Valuing Public Innovation: Contributions to Theory and Practice

ISBN-13: 9783031152023 / Angielski / Twarda / 2022 / 365 str.

Rolf R?nning; Jean Hartley; Lars Fuglsang

Opis

Public innovation is distinctive from private sector innovation by being set in a political system rather than a market. The roles of citizens and elected politicians as well as public servants and other stakeholders are frequently relevant. Public organizations can be creators, funders, orchestrators or sense-makers of innovations, which are carried out with the aim of benefitting society. This book provides a comprehensive insight into the theory and practice of public innovation using a wide range of research evidence about the processes, drivers and barriers, stakeholders and outcomes of innovation. Using the lens of public value, the book offers a stimulating discussion of how public innovation is valued and contested in current societies. Valuing Public Innovation aims to help develop a deeper understanding of innovation and how to use that knowledge in practical ways. This is essential reading for academics and students in the fields of innovation, organisation studies, public administration and public policy, as well as for policymakers and practitioners.

Spis treści

CHAPTER 1:  WHAT IS PUBLIC INNOVATION AND WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?

This chapter is the introduction to the whole book, so it has three aims:

·         Why this book is needed

·         What it will cover

·         Key initial concepts in understanding innovation

Why the book is needed

There have been several important strides taken in understanding public innovation in the last 15 years.  First, public innovation has received a major policy boost from global governments across the world, with “innovation” claimed to be a major mechanism to boost the quality and legitimacy of public services: it is “the word that would be king” (Osborne and Brown, 2011).  This means that academics and managers around the world are trying to work out how to bring about innovation and work out whether or not this creates improvement.  Recent research can help on those questions.

Second, public innovation has, arguably, come of age as a discipline (or a cluster of disciplines) with a strong community of researchers and practitioners who recognise that there are distinctive features of public innovation.  Public innovation research and practice is no longer the poor cousin of private sector innovation. For quite some time, ideas and evidence from the private sector was dominant in the understanding of public innovation and the key concepts were “translated” or adapted to public organizations and settings.  Often, this had been an unfavourable comparison.  More recently however, the increased amount of research has enabled the reframing of innovation so that the distinctive aspects of public innovation are clear – for example, the focus being on societal rather than organizational benefits, the role of politicians and citizens in creating and being impacted by innovation and much more.

Third, in the last two decades, digitalisation has been a major force, some would say the fourth technological revolution.  Goods, services, organizing, relationships, democracy and much more have been shaped by our working with and through technology.  In terms of innovation, this not only influences what innovations occur but also how they occur.  Open innovation has become easier to encourage and use, so the shift from top-down organizational mandates from innovation from, say a policy unit or an R and D lab to “harvesting” ideas from stakeholders is a substantial paradigm shift affecting all sectors.

Fourth, and finally, at least for this introduction, are changes in societies themselves.  A more globalised world has led to changes in concepts of community, society, democracy and much more.  People share ideas with people on the other side of the globe as much as with their geographical neighbours.  Innovations, and fashions in innovation move around the globe quickly, so that diffusion of innovation becomes as important as the creation of innovation.  The sense of the public has shifted.  This has been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic which started in 2020 – a sense of being part of an inter-connected world.  Many public services report high levels of innovation to deal with the coronavirus pandemic, so this provides a rich area to explore.

Several developments such as globalisation, digitalization, refugees and coronavirus have created a more chaotic, volatile and disrupted context for public innovation. New strategies are needed drawing on social resources, perhaps bricolage and other robust strategies become important.

For all these reasons, there is a gap for a book like this, which surveys public innovation, paying attention to both words – not just the word ‘innovation’ but also the word ‘public’. 

 

What this book covers

This book is not only about innovation and innovation processes, important as those are.  It sets innovation in a public context and addresses questions about what is created which is of public value, and how is that achieved.  Therefore the role of politics and citizens, and other stakeholders and not just public managers and employees are central to this book.  Governance is explored, as well as innovations in governance.  So the concept of ‘public’ is of as much interest as the concept of ‘innovation’.  The authors also set innovation in its organization, inter-organizational and institutional setting.  Innovations can make progress or be hindered by organizational and institutional factors, so understanding these are important. This analysis also enables learning across the three sectors of public, private and voluntary organizations with appropriate and not over-generalised learning between sectors, because understanding the institutional ‘regimes’ and ‘logics’ helps to put innovation in its (public) place. 

 

Key initial concepts in innovation

This section explores what is meant by innovation and what is known about what it is, how it happens, who helps it along, and how it is different from other forms of change. 

This section draws out commonalities in different approaches, while also pointing out differences in approach where useful to be aware of different understandings of the concept and its processes.

The chapter will use short vignettes from research and organizational settings to illustrate some of the issues. 

What is innovation

Distinguished from the wider category of change by being a “step” change – (this can still be incremental – need to illustrate point carefully).  It is not the same as improvement (which could be but isn’t always an outcome of innovation). It is largely different from continuous improvement as a methodology.  Doesn’t have to be successful to be an innovation – world is littered with failed innovations, or ones which are initially successful but which later fail.  Not just creativity but also implementation. Doesn’t have to be unique – it’s about a practice, product or service being new to that organization.  Subjective elements – social construction. Core and peripheral aspects of innovation (Denis et al).

What is public innovation

One limited view is that it is innovations created by public organizations but this book takes a wider and more analytical view of public innovation.  Following Alford it is about who benefits from the innovation (and who may be excluded intentionally or otherwise).  Many public innovations are led and orchestrated by public organizations but some may involve partners from other sectors, citizens etc and some may originate in other sectors and be spread and shared by public organizations. 

Social innovations overlap with public innovations and this will be explained and explored.  Some public innovation activities are specifically targeted at supporting and extending social innovations.    

Public innovations aim to create public value – i.e. what the public values and what adds value to the public sphere.

Types and dimensions of public innovation

Early work on innovation created categories to understand different types of innovation, e.g. product, service, governance etc (Osborne, Damanpour and Walker).

May be more useful to think of dimensions, because if an innovation is disruptive or involves step change then may affect more than one element.  Eg new medical machine is a product, but it may change relationships between doctors and technicians and lead to a different service offered to patients.  Possible dimensions: Service; product; process; position; strategic; policy; governance; rhetorical (Hartley).  Service innovation, itself, has several dimensions (Miles, 2011, others) and service research in any case claims that it is difficult to maintain a distinction between process and product innovation since the product is a process.  There are similarities but also differences in public service compared with private service innovation (Fuglsang and Sundbo, 2016).  This supports the value of looking at innovation in terms of dimensions.

Why does this matter?  Not just categorising, but rather has implications for understanding and managing the innovation.  This shows the need for doing many things at the same, and the complex and toilsome work of managing public service innovation.

Scale of innovation

Albury (2005) – innovations can be radical, systemic or incremental.  Fuglsang - innovation as bricolage. Sundbo notes the dual structure of innovation.  Innovation as based on both hierarchical and bottom-up processes involving the same actors in both processes. Dual structure can be seen as relevant also in the case of public innovation.

Planned or serendipity?

Much innovation is planned, but some happens by accident (famous private sector examples of post-it notes etc).  Van de Ven – innovation can be both rational and random. Cf also engineering vs bricolage.

Phases of innovation

Many different schema (give some examples) but to the extent that innovation is seen as planned and rational can broadly discern several phases eg creativity, piloting, implementation more widely and diffusion (sharing across sections, different organizations or across different sectors).  This will also cover prototyping, stage-gates, blueprints and user involvement. 

Diffusion especially important for public organizations – so that a whole service sector benefits and in this way creates more public value.

Creators and catalysts of public innovation

People who either create or enable innovation to happen.  They develop it or they generate support or they clear obstacles out of the way.  Each category may be a supporter of innovation or they can object to innovation, depending on their view of the innovation.

Early views of innovation – group of creative and expert people kept apart from daily routines of organization so that they can create new ways of doing things.  Skunk works, R and D labs, policy units, etc. This sees innovation as a separate task (R and D) as distinct from innovation as integrated with work (in other words, practice based). 

This can still be important but open innovation means wider set of people may be involved. For private sector innovation studies this is mainly managers and employees but public innovation may have wider people creating and sustaining innovation:

Politicians – through national policies and through local initiatives

Public managers and professionals – motivated to create change because they have ideas about how services can improve

Professional bodies and associations – can lobby or develop innovation and particularly important for diffusing innovation/sharing promising practices

Citizens – e.g. expert service users, advocates, those wanting to help improve public services

Voluntary organizations may generate social innovations which are then scaled up or modified by public organizations.

The actors and their roles will be explored further in a later chapter.[1]

Innovation outputs and outcomes

Will be covered in more detail under evaluation.  Here we introduce public value and show a key difference from private firms is that the aim is to create value for society and not only for private capture through patents, design rights etc in order to create profits, market share or reputation. 

Institutions and innovation

Innovations do not just occur in organizational settings but in institutional (and constitutional) settings.  Shaped or stimulated by policies, which themselves occur in institutional settings. 

Introduce here traditional public administration, new public management and new public governance.  Note they co-exist.  Note that they can each stimulate innovation but in different ways and also create particular stimuli but also barriers to innovation. 

