John Damm Scheuer

Towards a Deeper Understanding of Public Sector Innovation

This chapter contributes to a deeper understanding of public sector service innovation, exploring how it evolves in interaction between actors in hierarchies, markets and networks. A typology of innovations in public sector services is developed and a model of public sector service production is presented. Then, drawing on an in-depth review of the public innovation, public policy and public administration literature, service innovation in three sorts of circuits and relationships between actors is identified. A number of characteristics of public sector service innovation are derived from the analysis, and it is concluded that public sector service innovations may be diverse and varied. They may be initiated top-down or bottom-up, formalised or policy based, organisation or employee led, and initiated by professionals or by users. It is suggested that the public service innovation process may be described as “co-evolution”, emphasising the view that change may occur in all interacting populations of public sector service organisations. Innovation is seen as happening in the encounter between people situated in hierarchies, networks and market-led organisations; and as evolving as iterative, interactive and heterogeneous processes where goals are often relatively unclear, resulting in innovations that must often be understood retrospectively rather than as intended outcomes of the execution of detailed plans.

The Role of Boundary Objects in Public-Private Innovation Networks The Story of Næstved Health School

This case study concerns a public-private collaboration in 2005–2008 between a private company, Falck Healthcare, and a municipality, Naestved commune, aimed at establishing a health school. The health school organised training courses of 10 weeks for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), type 2 diabetes and heart failure. The school was developed, tested out for a short period and then closed. The research project described and analysed the process through which the health school was established and showed how the inability of involved actors to construct an attractive boundary object may explain the lack of further public-private collaboration around the health school and thus the project’s lack of success. Boundary objects are objects that exist at the points where various social worlds meet in an arena of mutual concern. They have different meanings in different social worlds but their structure is common enough to make them recognisable, and a means of translation. Data were generated by means of document studies, interviews and talks with key actors.

Public-Private Innovation Networks: The Importance of Boundary Objects, Brokers and Platforms to Service Innovation

Collaboration across organisational boundaries is becoming more important for service innovation. But coordination across boundaries is not unproblematic, as shown in the literature. Actors have different working routines, different practices, time schedules, values, frames of reference, specialisations, cultures, habits, and so on. This is especially true in public-private collaboration where people have different professional roles, professional values and different conceptions of the user/citizen/client. Following the literature on boundary objects, it is argued that actors in such a context must collaborate in a disunified way by constructing a boundary object that can tie them together. The contribution of the chapter is to examine, in two Danish case studies, organisational aspects of this collaboration by looking into the specific roles of the broker and platform organisation, and the links between them, for shaping inter-organisational collaboration. The chapter compares innovation activities in two public-private innovation networks in services (ServPPINs) and discusses the role of brokers, platform organisation and boundary objects in the two cases.

Actors' balancing of criteria when translating an idea

Purpose – Taking the model of association as a point of departure the research question asked in the paper is: what is the role of translators and their criteria for choices in the translation of clinical pathways in a psychiatric ward?Design/methodology/approach – The paper is based on an explorative single case‐study. Data were collected through participative observation and document studies. A temporal bracketing approach to process studies were used where the chain of events were broken down into chronologically organized episodes and then submitted to rigorous analysis.Findings – The case‐analysis demonstrates that the role of human translators is to construct meaningful narratives that mobilize and enrol human as well as non‐human actors. Different translation proposals and translation criteria are continuously constructed, negotiated, tested out and weighted or balanced against each other by humans through the use of narratives. The analysis also demonstrates that other actors than humans may act a...