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Public sectors across the globe are seeing a great pressure to innovate. It is however notorious that public sector organizations have deeply embedded culture of risk aversion (Riley, 2019). Compare to the private sector, the culture of risk aversion in public sector is the result of long-standing belief that -failure will not be tolerated- or zero tolerance for trial and error gone wrong (Reester, 2017). Other factors that inhibit public sector innovation are ranged from restrictive regulations, insufficient funding, lagging technology and limited vision by the leaders. On the other hand, transparency and accountability is paramount in public sectors. Prerequisite for this is the upheld ethics by all public sector actors. Therefore, horrifying public responses to failed innovation efforts makes it even harder for public sector to innovate. Working on the use of taxpayer money that needs to be justifiable and expected constantly is not an easy job. Nevertheless, without innovation, it will be almost impossible to fulfill the community needs and expectations. This paper aims at highlighting innovation by Indonesian public sectors particularly at local government level. In doing so, this paper will able to identify the aspect of innovation ecosystem in public sector – what are the significant factors that enable innovation thriving in Indonesian public sector. The second part of the paper will also discuss on how innovation being carried out without contradicting or violating the public ethics. As the result, this paper seek to understand how to strike the balance between ethics and innovation is carried out by public sector actors in Indonesia. Using survey to public officials in Indonesian local governments, the analysis of this paper benefit from rather wide range of public officials in Indonesia. Survey will be done for those local governments with innovation acknowledged by the ministry of administrative and Bureaucratic Reform of Indonesia. The result of the discussion will be recommendation on how to boost the development of innovation ecosystem while being very considerate to the public ethics upheld.