Innovation and democracy

A key theme throughout this book is putting innovation in the context of democratic societies.  Innovation can occur in authoritarian societies as well (Hitler, Stalin and Mao Tse Tung were all, arguably very innovative) but we have a contextual bias in wanting to explore and understand how innovation happens, how and why in the context of democracy, with all its aspirations and flaws, inclusions and exclusions.  

This means there are commonalities with innovation in private firms (where the majority of the research is) but also important political, economic and social differences which we will explore through the book. 

 

 

CHAPTER 2:  THE PUBLICNESS OF PUBLIC INNOVATION

 

This book argues that public innovation is a distinct field of theory and practice.  It is not just innovation applied to public organizations and public services, but aims to understand both concepts – the words public and innovation.  The purpose is to understand not just innovation (what it is, how it happens) but also to understand how public innovations can help or harm society.  So public innovations need to be analysed in terms of their impact on democracy, on society and on the creation (or destruction) of public value.

This will be explored through a brief conceptual history of the concept of public innovation.  The conceptual history is undertaken through an analysis of how the concept of public innovation has been treated over time.  This analysis is based on five phases of research and scholarship.  Of course, phases is an analytical distinction which has more blurred edges in practice, but the phase analysis is useful to help distinguish key emphases in research and conceptual understanding. 

Phase 1:  Hidden in plain sight

Early studies of public innovation were not conceptualised as public innovation but rather as generic studies of innovation.  Although the studies took place in public organizations, or concerned innovations in the public sphere or for the benefit of society in general, the conceptualisation was about the nature of innovation and the nature of innovation processes.  A notable example is the seminal work of Everett Rogers (originally 1962, then four further editions).  This research focused on agricultural innovations and whether or not farmers took up the innovations; educational innovations in Thailand and new health practices in Latin America.  These studies were brought about through US land grant universities (themselves set up and supported through state provision i.e. public sector organizations) and the initial studies were all about government-inspired and funded innovations, intended for the benefit of anyone relevant to that innovation.  So, one can argue that these were public innovations (they might also be called social innovations).  Yet, Rogers’ reflection back on his life’s work in the 5^th edition and in the various editions does not talk about public services, public organizations or the public

So public innovation was “hidden in plain sight”.  It was there, but it was conceptualised as innovation not public innovation.

There are still innovation studies which examine innovation but the publicness is hidden or not observed or commented on.  An example here is many innovation studies in the UK NHS which explore innovation processes but which do not comment on this being a public service, free to all at the point of use, or comment on the role of politicians in creating healthcare innovation (Secretaries of State have created so much innovation that Pollitt called it “continuous redisorganization”).  In these studies the focus is on innovation but is context-blind.

Phase 2:  Innovation only happens in the private sector  

Innovation started to be of interest within economics and management studies.  In economics the field was given a boost by Schumpeter (1950) in trying to rebuild economies after the second world war and get out of stagnation.  In management studies, innovation as a concept was given a boost by the Japanese manufacturing miracles of the 1980s when Japan started to overtake the USA in manufacturing, notably in automotives).  Innovation began to be studied in pharmaceuticals, in household products (Procter and Gamble, Unilever) and in electronics etc.  Research studies on innovation processes in firms began in earnest and there were many seminal studies (van de Ven, etc).

The influence of market-oriented economics was strong, and a number of “competition state” economists argued, in good Schumpeterian logic, that competition was the key driver of innovation.  Innovate or die was the mantra (cf Christensen etc).  This coincided with the role of marketing in the consumer goods industries. 

Operations management was a field which developed many innovation concepts and ideas (e.g. Tidd and Bessant).  Innovation studies at this time were almost exclusively about “the firm” (not even the organization).  Competition was the key explanatory factor in innovation. 

There was little discussion of innovation in public organizations.  It was almost a non-question.  The logic went that if competition drives innovation, then given that the public sector is not concerned with competition, therefore it was not innovative.  Talk of “bureaucracy” and “red tape” compounded this sense that nothing new could come out of the public sector, least of all innovation.  It is a caricature which had appeal in some quarters.  It is fundamentally taken apart by Mazzucato in her book “The entrepreneurial state” but in this phase that book had not yet been written.

New public management reinforced this view that the public sector did not innovate and some of the reforms within this regime were based on handing the responsibility for innovation over to the private sector, or designing private-sector like structures and processes.

Phase 3  Public innovation is only a pale imitation of the private sector

In this phase, some interest in innovation was starting to happen in the public sector but the focus was on the innovation itself (the product) and so context did not matter.  The assumption was that public innovations were alike in all key respects in relation to innovation.  Researchers began to measure public innovation, using private sector concepts and measures.  These included whether the focus was product or service, what scale was the innovation (e.g. large/small, radical or incremental); the time taken to implement the innovation; what phases the innovation went through; and the role of managers and professionals (only) in bringing about innovation).

So there was a series of studies measuring innovation using private sector measures.  Examples can be seen in the work of Walker, Walker and Damanpour and others.  At this stage, there was no mention of politicians, citizens or public value.  The focus was at the level of analysis of the organization (the equivalent of the firm) not the service, or the sector or the value for society more widely. 

Phase 4:  The turning point?  Studies of American innovations in government

The Ford Foundation, a major philanthropic body in the USA, in the mid 80s became concerned that the entrepreneurial spirit in US government was neither recognised nor rewarded and they aimed to change this perspective through establishing the “Innovations in Government” award scheme.  It was set up in 1986 for a competition run annually for local, state and federal government agencies and services and the programme, with annual winners and much celebration, was run by Harvard University. 

This stimulated important conceptual and empirical work on public innovation. Several Harvard academics studies the cases of which agencies applied, which won and why, and this led them to refine ideas about what made a good public innovation.  There were several books as a result. Borins took an overview of all the cases and extracted key insights.  Altschuler and Behn edited a collection from academics and practitioners about what lay behind a good innovation, how it came about, how it was sustained.  Mark Moore was also at Harvard and although his work focused mainly on public value, he drew on innovation cases at several points. 

This high level of research and writing meant that there started to be more active exploration of the public features of innovations in government and public services.  This includes looking at the processes of innovation, including the political and democratic processes, a focus on the partners who worked with or alongside public organizations, examining impacts not just in terms of organizational efficiency or effectiveness but in terms of the quality of citizens’ lives.  There was work on how innovations could be considered in terms of their contribution to public value.  These all brought in a distinctiveness about aspects of public innovation, while drawing on valuable literature where relevant from the private sector. 

Phase 5:  Learning from service innovation  The development of service innovation, within the private sector, was an important development, showing important differences conceptually and in research terms from the product innovation which had dominated research till this point.  Ian Miles and Faiz Galluoj pioneered new thinking which opened up new avenues to bring public services into focus. 

Phase 6:  The distinctiveness and value of public innovation

Building on the Harvard work, as well as work on innovation in voluntary organizations ; with empirical research on public services not only as organizations but across clusters, partnerships and service sectors, a new understanding and appreciation of public innovation has come to the fore.  Researchers mapped the similarities and differences between public and private innovation (recognising immense variation within as well as across service sectors, and the existence of hybrid organizations) – Hartley (2005, 2011), De Vries, et al (2016), Fuglsang (2010).  Mazzucato caused a re-evaluation amongst economists and others in showing that the public sector stimulates and creates innovation and that without its contribution, private sector innovation would be greatly impoverished.  This is a major shift in thinking among economists. In public management studies, interest developed not just in the value created by organizations but by networks, clusters and across a whole area of service (Hartley and Rashman, 2018; Sørensen and Torfing).  There is now interest in the role of politicians in innovation (Rønning et al, 2014) and the role of power and conflict in creating and sustaining innovation. Interest in public value, arguably, has come of age. 

There is an increasing interest not just in creating innovations but in sharing innovations across organizations or a service (e.g. across hospitals, or local government or police services).  Diffusion is a key feature of public innovation because there are advantages to sharing compared with a market competition situation of keeping innovations within the firm.  This area is starting to attract more attention.

There is recognition therefore that innovation has some similarities across sectors (public, private, voluntary) but also that there are many distinctive aspects of public innovation.  So there is a need to understand public innovation in its own right, not rely primarily on private sector research.  Furthermore, and in a reversal of fortunes, public innovation has much to teach private innovation (about formal and informal political processes which can affect innovation, about the impact on wider society, about the role of different stakeholders in innovation; about power and contested meanings and goals). 

There is also now interest in governance innovations as well as service and other innovations.  In part this has come about through new public governance (e.g. Sørensen and Torfing 2012; Osborne, Moore and Hartley,  Torfing and Triantifillou). 

 

The current state of understanding

So far we have discussed public services as though they are uniform in character and clearly distinctive from the private sector.  This is a simplification, because public organizations (and private organizations) vary in their publicness (Bozeman; Rainey and Chun).  This will be explaind and explored. 

Some public services are welfare services, others are regulatory and even coercive, so very different relationships with citizens; vary in terms of how much rely on state or market funding; how much authority lies with the public organization or how far decision-making is shared with citizens.  So publicness is a spectrum not a category. 

