Responsible Innovation in Public Organizations: Dialogical Ethics

Innovation is a concept easily instrumentalized by public officials to make different projects and policies attractive. I analyze the concepts of public innovation and public interest through the lenses of classical ethical approaches in looking for a more operational definition of public innovation and clues for its management. I adopt a social practices approach and focus on the social construction of ethics, public values, and interest in everyday professional life. I argue that ethics is not only a cognitive and deliberative phenomenon but also a pre-reflective one with socio-material dimensions. Optimum calculus and abstract rules are insufficient to guarantee public value creation by administrations. Public interest and ethics are continuous ordinary struggles where all stakeholders are active agents. More dialogical social practices enhance the social actors’ reflexive attitude, public innovation, values and virtues.