The Role of Public Innovation Labs in Collaborative Governance—The Case of the Gipuzkoa Lab in the Basque Country, Spain

Abstract

Public sector innovation labs have gained increasing importance as one of the material expressions of public sector innovation and collaborative governance to address complex societal problems. In the current international context, there are various experiences, interpretations, and applications of this concept with similarities and differences but all of them are based fundamentally on the establishment of new forms of participation and collaboration between governments and civil society. This paper aims to examine, through a case study, how policy innovation labs could play a prominent role in promoting decision-making at the local level in order to create a more sustainable public sector. To do this, this article focuses on an analysis of the “Gipuzkoa Lab”, a public innovation lab developed in the Gipuzkoa region located in the Basque Country, Spain, in order to confront future socio-economic challenges via an open participatory approach. An analysis of a pilot project to address worker participation, developed within this participatory process, indicates that these collaborative spaces have important implications for the formulation of public policies and can change public actions, yielding benefits and engaging citizens, workers, private companies and academics. This paper provides a contemporary approach to understanding good practice in collaborative governance and a novel process for facilitating the balance between the state and civil society, and between public functions and the private sphere, for decision-making. In particular, this case study may be of interest to international practitioners and researchers to introduce the increasingly popular concept of public sector innovation labs into debates of citizen participation and decision-making.

A Comparative Analysis of Municipal Public Innovation: Evidence from Romania and United States

“…With respect to the first goal, the comparison between organizational arrangements reflects upon the difficulty to formulate a unique and comprehensive definition for PSI labs, acknowledged in the literature [8,9]. Nonetheless, the specifics of each case do converge on the characterization provided by [75] of "trans-disciplinary collaborative spaces", with emphasis on the "common orientation to achieve public innovations aimed at solving social problems, through the use of massive data, application of experimental and agile methodologies, openness to collaboration with citizens and other organizations, and prototyping solutions to real problems in specific contexts" [76]. The novelty resides not on the side of existing differences, but rather on how these differences are positioned in the theoretical frameworks of OECD's innovation capacity, and the typology of behavioral insights.…”

Laboratórios de inovação em governo como intermediadores de problemas públicos na América Latina

“…Os laboratórios de inovação vêm sendo tratados como uma dessas expressões da concepção de modelos que materializam a inovação no campo público (Unceta, Barandiaran, & Restrepo, 2019). Estas iniciativas representam a criação de novas estruturas organizacionais, que desafiariam formas de inovação conduzidas internamente e de cima para baixo, implicando adaptações das atividades públicas de inovação (Tõnurist et al, 2017;Unceta et al, 2019;Fuglsang & Hansen, 2022).…”

“…Os laboratórios de inovação vêm sendo tratados como uma dessas expressões da concepção de modelos que materializam a inovação no campo público (Unceta, Barandiaran, & Restrepo, 2019). Estas iniciativas representam a criação de novas estruturas organizacionais, que desafiariam formas de inovação conduzidas internamente e de cima para baixo, implicando adaptações das atividades públicas de inovação (Tõnurist et al, 2017;Unceta et al, 2019;Fuglsang & Hansen, 2022). Dessa forma, tais laboratórios são considerados vias de experimentação nas quais o setor público pode testar e ampliar inovações, redesenhar serviços e processos existentes, desenvolver protótipos, bem como empoderar a participação dos cidadãos, facilitar processos de aprendizagem e ampliar competências inovadoras e capacidades de redes (Tõnurist et al, 2017).…”

Same same, but different…? The emergence of Public Sector Innovation Labs in theory and practice

“…The first description focuses on a dedicated place for innovation within institutions and the latter is often a space outside institutions that focuses more on societal aims. A special category within the broader interpretation of PSI labs in the analysed literature are policy labs, that sometimes include non-governmental stakeholders and aim to create new policies (Unceta et al, 2019).…”

“…The findings from this exercise corroborated with our literature mapping exercise in Figure 1. Scholars in our sample of fifteen publications also use these more established concepts to explore and analyse PSI labs (Cole, 2021; Unceta et al, 2019;Whicher & Crick, 2019). In our group of scholars we also clearly noticed that the researchers use more established concepts, such as living labs (Hansen & Fuglsang, 2020), innovation labs (Cole, 2021) and (public) policy labs (McGann et al, 2018) to understand the concept of PSI labs.…”