Because public innovation studies have relied, until recently, so heavily on studies based on the private sector firm, it is useful to be clear about what can shape public innovations: 

Pressures for innovation not primarily competition but changing needs in society
• Organizations, networks and service not the private firm as the primary unit of innovation
• Diffusion of innovation critical for public service organizations, and based in relatively open networks not closed alliances
• Role of politicians and policy advisors in catalysing innovation – need to deal with more than one source of innovation and different processes of innovation
• Role of citizens and democratic debate in assessing value of innovation
• Accountability and transparency while an innovation being developed
• Exnovation may be contested as well as innovation
• The “public value” test of innovation’s role in improvement (Moore, Benington, Alford etc, also Bozeman for the social norms and values which underlie public value) 

 

Public innovation and political struggle

Public innovation, like public value, is a “contested democratic practice”.  There are struggles about diagnosis of problems, struggles over the best ways to tackle those problems, struggles over whether innovation will help or not; struggles over whether the innovation works for all or is more favourable to some groups than others, struggles over whether an innovation should be retained or abolished.

 

The final arbiter of public innovations then, is expected to be elected politicians in a democratic society.  They may be guided and advised by professionals, but the ultimate choice is theirs.  We will find, throughout this book, that political choices are part of the DNA of public innovations. 

 

CHAPTER 3: INNOVATION CONTEXTS

 

The chapter describes how the market, the state and the civil society are different contexts for public innovation. The three sectors can be distinguished in terms of their different ideal-typical organizational ‘principles’ (e.g. Billis 2010) or by the different ‘logics’ of the market, the state and civil society (cf. e.g. Pestoff 2014).

The three sectors thus can be described by different types of ownership, operational priorities, governance structures and human resources. Further, they entail different drivers, goals and outcomes of innovation.

The borderlines between the three sectors may have become more blurred. Shared institutional arrangements are created that combine elements from all three sectors. Hence innovation must be effective, user-centric, profitable, socially sustainable and create public value at the same time. For example, healthcare innovations often draw on arrangements mixing elements from all three sector logics.

All three sectors can contribute to public innovation.

The public sector sets goals and aspirations for development and innovation, and creates new innovative services on its own often through internally driven processes or in collaboration with other, external actors.

Private firms develop and produce goods and services under public rule or for the public sector in public-private partnerships or public-private innovation networks. 

Civil society and third sector organizations (TSOs) develop social innovations some of which are later adopted by the public sector. For example public schools, home care or libraries have in many places first been introduced as social innovations which were later adopted as public services.

An example to be developed is elderly care and loneliness. There can be a political wish to reduce loneliness among elderly people -- the outcome (or public value) of this being to increase the quality of life for elderly citizens and simultaneously reduce the need for other more costly services.

In this case, the public sector can set policy goal in collaboration with private and civic actors. Together they can experiment with delivering innovative new services that can reduce loneliness -- while each actors may still adhere to its own logics. TSOs may introduce new services through relational approaches to citizens and relational innovations. This can take place on a private location such as a private housing area which has a private economic interest in improving the reputation of this area. The innovations brought forward by these actors in collaboration can be adopted by the public sector leading to systemic innovation. 

Another illustrative example that may be developed is the ‘cycling without age’ case.

 

Private innovation for public services

Private actors are generally dependent on a market for innovations. They have no further obligations to deliver services. However, the public sector is a ‘market’ though a complicated one. It requires of private companies that they negotiate the terms with the public sector in a politicized climate – through ‘private politics’ (Åkerstrøm).

This may be done through developing public-private relationships. Two types of public-private relationships will be outlined in this section, PPP and PPI.  Focus is on PPI, since PPPs are special cases from only a few countries where a private firm designs, finances, constructs, operates and maintains a public sector service regulated by a contract with a public authority with a clear production outcome in mind (Hodge and Greve, 2005).

To understand the role of PPIs the section draws on the EU ServPPIN and Co-Val projects. They focus innovation networks between public and private organizations and public value creation in context. ServPPIN (FP7, 2008-2011) assessed how innovation can emerge from formal and informal network relations between public and private organizations; Co-Val (H2020, 2017-2021) explores value-creation in the public sector through public, private and social innovation activities.

Public-private-civic network contexts are a more confusing context than traditional public administration, because different types of preferences, competencies and logics co-exist. The chapter discusses how such pluralistic contexts that include private and civil actors can be managed and directed towards innovation outcomes, often keeping innovation within an emergent innovation model.

Whether and how private and civic actors external to the public administration in the strict sense contribute to public innovation and public value creation is explored (cf. also Hartley et al. 2013). These collaborative networks typically target complex or wicked problems that cannot be solved as such (they can be coped with but not tamed). It is argued that dealing with such problems require collaboration across interdependent actors (Torfing and Triantafillou) as well as experimentation with solutions. Innovations may be created, experimented with and tested on collaborative platforms such as living innovation labs where public sector rules are somewhat relaxed and bent towards other logics (Hartley et al. 2013).

Involving external actors in public innovation may imply that innovation regimes known from the private sector are applied to the public sector. Especially two innovation organization regimes are described in the general innovation literature, the entrepreneurial regime and routine-based regime.

The entrepreneurial regime emphasizes individual behavior (such as the creation of new firms by individuals).  However, it is also recognized that entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship are collective processes (Johannisson). Further, entrepreneurship inside organizations has been labelled as corporate entrepreneurship/intrapreneurship (Pinchot). The entrepreneurial approach to innovation states a logic of the heroic inventor as the driver of innovation (Meijer 2013). In the public innovation context, encouraging entrepreneurship may be a way of uncovering new opportunities, motivating bottom-up strategies and championing new services. The public sector also struggles with justifying the entrepreneurial mode which is intertwined with risk-taking behaviours and individual will-power which is believed to be incongruent with political leadership, public rule and public ethos.

The routine-based regime emphasises innovation as a routine activity integrated with and supported by every-day practice. Procedures, tools and language for innovation are emphasized. Building routines for innovation is increasingly requested in the public sector, given that innovation is seen as a core task of the public sector. However, since innovation is not part of the usual training of public managers and employees, collaboration with private firms may create a learning context for adopting such routines.

 

Social innovation for public services

This section aims at discussing the relevance of the concept of social innovation for public innovation. It discusses what social innovation is and the place of social innovation in the public sector.  Social innovation has a long history (Godin) from being mostly a revolutionary approach to ‘positively shaping social change’ (MacCallum and Moulaert 2019). It is today linked to two research traditions: One (American) where social innovation denotes certain types of innovations with an acclaimed social value; these can be created by all kinds of firms and organizations. And another tradition where social innovation relies on social mobilization – they are social both in the means and the ends.

 

One definition of social innovation that is discussed in this section is the following: “New approaches to addressing social needs. They are social in their means and in their ends. They engage and mobilize the beneficiaries and help to transform social relations by improving beneficiaries’ access to power and resources” (TEPSIE, 2015). This implies that innovation is driven by communities or collectives motivated by unmet social needs (cf. Moulaert 2019; 2013).

The section further defines what social innovation is. Social innovations are, like other innovations, step-changes that are recognized by other relevant actors to have durability and to be realized in practice. Social innovation are usually also seen as innovations that involve social actors in the innovation process. Social innovations can take place through social bricolage (Di Domenico et al 2009) or through more structured processes. Social innovations can be about system maintenance, system expansion and system transformation (Barinaga 2012).

This section will, however, investigate how social innovation leads to public innovation. Social innovations can be created by the public sector by inviting social actors into an innovation process that creates value for citizen groups. However, social innovations are more typically created by social actors though social mobilisation processes. Both of these innovation processes can lead to public innovations if/when the social innovations are adopted by the public sector. This is important because the public sector is needed to create a favourable institutional context for social innovations to thrive, like laws, regulations, and public procurement rules. However, it has also been argued (Demarchelier et al. 2019) that social innovations can be public innovations without any contribution from the public sector, i.e. when social innovation networks aspire to provide new public goods.

However, the distinction between public and social innovation could be criticised as taking the public and civic sectors as too separate. As shown above, many interesting innovations involve multi-sector collaborations of civil society actors and public actors, and sometimes also private actors. A more fruitful distinction could be to focus on which actor(s) initiates and/or leads the innovation and which power relations exist amongst them.

 

Democratic innovation

This section explores the democratic context of innovation as a specific context of public sector innovation. All public innovations have to take into consideration the democratic context for reasons of legitimacy (at least in democratic countries). This is not just representative democracy. Expectation of more participative forms of democracy have existed since the participatory movement of the 1960s and align well with increased ‘user’ involvement in contemporary public and social innovations. How can citizens play a more direct role in innovation? What forms of participation (thin/thick, Arnstein’s ladder) can be distinguished? What type of leadership is needed (Sørensen 2020; Hartley et al 2019)?

What are the limitations of new forms of democratized innovation? There might be a tension between representative democracy and deliberative democratic innovations (Fung 2003, 2015). This might happen at the national and local level if citizens’ assemblies and civil society organisations develop alternative (spatial) solutions which are at odds with national political decision making. Such developments might be even more challenging at the global level with innovations like deliberative (global) citizens’ assemblies (Dryzek, J., Bächtiger, A., Milewicz, K. (2011) or global citizens‘ juries (Goodin, R., Ratner, S. (2011) which might conflict with national parliaments.

