Public administration is the infrastructure that holds up an entire country: schools, healthcare, pensions, transport. When it evolves, it pulls the country along; when it lags, the whole system slows down. That makes its capacity to innovate a matter of democratic resilience, well before it becomes a technical topic. And yet the very features that guarantee its stability and fairness — rigid rules, complex processes, enormous structures — make change exhausting.
In my field, improving the user experience of public digital services, this imbalance is tangible every single day. People use banking apps and e-commerce platforms designed to the highest standards of simplicity; then they log into a public service — about pensions, health, education — and find confusing interfaces, bureaucratic language, convoluted journeys. The services that matter most in people's lives are often the least accessible. The cause is rarely bad will: it's a set of structural conditions. I count six of them. As long as they stay implicit, they look like bad luck; once you name them, they become project constraints you can plan around.
1. Recruitment: the exams "for IT people"
The public competitive exam guarantees transparency, impartiality and equal access — essential values. Its current configuration, however, makes it nearly impossible to bring in the profiles that matter most today: service designers, user experience specialists, data scientists, AI and cybersecurity experts. The tests assess legal and procedural knowledge; even the technical calls usually take the shape of exams "for IT people" — a label that may have worked at the dawn of the digital era and that now crams a whole universe of non-interchangeable professions into a single box. The result is paradoxical: an interaction designer or a data analyst often cannot even apply, because the entry requirements don't match their course of study. Government feels a growing need for people who can design services and read data, while its hiring machinery keeps selecting for something else.
2. No profit logic: a strength and a limit
Public administration operates entirely outside a profit logic, and that is an extraordinary opportunity: no quarterly targets to chase, no sales goals, only rights to guarantee. But the absence of a market has a side effect: there is no internal push for continuous improvement. Without competition, pressure to change doesn't arise spontaneously; if nobody measures service quality, the organization gets used to running on compliance. Historically, government conceived of itself as the executor of the legislator's decisions: the job is "doing what is required", rather than "doing it as well as possible". Excellence exists, and there's plenty of it — but almost always driven by individual visionaries or unusually motivated teams, hardly ever by systemic pressure. In the private sector, those who don't innovate get pushed out of the market; in government, those who don't improve simply stay where they are.
3. Procurement: "the vendor available under the framework contract"
Every public purchase goes through public-evidence procedures: transparent, competitive, verifiable. The principle is sacrosanct. A frequent side effect is that tenders, given their complexity and duration, tend to be conceived as multi-year omnibus contracts: innovation projects then have to be delivered inside that perimeter, with the large consortia that won those contracts — not always the ones with the most fitting competence for that particular job. A private company can pick, for each project, the partner best suited by talent and methodological affinity; in the public sector that isn't the rule, but you often start with a degree of compromise: you work with "the vendor available under the framework contract", and quality may end up depending on the tender clauses as much as on the relevance of skills. It's a structural limit, and no individual is to blame: it's a model of rules designed more to prevent errors — and wrongdoing — than to foster results.
4. Self-referentiality: doing everything in-house
People who work in the public sector perceive themselves — often rightly — as carrying a different mission: guaranteeing rights rather than selling products. It's a legitimate pride. When it hardens into moral superiority, though, it produces an unwanted effect: it becomes hard to learn from the outside world. What follows is an ambivalent relationship with the private sector: admired for its capacity to innovate, and at the same time eyed with suspicion, as if efficiency were incompatible with public purpose. Design methodologies, agile management, user-centred approaches get dismissed with "we don't sell anything", "government is a different thing". True. But precisely because it doesn't have to compete on the market, government can afford to adopt tools that elsewhere were born out of necessity and put them at the service of the common good. Acknowledging the distinctiveness of your role and keeping on learning from others are perfectly compatible.
5. Risk exposure and the fear of error
Government manages collective resources and services that touch the lives of people who are often vulnerable: here an error has concrete, sometimes serious consequences. Add a regulatory system made of constantly changing laws, layered regulations and ambiguous interpretations, and even the most straightforward action becomes a potential minefield. In such a context, the safest choice is standing still. Then there's a subtler dimension: every public decision can ultimately be traced back to a political name and face, and when something goes wrong, administrative responsibility instantly becomes media responsibility. Even the most marginal mistake becomes news.
Public debate tends to punish those who took a risk more than those who stood still.
This mechanism is paralyzing: prudence, a necessary virtue, turns into a trap — a culture of waiting and self-justification that discourages experimentation and rewards continuity.
6. Political discontinuity
On paper, the system guarantees continuity: senior civil servants should operate largely independently of changes in government. In practice, every significant political shift sends shockwaves well beyond the institutional top: positions that are less senior but crucial to the operational survival of projects change hands too. And so long-term projects hang like autumn leaves on the trees: one change of wind is enough to make them fall, regardless of their value or of how far they had come. The people responsible get reassigned, teams dissolve, organizational memory evaporates. In a country with government cycles as short as Italy's, the initiatives that would need multi-year continuity — precisely the ones that would consolidate genuine innovation — are the first at risk of starting over from scratch with every political season.
Recruitment. Exams calibrated on legal profiles; specialists often cannot even apply.
No profit. No competition, no internal push to improve: the organization runs on compliance.
Procurement. You often work with the vendor available under the framework contract, who isn't always the best fit for the goal.
Self-referentiality. Public-mission pride, hardened, makes it difficult to learn from the outside world.
Risk. Errors become news: prudence turns into paralysis.
Political discontinuity. With every change at the top, long-term projects risk falling like leaves.
An ecosystem that can (and must) evolve
These six conditions make government an ecosystem where innovating is, by nature, harder than elsewhere. But be careful: they are the outcome of the constraints and responsibilities that come with public action, hardly a genetic defect. They also generate a typical temptation: "newsworthy" innovation, pushed by the leadership of the moment to display immediate change — a signal of modernity more than an actual change of system. Public innovation that works grows instead out of concrete problems that traditional methods fail to solve, the theme of Making Things That Work.
And here lies the asymmetry that makes this challenge so compelling: exactly where innovating is hardest, the potential impact is enormous. Improving a single service can change the lives of thousands of people. The six conditions are the playing field; the forces you then meet inside individual projects — hostility, resistance, complexity, anxiety — are the subject of the O.R.C.A. model.