Technological innovation in the UK Police Forces: A smooth process?

The aim of this study is to explore the process of innovation in a British emergency service. The interconnection of new technologies and organisation design, process, strategy and external relationships is an important issue, but current research explains relatively little about whether and how services in general (and public service in particular) innovate. This gap in the literature has arisen because our understanding of innovation and innovation process is derived from studies of manufacturing and services are often considered to be non-innovative or supplier-dominated recipients of technologies. We argue that the combination of Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) with the "meta-theory" of Activity Theory (AT) has much to offer for an understanding of the innovation process in a critical-safety organisation. We report on two in-depth case studies of Police Forces, which were conducted in a manner that reflects the principles of the interpretative paradigm and employs a variety of qualitative techniques. Drawing on SCOT and AT, we consider the "negotiations" of meanings and the tensions developed among the stakeholders, depict the dynamics of the process of innovation and recognise the contextual nature of innovation. The paper concludes that gaining a holistic and in-depth understanding of the interdependence of the innovation stages can actually support the work of non-engineering academics, practitioners in the emergency services, technology developers and government agencies that oversee the implementation of technologies in other public organisations.