Overall, private, public and civil sectors constitute different contexts for innovation. The borders are, however, blurred. Institutional arrangements are created that draw on all three sectors. Pluralistic and confusing environments for innovation are created. How these are managed towards innovation outcomes is complicated.

 

 

CHAPTER 4: A SECTOR WITH DYNAMIC HYBRIDIZATION

The chapter starts with a discussion of the relationship between a sector approach and a hybridization approach to innovation. What is a sector approach? It implies that sectors are treated as formal organizations (Billis 2010) or as governed by specific institutional logics (Thornton et al. 2012). Formal organizations may be contrasted with personal organizations (Billis  2020) or informal ways of organizing. Formal organizations and institutional logics are Weberian ideal types that seldom are carried out 1:1 in real life but provide meaning and directionality to innovation activities and enable coordination between actors. A formal organization can be described in terms of ownership, governance, operational priorities, human resources and other resources (Billis); an institutional logic is a socially constructed pattern of cultural symbols and material practices by which individuals and organisations provide meaning to their daily activity (Thornton et al. 2012, p. 2).

However, public organizations are not characterized by one distinct organizational principle or one institutional logic. Organizational reality is much more messy and public agencies continuously experiment with new policy solutions and conceptual innovations by drawing on a wider ecosystem of actors in iterative processes of modification and readjustment of innovations. There are two ways of describing this hybrid situation. One posits that all organizations will adhere to one sector principle or institutional logic as the dominant principle/logic. For example, public sector agency always tend to mainly follow the organizational principle of public sector where citizens are owners, politicians make decisions and priorities are set based in collective choice and public ethos. However public sector organizations may still be drifting towards private and social sector principles. They conduct “interactive leadership” (Sørensen 2020) by pulling in social and private actors and they observe citiziens’ individual value creation (Osborne et al;  Gröonroos 2018) as inputs to innovation; they try to become more responsive, resilient and robust towards changes and disruptions in their environment.  Listening more to external stakeholders and citizens represents a move towards a more hybrid form of organizations where several principles or logics are considered. While actors may still in the main adhere to a public sector logic, they also initiate intersectorial collaborative efforts, where overlapping sector principles (hybrid zones) are enacted at the same time (Fuglsang and Møller 2010).

Another way of describing organizational reality claims that some public organization are inherently “pluralistic” because they are characterized by different types of preferences, competencies and logics that co-exist (Frieland and Alford, 1991; Cloutier and Langley, 2007; Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006; Denis et al 2007). Pluralistic organizations are defined as “organizational contexts characterized by three main features: multiple objectives, diffuse power and knowledge-based work processes (p. 179). Pluralistic organizations become pluralistic as they “enter into various forms of collaborative arrangements, as matrices and networks penetrate organizational structures, and as knowledge workers play an increasingly important role in the economy, pluralistic forms of organization are becoming more and more prevalent” (p. 180). Pluralistic organizations are not necessarily hybrids of public, private and civil sector principles, however their objectives and values can come from various sectors. Denis et al. argue that strategizing in such context can be described through the lenses of three theoretical frames: ANT, conventionalist theory and social practice theory in which actors act as 1) “translators” enrolling others in networks to build power, 2) “critics” and negotiators of value compromises to build legitimacy, or 3) “social actors” operating through their practices and routines to build knowledge. Theorizing organizations as inherently pluralistic implies that innovation is seen as influenced by actors that hold different values, routines, knowledge, time-schedules, etc. Institutional arrangements are created by recombining elements from different institutional contexts (such as professional, management, and market-like logics); yet institutional arrangements are dynamically and recursively changed all the time. For example, there may be tensions between managers, doctors, nurses, patients and relatives in a hospital. This pluralism crystalizes into fragile institutional arrangements that in turn must be continuously maintained and changed in order to balance interests within the organization.

The chapter examines whether it makes sense to describe a move towards increasing hybridity and pluralism in public organizations, including what the dynamics, drivers, challenges and consequences of mixing public-private-civic sector concerns are. New complex institutional arrangements may be created that change the context of public innovation. This includes a move towards adopting management styles from the private sector (NPM) and user-centrism or “servitization”, i.e. more market-like approaches in which citizens are treated as if they were individual customers (Fuglsang and Møller 2020). This increasing complexity can also be theorized as a move from a goods-dominant to service-dominant logic (Vargo and Lusch). The lens of the service-dominant logic (SDL) applies to describing a potential change of logic towards stressing the service exchange with users and users/citizens as contextual “resource integrators”. SDL represents a different model of production than a traditional supply-chain model where the value of a service is created by the service provider and destroyed during the consumption by the user. In so far as servitization or service-dominant-logic-like thinking become more prevalent for public agencies, it contributes to a more hybridized and pluralistic context for these organizations. Yet we know little about how such organizations can be managed and directed towards innovation outcomes.

For public agencies the hybridized and pluralistic context for innovation poses several challenges for innovation at different levels.

First, there is a basic innovation challenge of accepting these new complex institutional arrangements once they are recognized. Theoretically there are several options for public agencies (cf. Oldenhof et al 2013; Battilana and Lee, 2014). 1) Organizations can choose to reject or ignore new emerging logics and thus resist further hybridizations. This resistance to change can in itself spur innovations to improve existing practices and routines inside the public sector. Resistance can also be more situated at the task level where public employees in their work context can autonomously resist change in order to maintain public ethos etc. 2) The second option is to create agencies that take care of specific tasks, for example a service design unit or innovation labs that works with user-centric approaches to public innovation as a basis for public value creation. 3) Yet another strategy is to deal incrementally with conflicts and tensions between values as they emerge. Thus, there can be a need to inform employees or consult with them before making concrete decisions about how to proceed with certain innovations. 4) Finally, public agencies can seek to make durable compromises between institutional logics, thus setting up institutional arrangements, such as “Public Service Logic” that represent systemic policy-supported structures agreed across organizations and are supported by practices and routines.

Second there is the question of how new institutional arrangement are constituted and adopted in a public service organization’s innovation activities. For example, if it recognized that a more interactive leadership style needs to be introduced that can spur collaborative innovation, how can this new approach become supported by routines and practices at the systemic level. This poses several problems because one may expect that some central actors networking at the management level are more aware of such new logics than others, and keener to support it than subordinates across an organization. There can be cognitive and institutional distances between people (Boschma). Thus, one approach would be “disjointed incrementalism” (Lindblom; Kowalkowski) in which new directions are emerging from practice, continuously modified and calibrated across the organization through processes of reflexive action (Fuglsang and Sundbo). This would be different from a top-down, one-size-fit-all, unidirectional approach

Third, another question is what hybridized approaches mean for the innovation process as such – supposedly no longer top-down, internally driven but driven by many and different actors over time. This makes the innovation process more complex, as it takes place in a wider ecology of actors where many can contribute with ideas and resources throughout the innovation process. How to manage this context in bringing forward new innovations probably requires new leadership styles that integrates viewpoints while also manipulating viewpoints towards concrete actions and innovation outcomes. This also requires the ability to stop innovations.

A final issue which might be considered in this chapter is how informal and personal organizations (Billis) influence hybrids innovation patterns. The example of personal organization mentioned by Billis is book clubs, and such may exist inside public organizations. More generally numerous personal and informal networks amongst people exist that adhere to different logics than formal organization, which could be important to understand better mechanisms for adopting or resisting innovations.

 

CHAPTER 5: PUBLIC INNOVATIONS: INSTITUTIONS AND ACTORS

Innovations occur not only in organizational settings but also in institutional (and constitutional) settings. They might be shaped or stimulated by policies, which themselves occur in institutional settings, including laws and regulations. Innovations might also be intended to create systemic reform, for which institutional change may be needed. On the one hand if this context is open and stimulating, then social and public innovations may emerge, thrive, continue and be consolidated.  But, on the other hand such innovations also need to become embedded in existing structures, laws and regulations and to have broad legitimacy if they are to survive. In other words, for innovations to create sustained impact they need to be mainstreamed. This chapter examines how this can happen (or be thwarted) though examining institutions and actors in innovation processes. 

Institutional change is a complex set of processes involving different types of forces and agents. While institutions may create pressures towards stasis, there is usually (some) space for agency which can make institutional change happen. The literature has developed concepts like ‘policy entrepreneurship’ and ‘institutional entrepreneurship’. It is deployed in the literature on sustainability transitions when advocating the institutionalization of niche innovations, while at the same time resisting pressures to conform to mainstream practices which would kill creativity which develops innovations (Smith et al. 2013).  Institutional theory can help explain how innovations thrive or falter, in spite of the recent critiques of institution theory (eg Alvesson and Spicer, 2020) which complains that it has become a catch-all theory. Early institutional theory focused on stasis but more recent work has focused on how change (including innovation) happens (e.g. Scott, Suddaby, van Gestel). 

In 1988 DiMaggio introduced the notion of ‘institutional entrepreneurs’ as being actors who initiate changes that contribute to transforming existing institutions or creating new ones. These (groups of) individuals or (groups of) organizations are ‘change agents’.  Battilana and Boxenbaum (2009, 74-78) see two types of enabling conditions for actors to become institutional entrepreneurs. The first are ‘field conditions’ like crisis situations, and the level of institutionalization or fragmentation in the field (which pose alternatives, or allow for entrepreneurship). The second enabling condition is the ‘social position an actor occupies within an organizational field’, being for example the status, hierarchical position, or informal network position, but also individual characteristics like demographic and psychological factors.

