Disruptive Innovations in Voting: Electronic Poll Book Adoption and Certification in Indiana

Innovation, Polarization, And Election Administration

Innovations, frequently lauded by politicians and pundits as a “magic wand” in speeches and reports, must serve a practical purpose to improve services, policies, and practices (Pollitt & Hupe, 2011). Although innovation has been oversimplified as “new ideas that work” (Mulgan & Albury, 2003) or “new stuff that is made useful” (McKeown, 2008) recent research has attempted to clearly define what innovation is as opposed to a vague, overly optimistic rhetorical device. Public innovation produces public goods such as increasing political value (such as enhancing democracy), social value, or economic value as opposed to private innovation which is geared toward producing private value for individual businesses (Moore, 1995). The government previously worked from the idea that innovation was the act of continuous improvement instead of radical transformation which requires the replacing of systems with another (Hartley, 2006). Innovation also occurs by accident or through trial and error making innovation an unpredictable process marked by chance discoveries and unforeseen events (Van de Ven et al., 2008). Given this uneven and somewhat unpredictable process, once an innovation is discovered it requires the exploration and exploitation of these new ideas (Mulgan & Albury, 2003). Perhaps one of the most recent and better definitions of innovation is from Torfing (2016) stating that it is “an intended but inherently contingent process that involves the development and realization, and frequently also the spread, of new and creative ideas that challenge conventional wisdom and disrupt the established practices within a specific context” (p. 30). Torfing (2016) argues the definition works because it states that innovation is intentional, and widely adopted, institutes not only quantitative but qualitative change, and that different groups may evaluate the innovation differently. Although there is an expectation that innovation is applicable and spread broadly, it is sufficient for it to be used in a particular field or domain only (Zaltman et al., 1973).