Open innovation and public administration: transformational typologies and business model impacts

Abstract

Extant research demonstrates that e-Government initiatives often fall short of achieving innovative forms of government and governance due to a techno-centric focus that limits such initiatives to minor improvements in service delivery. While it is evident that innovation is central to modernising and transforming governmental organisations, and that the co-creation of services by public authorities and community groups is an essential component of realising the benefits of investment in information and communication technology, there is little research focusing on the nature of innovation in transforming governmental organisations and services. Addressing this gap in the literature, this paper explores how open innovation strategies can transform public administration by examining how a network of municipalities in Sweden transforms value creation and service delivery by collaborating with each other and with external parties to accelerate the creation and exploitation of innovation. Using a case study with embedded units of analysis, four emerging typologies of governmental transformation based on open innovation are identified. The paper illustrates how these open innovation typologies (i) transform the organisation of the municipalities and (ii) help them deliver high quality co-created services to citizens. By examining the strategic and operational aspects that facilitate such activities, the analysis reveals the impact of open innovation on the business models of public authorities. The paper concludes that open innovation practices represent a more radical manifestation of transformational government than previously envisaged; signalling not only fundamental change in the nature of value creation and service delivery by public authorities, but potentially in the nature of their organisation.

Keywords:

• open innovation
• business models
• public administration
• transformational government

Acknowledgements

This work has been funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS) through the O3C Business Models Project.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joseph Feller

About the authors

Joseph Feller is a senior lecturer in Business Information Systems at University College Cork, Ireland. He is the co-author of Understanding Open Source Software Development (Addison-Wesley, 2002) and co-editor of Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software (The MIT Press, 2005). His work on open source software, inter-organizational collaboration and open innovation has been published in a variety of international peer-reviewed journals (including Information Systems Research, the Information Systems Journal, the Journal of Strategic Information Systems, and Information Technology and People) and conference proceedings (including the International Conference on Information Systems and the European Conference on Information Systems).

Patrick Finnegan

Patrick Finnegan is a professor of Information Systems at the Australian School of Business, University of New South Wales, and a Senior Editor of the Information Systems Journal. He previously held an Associate Professorship in Management Information Systems at University College Cork, Ireland, and was President of the Irish Chapter of the Association for Information Systems from 2006 to 2008. His research on inter-organisational systems, electronic business and open strategies has been published in the proceedings of leading IS conferences and in a variety of journals (including Information Systems Research, the European Journal of Information Systems, the Information Systems Journal, the Journal of Information Technology, Information Technology and People, the International Journal of Electronic Commerce, DATABASE, and Electronic Markets).

Olof Nilsson

Olof Nilsson is a senior lecturer in Informatics/Information Systems at Mid Sweden University, Sundsvall, Sweden. His research focuses on access to Public Information Systems, and he has taken an active part in two ‘triple helix’ projects developing Open Source applications for public authorities. In 2008, he was a post-doctoral research fellow at University College Cork, Ireland, researching how open source software facilitates the transformation of public service and government. His research has been published in the International Journal of Public Information Systems and the International Journal for Humanistic and Social Computing, as well as a number of international conference proceedings (including ECIS, ICIS, IRIS, IFIP 8.2, and IFIP 8.6).