The activities that institutional entrepreneurs typically undertake are, a) developing a vision, including several types of framing, b) mobilizing people behind that vision, by way of use of discourse and resources mobilization, including formal authority and social capital, and c) motivating them to achieve and sustain the vision. Battilana and Boxenbaum (2009, 78) point out that ‘because they initiate change that break with existing institutions’ institutional entrepreneurs ‘face specific challenges arising from other actors’ institutional embeddedness as well as potential political opposition’.   

The concept of ‘institutional entrepreneurship’ is related to Kingdon’s (1995) concept of ‘policy entrepreneurship’ which can be used to open a ‘window of opportunity’ to get an issue on the political policy agenda. This ‘window of opportunity’ focuses on the ‘field conditions’ mentioned above. For such a window of opportunity to open three ‘streams’ must be aligned: the problem stream (is the condition considered a problem?), the policy stream (are there policy alternatives that can be implemented?) and the political stream (are politicians willing and able to make a policy change?).

Ansell and Gash (2012) and Crosby et al. (2017) point to the important potential role of public sector leaders as policy entrepreneurs, who can act as sponsors, champions, catalysts and implementers of collaborative innovations which may lead to institutional change. Sponsors are actors such as legislators or agency heads who have political authority they can deploy to channel resources and legitimacy to innovative projects. Champions are people who rely mainly on their informal authority to convene or facilitate a collaborative process. Catalysts are the ones with formal or informal authority who stimulate professionals to ‘think out of the box’. Implementers are the people who envision how new and bold ideas can be transformed into institutional and operational designs that will work in practice. They can also co-ordinate action across multiple agencies. They connect ‘big ideas with the creation of new norms and routine in the task environment’(Crosby et al. 2017, 661). 

In recent years the notions of ‘institutional entrepreneurship’ and ‘policy entrepreneurship’ have become less focused on individuals or organizations being ‘heroes’ (Cels 2009), and more on distributed heroism (Meijer 2013) and collaborative leadership.

Discussions on public innovations can go further in taking into account the debate on multi-level governance (Marks and Hooghe 2004; Torfing and Triantifillou; Moore and Hartley), which focuses on the roles different levels of government have. For the public innovation debate the relevance of this debate lies in the appreciation that innovations and policies which are developed at the local level ultimately will need to become embedded in national (and for some nations European) institutional contexts if they aim to have broader impact than just the locality they are developed in.  Some innovations are developed nationally and embedded locally (e.g. the establishment of the welfare state, the NHS, Norwegian State Oil). This requires a focus on the interdependencies and institutional power relations within multi-level governance. A case in point would be social and public innovations which are developed in local multi-actor networks in the domain of the reception and integration of migrants and refugees. Scholars such as Bak-Jorgensen (2012), Scholten (2012), and Caponio and Jones-Correa (2018) focus on the ways in which different levels of government interact, thereby concentrating on showing the growing role of local government in migration governance and how cities are developing their own policies and practices, sometimes not aligned to national policies.

Related are recent studies on public innovation by city networks. These focus on the institutional entrepreneurship which cities seem to be taking in norm-generation in international law. Oomen and Baumgärtel (2018) and Oomen (2019) analyse this ‘jurisgenerative role’ of transnational municipal networks (TMNs). They call these TMNs the ‘new frontier’ in international law generally and in human rights law specifically. They analyze how local authorities collaborating in networks have first started to play a crucial role in guaranteeing the minimum rights of refugees during the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’, and after this gradually became an established actor in the field of international human rights law. Oomen et al. show that TMNs ‘seek to inform and influence the agenda and development of international law and policy’. They point out that this simultaneously does have another function. Norm-generating processes provide cities the opportunity of ‘rallying local governments around similar interests and values’ (Oomen, Baumgärtel & Durmus 2020). So city-networks seem to develop radical public innovations by simultaneously combining the horizontal building of alliances with institutional entrepreneurship aimed at embedding innovations in international law.

This seems to align closely with developments in the literature on sustainability transitions (Markard et al. 2012, Sengers et al. 2016, Patterson et al. 2016, Swilling & Hajer 2017), which points at the crucial role of ‘entrepreneurial urban governance’. This allows for broad coalitions of urban ‘agents of change’ to emerge, within a multi-level governance context of active and goal-setting states which enable innovations by supporting and investing in them (Swilling & Hajer 2017, 7, Swilling 2020, 188).

In the next sections, we focus in more detail on institutional and community-based actors. 

 

Change agents, catalysts and opponents

Change agents are those who are engaged in bringing about innovation.  They may be active in creating ideas, in setting up and learning from pilots and prototypes, they could be the people who embed and sustain innovation.  They could be the people who actively end innovations through, for example, stage-gate processes or through exnovation.

Catalysts are not directly involved in bringing about change but they can help it along in various ways.  For example, they may raise questions about current ways of doing things, provide support to change agents, help to provide meaning and framing of new ways of looking at services and public challenges. 

Opponents may hinder or block an innovation either explicitly and actively, or they may fail to support the innovation.  Sometimes this is labelled “resistance” but many would argue that this label is too simplistic and does not reflect the range of reasons and motivations for not supporting a change or an innovation (Burnes; Piderit).

Furthermore, many of the factors which influence innovation stalling or failure, as in wider organizational change, relate to systems issues and the difficulties of implementing new features of process, practice, service or products within an existing system (Behn). These are institutional rather than agent issues, though sometimes analysed as though they are only about “resistant” individuals.  

Public innovations may come from national policy initiatives (which themselves may be innovations) e.g. new practices, new services, new products enacted through legislation and statutory instruments.  Examples of NHS, Open University, the Norwegian State Oil Company. Not been done before, wide implications.  Initiated by and mobilised through elected politicians.  Needs professionals to make it happen but the big ideas come from politicians.

They may come from local politicians – e.g. in local government, from political authorities running police etc.  Have the idea, champion it, help to arrange discussion with stakeholders so that pros and cons well-rehearsed, build acceptance and create heat-shield for managers who are designing detail.  (example: Ken Livingstone and London congestion charging; Jacob and Eva’s example of that local govt in/near Copenhagen which involved citizens in e.g. designing skateboarding park). 

May come from professionals, through their daily work they may see improved ways of providing services or preventing harm.  (E.g Manchester police Netflix and pizzas to prevent runaway children; Great Ormond St hospital use of Formula 1 techniques) and from networks of professionals)

From citizens – those who are experts because they use a service a lot (e.g. expert patients); those who see a gap which they can help fill (lots of examples from Covid-19 pandemic e.g. gin makers now making alcohol-based hand sanitisers; haute couture fashion houses manufacturing face masks) and those who band together to demand, offer or advocate for innovation (e.g. food bank charities to alleviate poverty). 

Open innovation – an invitation for whoever wants to join in creating an innovation or refining one.  A great resource for public organizations but also a risk if some contributors more dominant than others and also some services (especially coercive and regulatory services) may wish to limit the amount of open innovation. 

Reference briefly back to chapter on state, market and civil society on private sector innovations for the public good and hybrid organizations 

The role of particular actors can vary according to the broad phase of innovation.  The role of change agents and catalysts in starting up an innovation can be different from their roles while trying to sustain innovations or when trying to mainstream innovations.  Sharing promising practice (diffusion) may also be different again.

 

Entrepreneurs in and around public organizations

Some have described innovators in public organizations as ‘intrapreneurs’ and it has been argued to be a valuable means by which to encourage innovation in otherwise bureaucratic public organizations (Hartley, Sørensen and Torfing, 2013), in a ‘neo-Weberian’ state (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2004) with a stronger emphasis on managers acting as entrepreneurs (e.g. Drechsler and Katell, 2008).  This is also found in the exhortation from Moore (1995) for public managers to have “restless, value-seeking imagination”.

Another literature relevant to this concept of public manager entrepreneurs derives from institutional theory and is about ‘institutional work’ and concerned with the effect of individuals on organizational action.  Institutional work is the broad category of purposive action aimed at creating, maintaining and disrupting institutions (e.g. Lawrence and Suddaby, 2006; see also Nicolette van Gestel).  There has been considerable work about the role of individuals in e.g. advocating, defining, vesting, constructing identities, changing normative associations, educating and so on.  How far this has been related to public innovation will be explored in the chapter.  How far such institutional work also examines the role of teams and coalitions not just individuals will also be explored.  For public innovation, how far is institutional work undertaken by politicians, citizens and partners, not only those within formal organizations?  This will be explored.

In this chapter we aim to identify how leverage points can support successful innovation diffusion, induce the de-institutionalization of existing configurations, and lead to the institutionalization of new designs in different contexts. These leverage points can be design features or practices in innovations that can challenge existing structures and induce change processes.

Apart from the broader socio-economic and political context, we are particularly interested in structural conditions of innovations, such as their organizational and relational arrangements, that allow to mobilize learning, resources and networks (Christensen et al. 2016; Ansell and Torfing 2015), and the actors who, due to their deliberate activities (‘institutional work’), enable institutional change processes (Battilana et al. 2009; Garund et al. 2007, Ansell and Gash 2012).

