Policy Innovators in Indian Bureaucracy

Innovation in public services is increasingly becoming a normative practice especially in the developing economies. The chief architect of innovation in public services is the public manager in the administrative staff. However, not all public managers have the same background and with constant moving around, it makes implementing and institutionalizing innovative practices harder. The drivers and barriers to innovation have been well discussed in the literature of public administration, including the cultural and environmental ones. But, how do they impact an individual manager's taking on innovation has not been studied. This paper explores the psyche and the important environmental factors according to a bureaucrat toward policy innovations using Q-sort technique. This enabled the researchers to come up with a typology of public managers’ attitudes towards innovation. There are a few departures from public administration and public innovation theories that provide a significant insight into a career bureaucrat's psychology.