Organisational innovation in the public sector: the case of the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission (CIPC)

Abstract

The project seeks to determine, in the South African context, whether or not public/government agencies have a systematic way of managing of innovation, and if so, to find out if they have method of learning and building innovation capabilities. It highlights possible problems that remain within public sector agencies, the CIPC in particular, with respect to learning and capability building, thereby laying the foundation for a more detailed study to be carried out in the future. The current study further aims to meaningfully contribute to the necessary core skills and teachings in the field of innovation management by trying to improve the understanding of how public sector organisations or government agencies build their internal learning and innovation capabilities. Therefore, the study will make use of two relevant theoretical frameworks, one of which is mostly used to analyse the private sector, that is, dynamic capabilities (DCs), while the other, the Smart Intellectual Property Office Framework (SIPO), is more widespread in the public sector. During the execution of its mandate, the CIPC makes use of technologies and ought to establish its process to optimise its administration and service delivery to the public for both local and international stakeholders. The responsibility of CIPC inter alia, is to administer, regulate and protect Intellectual Property assets and companies in line with requirements derived from a number of legislations/laws that have been in existence for a number of decades. This suggests that the CIPC ought to have the innovation capabilities to deal with issues regarding the technologies it uses and services it provides in executing its mandate. It is also recognised that public sector innovation has a substantial and varied impact on performance with regard to private sector, such as the services provided by CIPC, which include the registration of companies and intellectual property. This study adopted a qualitative approach in analysing the CIPC as a case study. In general, qualitative research methods are quite effective in gathering information that deals with matters that are intangible such as the experiences of the population of interest. In this case, the perspectives of participants provided informed conclusions regarding organisational innovation and its management in the public sector, particularly government agencies. The study was executed using both interviews and the analysis of official documents. iii In conclusion, it was revealed that public organisations that do not nurture learning and the building of coordinative/integrative capabilities risk losing relevance. This is because coordinative/integrative capabilities reflect the ability of an organisation to properly make use of its resources to support the sustainability and constant renewal of the organisation.