Next to leverage points, we will seek to identify key mechanisms through which change dynamics and scaling of innovative experiments across levels can be activated. Such mechanism can range from framing and creating alternative narratives (imaginaries) with the aim to disrupt existing institutions, over targeted networking and collaboration (for resources, knowledge and skills) to upscale an innovation, to targeted lobbying and advocacy seeking to foster the political and institutional embedding in a broader context (Turnheim et al. 2018).

 

The leadership of innovation

It is a commonplace to say that innovation benefits from the exercise of leadership.  Successful firms with innovation are led by charismatic and visionary leaders, for example.  This seems to imply that a particular leader (generally a chief executive) can have a major impact on innovation and on firm success.

However, we argue that the processes of leadership are more nuanced, and also there is a need to be clearer about how and why leadership may influence innovation (and exnovation).  There is surprisingly little research on leadership to create and sustain innovation, and even less about public innovation.

We take leadership to be a process of mobilising action rather than being about a position in an organization, so leadership can occur from any role, whether at the top, in the middle or at the bottom of an organization, though a hierarchical position does provide a source of legitimacy and influence.  Furthermore, leadership may not just be by a single leader, but can be shared or distributed – part of a ‘leadership constellation’ (Denis et al) both within and outside a public organization.  Dual leadership is particularly relevant to many public organizations, notably a politician working closely with a senior public servant.  (Hartley and Manzie). 

Some research on private sector innovation and some on public innovation (e.g. in healthcare) has suggested that particular styles of leadership may be relevant.  For example, transformational leadership (Bass etc) has been associated with major change, through its roots in charismatic leadership and the style being one which inspires positive feelings in followers.  The assumption then is that they are inspired to innovate.  But it is interesting that empirical research in health shows that transactional leadership is also important in organizational change and innovation because it is concerned with the enactment of clear goals and priorities, and this could be as important in sustaining innovation not just kicking it off.  To embed an innovation may require transactional leadership.

However, there is a great need to go beyond leadership styles (which tends to be interesting but very limited research) to understand what are the leadership processes and practices which stimulate innovation and which sustain it over time. Leadership may also have a role in calling time on an innovation which has outlived its usefulness (i.e. leading exnovation).  What leadership practices give public servants, citizens and others the confidence to raise questions, suggest ideas and seek for ways to improve governance and public services?

This chapter examines leadership practices, which help to support the different elements of innovation – broadly, creativity, piloting, implementation and diffusion.  All seem to need the ability to lead and model “intelligent failure” (Sitkin, 1992).  Sitkin argues that while failure must not be pursued for its own sake there are nonetheless certain types of failure which are safety- and survival-enhancing, and allow risk to be more effectively managed.  These failures, Sitkin argues, can be called intelligent failures, in other words, those “failures that are most effective at fostering learning” (Sitkin, 1992, p.243). 

The role of leadership in fostering curiosity, handling ambiguity, complexity and uncertainty while managing risk are explored.  All of these require a learning mind-set and organizational learning capacity.  The role of leadership in establishing and maintaining an innovation culture, with acceptance of intelligent failure is important.  This is not always easy for public organizations which also are accountable and responsible where failures occur. 

 

CHAPTER 6: COLLABORATIVE INNOVATION AND CO-CREATION

Comparing collaborative innovation across different governance regimes. 

In this chapter collaborative innovation is about the efforts where the public sector cooperates with other actors in delivering services to the citizens. The cooperation can be with for-profit firms, social entrepreneurs, non-profit actors and voluntary organizations. 

This chapter starts by outlining the three different governance regimes (ie. traditional public administration, new public management and new public governance) as the background to introducting collaborative innovation.  

There have been innovations under all three regimes.  Each approach is able to mobilise or catalyse innovation in different ways, as is shown with brief examples.  However, it is NPG (Osborne, others) which is most associated with collaborative innovation. Here, partnerships and networks with external actors are the main strategy to innovation along with an expanded capacity to meet the demands of the citizens. While competition is seen as the driving force in NPM, ‘horizontal’ collaboration is the main process for innovating public services in NPG. The rationale is that the public sector, with its limited resources, cannot manage to deliver all the services citizens expect and some other actors could be even better suited for certain deliveries. In addition there seemed to be a growing number of public problems that are treated as wicked; they are complex, and hard to solve without involving external actors (Koppenjan and Klijn 2004), for which collaborative approaches are often advocated.

Collaborative innovation, co-creation and open innovation

Collaboration can take place at the macro-, or inter-organizational level but it can also be at the micro-level  when public service providers cooperate with citizens, as clients or users of public services. In our discussion we will label this co-creation, based on an ongoing debate about how public services can add value for individual receivers of services. The co-creation part of the chapter is concerned with collaborative innovation specifically with service users and citizens themselves. 

Both co-production (Ostrom) and co-creation ( from service management) were originally used for interactions between public providers and individuals.  Some scholars have used the concepts interchangeably, creating confusion.

In the literature we find discussions of co-creation where the concept is used in a similar way to collaborative innovation (Steen et al. 2018, Tortzen 2019), which is understandable since co-creation is about creating something in collaboration. We will split our discussion between the macro and micro discussion.

Macro collaborative innovation

The discussion at the macro-level gives attention the expected advantages with collaboration (Roberts 2000, Hartley et al 2013, Osborne and Strokosch 2013, Torfing 2018, Torfing and Triantafillou 2016), but also the discussion of the limitations ( Hartley et al 2013, Wegrich 2018), Steen et al. 2018, Tortzen 2019).  We explore what theoretical frameworks and models help to explain when and how collaborative innovation ‘works’ across a range of contexts.  We also argue that collaborative innovation cannot be considered solely in terms of innovation processes but needs to be set in an institutional framework. 

Co-creation (Co-production).

NPM gave attention to public service delivery and the expressed goal was to make services more user-oriented. This has triggered a great discussion. Even if it is post-NPM, authors anchored in service management theories (from market thinking) have made central contributions (Vargo and Lusch, Grønroos, Skålen).

Vargo and Lusch introduced the dichotomy between a goods-dominant logic and a service-dominant logic (SDL). The value of a good is highest when it is new, and the value is delivered by the producer. The value of a service is not guaranteed in advance, it can be realized only in the interaction. An important aspect of SDL is that it goes beyond the dichotomy of goods and services. In SDL goods can be part of a service relation. The strength and weaknesses of SDL, adapted to public servies will be discussed. Here we will draw on works of Osborne and colleagues (Osborne, Radnor and Nasi 2012, Osborne and Strokosch 2013, Osborne 2018, Alford (2009, 2016) and others.

The aim of introducing service mangement (SM) and customer thinking in public sector was to improve the capacity to add private value for the clients through the interaction with a public service organization which aimed to add public value.

Co-creation is the bright side of side of the interaction, where value is added through the interaction, and Vargo and Lusch`s statement is that value is always added (Vargo and Akaka 2012). The dark side is when at least one partner sees the interaction and/or its outcome as value co-destruction. (Ple and Chumpitaz Caceres 2010, Echeverri and Skålen 2011, Prior and Marcos-Cuevas 2016). In the interaction at the micro-level the service receiver may want to add private value, to improve their situation.  For the service providers it can also be a goal to improve the situation for the receiver. But public providers are expected to take into account professional judgements of the client`s case and also to give priority to the creation of public value. We will discuss the balancing between private and public values in these interactions, and the strength and limitations of using service management theories in the analysis of public services. In a market situation a customer has the needed resources to pay for the services she wants (or otherwise is ignored).  In public sector there is a scarcity of resources, and since the customers do not pay market price for the services, they must accept they are sometimes not given priority in the distribution of resources.  The service management perspective focuses on the situation of the service receivers. Studies based within public administration theory focus on the situation of the front-line service providers, called street level bureacrats (Lipsky 1980, Dubois 2010, Caswell 2005, 2018, Zacka 2017). In these studies the bounded rationality of the providers, and how to handle them, are important topics. It is important to see these two theoretical traditions together when co-creation of services are discussed.

Open innovation

In addition, the private sector has pioneered approaches to open innovation – where a company invites expert users, amateurs and others to make suggestions for innovation or even to create innovations which may then be adopted by the firm.  There are famous examples from Lego, Nokia phones (when they existed) and open source software.  Von Hippel (2005) is a key exponent, also Chesbrough (2003) and others.  This is a radically different approach to innovation which involves harvesting ideas from the external environment rather than relying on specialists (e.g. R and D) within the organization (see also Hartley, 2014).  Crowdsourcing of ideas is one type of open innovation and in the public sector has been labelled citizensourcing. 

The idea of harvesting ideas from a range of stakeholders including citizens, expert patients etc has been adopted in parts of public services but public services have to exercise a degree of caution in a democratic context - that open ideas are genuinely for the public good rather than the capture of private interest.  This means thinking carefully about what public value is being created. 

Evaluating collaborative innovation

What are the situations in which collaborative innovation and/or co-creation are successful and what explains that success.  This section examines these issues and what further research is needed. 

 

CHAPTER 7:  DIGITALISATION AND SMART SOCIETIES

This chapter will not be written by the authors but by Dr Erna Ruijer and Dr Rianne Dekker, both Assistant Professors at the University of Utrecht, Netherlands (School of Governance) and both having been involved in EU research projects on aspects of digitization and also social media.

