Enhancing Public Innovation by Transforming Public Governance?

Intensity of innovation in public sector organizations: The role of push and pull factors

“…First, the conclusions from this study contribute to research on open and collaborative innovation in the public sector. While the findings support the arguments in this literature that public organizations can benefit from external factors ‘pushing’ innovation (Sørensen and Torfing ; Torfing and Triantafillou ), they also clearly show that such push sources of innovation are enabled by the innovation capabilities of the organization itself. While similar results have been found in the private sector (Lichtenthaler and Lichtenthaler ), this study indicates that this same process takes place in the public sector.…”

“…Our understanding of innovation in the public sector context, however, is underdeveloped (e.g., Potts and Kastelle ; Osborne and Brown ; Sørensen and Torfing ; Gonzalez et al ; Torfing and Triantafillou ). Moreover, a recent systematic review of studies on innovation in the public sector concluded that the literature lacks a ‘clear theoretical underpinning’ and does not relate to existing theories on innovation within organizations (de Vries et al , p. 161).…”

“…Further, this sector faces increased demands for new and/or better services, more cost-efficient solutions and alternative ways to interact with its citizens (Walker 2006;Albury 2011;de Vries et al 2016). Many scholars agree that innovation is central to the public sector's ability to deal with these challenges (Osborne and Brown 2011;Torfing and Triantafillou 2016;Demircioglu and Audretsch 2017). Innovation has the potential to improve not only the effectiveness but also the problem-solving capacities of organizations in the public sector (de Vries et al 2016).…”

Collaborative Innovation, New Technologies, and Work Redesign

“…A growing interest in workplace and employee‐led innovation has informed numerous recent policy initiatives and research projects in European Union (EU) states, as governments have sought new solutions to “productivity puzzles” in the form of support for work redesign and job enrichment strategies designed to tap the innovative potential of employees (for a review, see European Commission ). Torfing and Triantafillou (, 71) chart how a parallel shift across many EU states has seen policy makers seek out new approaches to innovation “to solve intractable problems” and respond to “citizens who have growing expectations of the quality and availability of public services.” De Lancer Julnes, reviewing U.S. evidence, concurs that “the desire to address intractable problems using collaborative arrangements” has driven new forms of public service networking designed to connect up employees' resources and energies in order to “increase the capacity of organizations” (2015, 27). These shifts may be particularly visible in health care, where communities of practice that network professionals' complementary expertise have been identified as a potential source innovation in both interorganizational and intraorganizational settings (Pattinson, Preece, and Dawson ).…”

Designing for Policy Success

“…The second possibility is to pursue policy options that are new and thus untested within the jurisdiction, sector, or network at hand. This explorative mode involves at a minimum the explicit tailoring to local conditions of programs and policy instrument mixes borrowed elsewhere, and more radically the development of new frames on existing conditions and problems, the engagement of new stakeholders or a realignment of existing stakeholders, a search for knowledge that departs from established truths, the discovery of new values or the recalibration of existing values and calculi (Torfing and Triantafillou, 2016). In combination, these may generate completely new policy designs and delivery mechanisms that have the potential to increase public problem-solving capacities and forge progress on issues that defied existing governance repertoires.…”