Does Substandard Performance Encourage Innovation Adoption?

What makes an organization innovative? This is an enduring question in literature with a variety of models explaining innovation adoption in public organizations. The study presented here contributes to this research by introducing substandard performance as a determinant of innovation adoption, using the example of the adoption of CompStat systems in U.S. police departments. CompStat is a significant innovation in policing that was first operationalized by the New York Police Department in the mid-1990s and is consistently gaining popularity among police departments in the United States and abroad. This study uses a survival analysis of 362 small to midsized U.S. police departments over a 14-year period. Event history and Cox proportional hazards modeling show that poor preadoption performance for violent crime is significantly related to CompStat adoption, and the weaker a department’s preadoption performance, the earlier it adopts CompStat. Property crime, on the contrary, is not found to have a significant impact on the adoption of CompStat.