CHAPTER 8: INNOVATION: DIFFUSION, POWER AND TRANSLATION

This chapter has five parts.  It starts with Roger’s well known model, which is concerned with the spread of innovations that appear to be successful in one context and are deployed in another context.  Rogers’ work was seminal and is  concerned with the speed of diffusion and its efficacy (measured by adoption).  Diffusion is  largely seen as inevitable and speed is dependent on a number of factors. His concept of diffusion as providing relative advantage opens the way for a discussion of power and influence, although Rogers does not discuss power and influence.  His work has tended to view diffusion as similar to a chemical process.  The second part looks at the legacy of Rogers’ conceptualisation.  Some other models have built on Rogers in an implicit way, and have been adopted by policymakers in a rational, mechanistic, engineering way – with replication, roll-out and mainstreaming part of this implicit model.  This implicit model has been used extensively in discussions and policy about public service reform.  The third part critiques the diffusuion model in two ways - in relation to how organizations learn and are able to adopt/adapt ideas and practices from other contexts and in relation to power.  The fourth part of the chapter addresses power as it relates to the spreading and adoption or adaption of existing innovations in new contexts.  In the last part,  translation theory, both actor-network theory approach and the organizational approach will be discussed. These are diffusion theories that clearly see power as part of the translation process.

Diffusion and related concepts

Definition: «Diffusion is the process in which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among members of a social system (Rogers 2003, p. 5).  The chapter briefly discussions the different terms for spreading innovative practices:  diffusion, dissemination, sharing good practice, sharing promising practice, spreading innovation, recombinant innovation. 

According to Rogers, diffusion is affected  by:

• Attributes of the innovation ( relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, triability, observability)
• Adopter characterisitics and categories (the latter being innovators, early/late adopters, laggards)
Communication channels (mass media, similar individuals, people in a network).

·         Social system ( similarity of units, social norms, opinion leaders).

 

The two-step hypothesis (Katz and Lazarfeld) can be important in the spread of innovations; people trust information from media or authorities less than they do opinion leaders who filter and interpret this information.   Social capital is developed in networks and can be important both for creating and distributing innovations. Strong social ties are important but also the strength of weak ties (Granovetter ) are relevant.  Freeman`s (1977) concept of betweeness centrality is relevant.  Concepts from social capital theory are important in explaning diffusion, such as bridging and bonding (Putnam).

Rogers’ model can be useful for discrete and relatively simple innovations (hand washing in hospitals, hybrid corn etc.) but is more difficult to apply where the innovation is more complex, multidimensional and service-based. Then it is harder to evaluate whether adoption has happened or not; and in addition some elements  may be adopted but not others; more subjective views about the innovation can be salient; and the policy context affects adoption (Greenhalgh et al 2013).

Denis et al (2002) noted that complex innovations may have a «hard» element and a «soft» element. The hard element can remained unchanged but the soft element will be modified according to context.

Diffusion as replication

There are other models of diffusion which echo the influential Rogers’ approach.  Public sector reform has often been led by a somewhat mechanistic diffusion approach – based on communications and the assumption that innovations can be ‘rolled ou’ or replicated. 

But Nelson and Winter show, from private sector research, that replication is very rare and only tends to occur in near-laboratory conditions (which public services are not).  Some knowledge transfer models are similar in assuming the evidence is enough to create change (innovation) in organizations. 

Diffusion as learning

Diffusion is both about receiving information and distributing it further. However, a different approach is less about information ‘push’ (getting others to adopt) and more about information ‘pull’ (the desire of an organization to gain knowledge).  

Absorptive capacity, or learning capacity, is important for the capability of receiving information and turning that into useable knowledge. (Cohen & Levinthal).  Innovation and learning are closely linked because additional knowledge creation is required each time diffusion happens – unlearning old practices, exploring new possibilities, and developing and integrating new practices (Behn).  It involves both tacit and explict knowlege (Nonaka, 1995).  Those organizations which already have the capacity to learn are more able to use new learning.  Adaption more than adoption is more common (Hartley and Rashman). 

Recombinant innovation or «innofusion» takes innovations from elsewhere and takes them into a very different context and set of practices, often across sectors, e.g. from Formula 1 to hospitals, or from environmental studies to fire and rescue.  In recombinant innovation, it is less diffusion and more «harvesting» of ideas from other sectors.  The focus is outwards to other organizatons and sectors (innovation pull). 

 

Power

According to Russell, power is a key concept in social sciences, similar to energy in physics.  Power may contribute to explaining both why some innovations are distributed, and some delayed, or even not spread (Fitzgerald et al. 2003).  Public innovations can be seen as part of the struggle of diverse interests within society. Innovation is therefore, essentially, about politics. Politics can be defined as the struggle about  the distribution of limited resources in society, and power can be defined as the ability to reach desired goals.

Power (like energy) can take different forms, but the basic forms are power connected to actors, and structural power. These forms are connected, since the power of the actors can depend on the context. Steven Lukes (2005) defines three main approaches to the analysis of power: the first is focussing on decisions (who get their interests realized in conflict situations). The second is the power of non-decisions: the ability to bring cases on the agenda and denying other cases to be brought there. The third face of power is the hidden structural power; some ways of thinking are taken for granted, and some understandings are dominating the public discourse totally (hegemonic discourses).  Rhetorical innovations ( Hartley 2005) may be seen as using language to exercise power but the chapter examines other aspects of power in relation to innovations too.

Translation

Translation theories are a particular set of diffusion theories pinpointing the active process of absorbing new information and distributing it further. Power can be executed through filtering and adapting the message. Røvik (2007) use decontextualization and contextualization as basic concepts: an idea, or a practice, must first be taken out of a context , and then re-placed in a new one.  Tacit knowledge is a challenge; it cannot be transferred easily and attempts may be need to represent tacit knowledge with metaphors and analogies.

Within the actor network theory (ANT) tradition, Bruno Latour has  been a central author. Within this tradition translation is about persuading and convincing . The translater must work like a salesman, selling new solutions. It is not enough that the innovation is valuable in itself.

Contest in diffusion

If innovation is inherently about politics and power, then the understanding of diffusion benefits from being linked with democratic dialogue – whether this is the «contested democratic practice» of public value (e.g. Benington, 2015); the public sphere of Habermas or the need for agonistic pluralism of Mouffe.  These are different ways to try to weigh up contested and plural interests in society. 

 

CHAPTER 9:  EVALUATING PUBLIC INNOVATIONS

Public innovations aim to create public value. This means aiming for two aspects (Benington 2017): what the public values (being instrumental goals, preferences, legitimacy), and what is of value to the public (including deontological goals like freedom and equality). How do we know that public value has actually been created? Moore (2013) has written on how to recognize public value, in which he, among other things, developed a public value scorecard, with which public organisations and the broad range of their stakeholders might score both aspects of public value.  However relevant and interesting this method is for public organisations providing stable and predictable services, we argue that it is not sufficient to evaluate public innovations.  Public innovations seem to need a different approach because they are dynamic and may not have much consistent and reliable data over time.  Innovations may have specific ways of creating public value, for example by experimentation, bricolage and living labs, which involve processes of generating and iteratively refining policy and practice solutions (ideas, innovations, designs, policies, programs, etc.) based on continuous feedback from their users and with the goal of addressing a problem within its context.  Ansell and Bartenberger (2016) label this ‘generative experimenting’.  Although there is a growing literature on generative experimenting, the role of evaluation is underemphasized. ‘Labbing’ is sometimes accused of using ‘quick and dirty methodologies’ (Tõnurist et al., 2017: 20) to evaluate whether the policy solution works.  Milley et al. (2012) conclude that few social innovation studies make explicit links to the evaluation of capacity building. As a result, it is unclear what types of evaluation can support public policymaking through generative experimenting and what types of knowledge it produces. Generally, it is assumed that generative experimenting leads to practical knowledge on how a solution works in a specific setting, but not to broader academic knowledge but this may be a limited view of evaluation.

Evaluation methods vary in the extent to which they contribute to lesson drawing for practice and to generalizable knowledge on the effectiveness of policy interventions. On the one hand, evaluation can test theories of policymakers, practitioners, stakeholders and evaluators underlying their professional work (Leeuw and Donaldson, 2015: 468).  Evaluation then generates actionable knowledge for practice.  On the other hand, evaluation can test scientific theories capable of contextualizing and explaining the consequences of policies, programs and evaluators’ actions. These include academic theories of policymaking and implementation, as well as theories that explain the behaviour of evaluands in their social and institutional surrounding (Ibid.: 470-1). When evaluation tests such theories, it contributes to academic knowledge on policy and practice solutions.

Generative experimenting places specific demands on evaluation. Evaluators need to immerse themselves in the real-world policy context in which design takes place (McGann et al., 2018). They need to work closely with the participants in the experiment and with the partners leading the experiment to establish the effectiveness and desirability of new solutions. Also because of the often messy design process, evaluation needs to pay attention to and look out for unexpected turns and unplanned outcomes. Evaluation of public innovations could draw on two main traditions in evaluation studies and aim to combine these. 

