aim of these organizations is to respond to user demand by complying with established procedures and frameworks, but this demand is set by legitimate authorities and not by the users themselves, except possibly at the time of elections or a change of political regime. These public organizations are therefore not “customer” oriented, but put forward public values to justify their decisions. These public values are not necessarily shared by all but are imposed on all in the name of the law and quasi-immutable rules whose interpretation rests solely with the bureaucracy in charge of enforcing them. In this model, which is fortunately outdated, any co-construction of innovation is therefore impossible, and only process innovations can exist, improving the efficiency of bureaucratic work to the detriment, sometimes, of the quality of service provided, for example by intensifying the controls and information to be provided, which the digital revolution makes possible.