Pilot projects are key to test innovation.
Melanie De Winter, 2020. Part of Faculty of Social Sciences at University of Liege and resarcher in Qualitative Social Research. “Reshaping health care governance using pilot projects as public policy implementation instruments.” https://journals.openedition.org/irpp/1422. Pilot projects are often used in a variety of sectors in innovative contexts. In the scientific literature, one can find numerous articles relating the results of a specific pilot project in a particular sector, whereas the literature analysing the pilot project tool as an object for research is much rarer (Pinson, 2005). In other words, research focuses generally on the experiment conducted as part of the pilot project under study, and not on the pilot project tool as a phenomenon per se, which should, nevertheless, also be worthy of scientific attention (Vreugdenhil et al., 2010).
The pilot project is a specific work method, fulfilling a function of experimentation, which is mobilised in a plethora of sectors and allows a learning while doing approach (Kay & Boxall, 2015; Lee, 1999). This tool offers the possibility to test the innovation at stake in real-world settings at small and controlled scales, which limits the impact of potential failure or negative side effects (Vreugdenhil & Ker Rault, 2010). Furthermore, the actions undertaken as part of the experiment are expected to be more reversible (Musselin, 2005; Zurlo & Nunes, 2016) and, for this reason, are supposed to be less frightening for the stakeholders involved.
3Therefore, pilot projects are often used by policy makers in innovative contexts (Vreugdenhil et al., 2010), to learn from the experimentation carried out (Engström & Lidelöw, 2015) and to create new knowledge and produce evidence for policy-making (Sanderson, 2002; Vreugdenhil & Ker Rault, 2010). They are thus expected to help orient future political action and policy development. In this way, the pilot project constitutes a tool for, “improving the effectiveness of policy responses” (Sanderson, 2002, p. 4). The purpose is to work collaboratively (Zurlo & Nunes, 2016) in order to identify what works in what context (Sanderson, 2002; Vreugdenhil & Ker Rault, 2010).