Evaluation research has evolved along with changes in policymaking practices. In early rationalist approaches to policymaking, ex ante evaluation of the policy theory was common. The evaluator would scrutinize the problem and available policy solutions at hand to advise on the most suitable intervention (Nagel, 2002; Dunn, 2004). Along with New Public Management approaches to governance in the 1990s, positivist, ex-post approaches to evaluation – that had been present since the 1950s and 1960s - underwent a renaissance (Vedung, 2010). Within this paradigm, experimental and quasi-experimental methods of evaluation are used, with the randomized controlled trial viewed as the gold standard of policy evaluation (depending on the research question of course).  Evaluation then measures discrepancies between the expected and actual policy performance, preferably by using a counterfactual (Dunn, 2004).  Evaluation as science-for-policy generating actionable knowledge shifted to science-of-policy generating academic knowledge with the aim of objectively measuring the effectiveness of the intervention, independent of context.

During the 1990s, new models of evaluation emerged in response to critique on positivist models of policy evaluation and returning to evaluation as a science-for-policy. One example is ‘theory of change’ and realist approaches to evaluation which offer a post-positivist position. Their main critique on the positivist paradigm is that it conceives policy programmes as unified entities through which recipients are processed.  Instead, later theories acknowledge that people may be subjected to, and experience, policy programmes in different ways under different circumstances (Blamey and McKenzie, 2007). Rather than conceptualizing contextual factors as confounding variables to be controlled (Pawson and Tilley, 1997) theory-based evaluation approaches maintain that ‘context is key to understand the interplay between program and effects’ (Blamey and McKenzie, 2007: 441). These methods produce situated knowledge, taking into account the social as well as institutional context.

Theory of change approaches aim to reconstruct the assumptions of practitioners in a project on how and why a solution will work. The evaluator elicits the implicit and explicit assumptions and then constructs methods for data collection and analysis that are able to track the outcomes to see which theories hold (Weiss, 1997). In order to explain why some assumptions hold and others do not, this approach studies the links between activities, outcomes, and contexts of the solution (Connell and Kubisch, 1998; MacKenzie and Blamey, 2005). Ultimately, theory of change evaluation aims to produce and integrate actionable and academic knowledge (Weiss, 1995). Realist evaluation aims to understand what works, for whom, in what circumstances and why (Pawson and Tilley, 1997; Contandriopoulos and Brousselle, 2012). More than theory of change evaluation, realist evaluation is concerned with uncovering generalizable causal mechanisms on why the intervention works, generating academic as well as actionable knowledge (Blamey and MacKenzie, 2007).

Developmental evaluation has gained in popularity as an approach to evaluation, particularly in complex innovation environments where the goals and paths towards these goals are evolving and where interactions between systems lead to emergent properties (Patton, 2011; Lawrence et al., 2018). The primary focus of evaluation is on adaptive learning rather than or as well as accountability. The evaluator may be embedded in the project as a team member and intervenes in the innovation process by providing intermediate and real-time feedback to inform further development. The approach is flexible, with new measures and monitoring mechanisms evolving as understanding of the situation deepens and the project’s goals emerge. Related to this is the work by Scriven (1996) who advocates minimal theory use in evaluation and losing the distinction between intended and unintended outcomes altogether. Developmental evaluation is primarily concerned with generating actionable knowledge and fostering use of evaluation results (cf. Contandriopoulos and Brousselle, 2012).

These two models provide useful starting points for evaluation of generative experimenting in public policymaking, especially where programs are ‘complex’ and aim to intervene in complex systems. This refers to interventions involving multiple partners and components, where outcomes are uncertain, emergent and there are non-linear pathways to impact, and where questions of value are broader than solely assessing causality (Mayne and Stern, 2013).  Theory of change approaches promote attention for diverging ideas on workable solutions. They also seek understanding of the context in which the policy is implemented in order to explain differences in effectiveness and user-experience. This fits the real-world setting of experimentation in design experiments and living labs. Developmental evaluation supports innovation processes by identifying emerging outcomes and feeding intermediate evaluation results into the next phase of the design process. It advocates a prominent role of the user in design and evaluation and demands reflexivity on the role of evaluation and the evaluator in producing certain outcomes. This fits co-creation in innovation. There are also important differences between these approaches including the role of theory in evaluation and whether formative or summative judgement is either desired or possible.

 

CHAPTER 10: CONCLUSIONS

The conclusions will summarise key themes from the book’s chapters – ensuring that sufficient attention is paid to the concept of public (with associated ideas of politics, power, public value, the public sphere) as well as the concept of innovation (processes, types, relations to improvement, exnovation and so on).  The chapter will draw together threads in a way which shows that public innovation is established as a field in its own right, with a body of knowledge, with key frameworks and concepts. 

However, a number of themes still deserve further exploration and we will use the conclusions to stimulate thought by summarising the state of the art and the gaps remaining:

·         The book has laid considerable store in understanding innovation in its organizational and institutional setting.  Public innovation also needs understanding in its constitutional and democratic setting.  This means taking an inter-disciplinary approach to the field.  However, while context is often a mantra of social sciences, really pinning down which aspects of context seem to be particularly important in particular circumstances is crucial. 

·         Open innovation.  This has become more important across all sectors, and there is currently quite a fashion in public administration to encourage “co-creation” or “co-production” in public innovation.  But has there yet been sufficient analysis and theorising about the constraints on open innovation for public services compared with that which is encouraged for private services. 

·         Digital innovations are legion but how far has public innovation theory and practice explored what are the implications of widespread digitisation (eg smart cities, internet of things, big data) for the functioning of democracy and for the maintenance of the public sphere. 

·         Diffusion and the sharing of “promising practices” has received greater attention but there are still areas to understand and questions to ask. 

·         Hybrid innovations occur where there are hybrid organizations (part private, part public for example) and there is as yet insufficient understanding of how different ‘institutional logics’ affect how innovation is practiced and evaluated. 

·         There is scope for more realist and developmental evaluations of innovation – “what works, for whom, in what circumstances and why” (Pawson and Tilley, 1997).  This means paying more attention to the context within which innovation takes place – the societal and institutional context and the organizational context of cultures, structures and power.

·         There is scope for greater attention to the role of politicians in public innovation.  This is starting to happen but there is scope for more research.  What is their role not only in setting policies, but also in championing an innovation, shielding managers from adverse comment while the innovation is developed, and checking that the innovation works for a variety of stakeholders. 

·         There is a role of more public innovation theory and research which is critical in the sense that it focuses on how power is used and abused.  Such power may be formal or it may be culturally embedded in practices, assumptions and values (Foucault). 

·         Most importantly perhaps, we need to set public innovation in its democratic setting.  Research and writing needs to ensure that relevant stakeholders are included in the analysis (politicians, managers, citizens and service users for example) and that the processes and outcomes of innovation are evaluated with a view to whether they enhance or detract from “the good society”, including democracy itself.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1] Maybe involve categories from (leadership in) collaborative governance: stewards, mediators, catalysts (Ansell & Gash 2012); add other roles (Crosby, ‘t Hart, Torfing 2017); and add from Bason (2010) a.o. on co-creation

 

O autorze

Rolf Rønning is Professor of Social Policy at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, and Visiting Professor at The Open University, UK. 

Jean Hartley is Professor of Public Leadership at The Open University Business School, The Open University, UK. 

Lars Fuglsang is Professor in the Department of Social Sciences and Business at Roskilde University, Denmark, where he heads the research group on Innovation in Service and Experience. 

Karin Geuijen is an Assistant Professor in Public Management in the Department of Governance at Utrecht University, The Netherlands.

Blurb

“This gem of a book on public innovation deals directly with the politics fundamentally underpinning it and the challenges of assessing its impacts. The authors systematically work through several thorny issues related to defining public innovation and what it creates (or does not), and the multidisciplinary framework which shapes the structure of the book is a terrific resource. Their focus on public innovation as a space where societal problems are contested and addressed is clear, convincing, and useful.”

— Jenny Lewis, The University of Melbourne, Australia 

Public innovation is distinctive from private sector innovation by being set in a political system rather than a market. The roles of citizens and elected politicians as well as public servants and other stakeholders are frequently relevant. Public organizations can be creators, funders, orchestrators or sense-makers of innovations, which are carried out with the aim of benefitting society. 

This book provides a comprehensive insight into the theory and practice of public innovation using a wide range of research evidence about the processes, drivers and barriers, stakeholders and outcomes of innovation. Using the lens of public value, the book offers a stimulating discussion of how public innovation is valued and contested in current societies. 

Valuing Public Innovation aims to help develop a deeper understanding of innovation and how to use that knowledge in practical ways. This is essential reading for academics and students in the fields of innovation, organisation studies, public administration and public policy, as well as for policymakers and practitioners. 

Rolf Rønning is Professor of Social Policy at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, and Visiting Professor at The Open University, UK. 

Jean Hartley is Professor of Public Leadership at The Open University Business School, The Open University, UK. 

Lars Fuglsang is Professor in the Department of Social Sciences and Business at Roskilde University, Denmark, where he heads the research group on Innovation in Service and Experience. 

Karin Geuijen is an Assistant Professor in Public Management in the Department of Governance at Utrecht University, The Netherlands.