Innovation management in local government: An empirical analysis of suburban municipalities

The authors surveyed city administrators in the six-county Chicago region to test an innovation management capacity process model. Innovation management capacity is conceptualized as the function of council-staff functionality, managerial leadership capacity, and staff team management. The empirical results from 220 city administrators in 53 cities support the hypothesis that the number of municipal innovations is positively correlated with innovation management capacity, controlling for structural, socioeconomic, and demographic variables. However, this study does not find a statistical relationship between innovation effectiveness and innovation management capacity. The authors posit two possible explanations for these results and propose an alternative innovation management capacity process model for testing in future research.