Practice-Based ‘Inside-Out’ Innovation in Public Service: A Regional Child Welfare Agency

The aim of this chapter is to describe an inside-out, practice-based innovation process in the public sector. The innovation is concerned with the improvement of the quality of the internal vs. external and cross-disciplinary information/data transfer on foster youth in a regional child welfare agency in Italy. The process is an open one; it occurs at the third sector level of the public service agency. Different professional groupings are involved in the interinstitutional decision-making process on children; thus, local and role-specific knowledge is needed to resolve problems that arise at a more complex interinstitutional level, such as the joint evaluation of children’s behaviours. The practitioners’ need to reduce intra-team conflict rates turned out to be the activating influential factor of this innovation. The employee-driven innovation process developed through three steps: (1) in-service training led by psychologist, (2) staff assessment, and (3) development of a new tool for the systematic observation by residential youth workers of children’s behaviour. They can be referred to as ‘educators’, ‘front-line community educators’, ‘practitioners’ or youth workers. The new tool adopted reduced interpersonal and team conflicts at intra-service level, according equal dignity to both beginners and to experienced workers when reporting on children’s behaviour. Unintended and positive outcome of the development of the new tool emerged at the adoption/diffusion stage: the large number of observations of each child, available in real time, allowed youth workers to be effective both in intra-service and interservice information transfer. Comparative studies should be carried out in order to identify commonalities between social, health and educational services’ innovation influential factors and outcomes. According to De Vries et al. (2014), innovation’s outcomes are seldom analysed; we’ve contributed to fill this research gap.