Stakeholder Collaboration and Innovation: A Study of Public Policy Initiation at the State Level

A field study was conducted to determine whether diverse, competing stakeholders in a domain can use collaboration to intentionally initiate innovative public policy affecting that domain. The subjects consisted of 61 participants representing 24 stakeholder groups gathered by a U.S. governor that met regularly from 1985 to 1987 to develop a "visionary proposal "for the state's public education. The authors sought to differentiate the substance of collaboration from its result and devised a sociological concept of collaboration with five elements: transmutational purpose, explicit and voluntary membership, organization, interactive process, and temporal property. The results reveal that the stakeholders did collaborate to initiate public policy. The results also show that the collaboration was associated with innovation as hypothesized and that this innovation was incremental rather than radical in nature.