In the wake of the deep austerity facing most governments around the world, leaders are faced with the challenge to “do more with less.” Unfortunately, typical cost reduction exercises inevitably result in a difficult trade-off-between price or performance. Breaking this seemingly unavoidable trade-off will require leaders to look at the public sector in a whole new way.

That is the conclusion of a new study released from Deloitte’s Public Sector industry practice unit, GovLab, and its authors, William D. Eggers, Laura Baker, Ruben Gonzalez, and Audrey Vaughn.

Eggers and Vaughn highlight those findings in an exclusive article for Breaking Gov.

The key to radically reducing costs, while maintaining or even improving services, according to the report, is disruptive innovation.

Creating the conditions for disruption will require policymakers to view government through a different lens. Instead of seeing only endless programs and bureaucracies, the myriad responsibilities and customers of government can be seen as a series of markets that can be shaped in ways to find and cultivate very different and ultimately more effective, less expensive ways of supplying public services.

The paper, available from Deloitte and also available to readers here, provides examples of opportunities to implement disruptive innovation and offers a framework to introduce it in the public sector-proposing an alternative path to significantly reduce costs without sacrificing the quality of services.