%0 Journal Article %T Does Substandard Performance Encourage Innovation Adoption? %A Obed Pasha %J The American Review of Public Administration %@ 1552-3357 %D 2019 %R 10.1177/0275074018804559 %X 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 %K innovation adoption %K substandard performance %K CompStat %U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0275074018804559