Implementing Public Innovations in Network Settings

Practitioners and scholars have devoted considerable attention in recent years to initiating public innovations-to the relative neglect of how to ensure the implementation of such efforts. Executing innovations over the longer term, particularly in complex networksettings, can be expected to be problematic. And yet networks are likely to be crucial institutional settingsfor the implementation ofpublic innovations. The analytic approach of game theory, used heuristically, can identify a set of actions useful to public managers in enhancing prospects that sound innovations will succeed. The implications of this inquiry run counter to some of the themes used as mantras in the recent reinvention discussion andfocus attention on the centrality of institutional infrastructure, trust, and obligation for innovative success into the future.