Collaborative Governance and Public Innovation in Northern Europe

Governments all over Northern Europe have placed public innovation high on the political agenda. European governance researchers are seeking to map the impact of efforts to promote public innovation with a particular focus on the role of collaborative forms of governance in achieving this. This introductory chapter provides a description of this new field of research - its emergence, character and maturity - with reference to the case studies presented in the following chapters. The case studies draw on a broad range of different theoretical and methodological schools of thought that each offers a unique contribution to developing a new, multi-disciplinary theory of public innovation. The case studies are mainly based on qualitative data; however, the authors note that quantitative studies and mixed methods could potentially advance the research field even further. Nevertheless, the case studies presented in the book point to a number of important preliminary findings regarding the role of collaborative forms of governance in enhancing public innovation: 1) Collaborative public innovation transforms mindsets, role perceptions and work forms; 2) Design matters for the success and failure of collaborative innovation processes; 3) Leadership is important for promoting collaborative innovation; and 4) Collaborative public innovation is relevant at all levels of governance. On these grounds, the chapter concludes that a promising research field is emerging but is still in its infancy and further research is needed in order to map the potential of, and barriers to, collaborative forms of public innovation in Northern Europe.

In this chapter, two different instruments of involving citizens and users in public sector are analyzed. More precisely, we focus on deliberative mini-publics and user-driven innovations. The chapter puts forward two empirical cases where these instruments have been experimented in Finland. These cases illustrate how the use of these instruments offers new roles and opportunities for citizens to influence policies and their implementation. The analysis sheds light on the underpinnings, procedures and outcomes of these instruments, and focuses on possible roles of citizens in public sector innovation. The cases analyzed in this chapter show that the impact of citizen involvement does not necessarily depend so much on the type of instrument used in involving citizens. Rather, openness and receptiveness by policy-makers appear to be more important than the intentions behind the used techniques. Furthermore, our case studies suggest that there may sometimes be trade-offs between the goals of inclusion and innovation capacity.

The chapter presents and discusses how we can conceptualize user involvement in the public sector, as well as users, in very different ways: As consumers, co-producers, lead users or citizens. One important question which is subsequently discussed, is what such different conceptualizations imply for citizenship understood in more traditional terms, i.e. defined by political deliberation and rights. This question is important because conceptualizations of users imply certain ideas about the public sector, state and society, which have political implications as well as implications for our understanding of citizenship. Thus, we need to be aware of what different perspectives of user involvement imply for citizenship and collaborative innovation in the public sector. The chapter is based on a literature study and uses an empirical case as an example to illustrate and discuss differences in democratic implications of different user conceptions. The chapter concludes that we need an increased awareness of how to work with the different user conceptions in collaborative innovation practices, and argues that is important to also include the concept of the welfare state citizen with rights, as none of the other user conceptions are explicit about rights.

This chapter aims to enhance our understanding of the relation between public innovation and organizational legitimacy. On the basis of the literature, we formulate the expectation that top-down innovation results in strengthening of a bureaucratic logic to producing legitimacy whereas bottom-up innovation results in more emphasis on a network logic. To investigate this expectation empirically, the chapter analyses the introduction and use of social media by the Dutch police. The outcomes challenge the expected relation: top-down innovation resulted in a more networked arrangement for legitimacy. We explain this finding by pointing out that the innovation process was infrastructural and empty in content: the content was provided through bottom-up innovation. We conclude that combinations of top-down and bottom-up practices can form a conceptual lens for studying the involvement of different organizational actors in processes of public innovation.

Collaborative innovation presents itself as a promising method for crafting innovative solutions to wicked problems. While the barriers and drivers of collaborative innovation have been studied extensively in the expanding collaborative innovation literature, there is still a need for more empirical studies of the role of public leadership in overcoming the barriers and strengthening the drivers of collaborative innovation. In order to contribute to this endeavour, this chapter conducts a cross-case analysis of 14 cases of collaborative innovation aimed at curbing gang violence in the city of Copenhagen. The chapter provides empirically informed answers to the questions of when and where leadership is particularly needed, what public leaders should be aware of when leading collaborative innovation processes and how they should go about developing innovative solutions to wicked problems such as the current Danish gang problem.

Dutch cities suffer from the behaviour of a small group of treatment-resistant serious habitual offenders. This situation challenges service coordination between municipal authorities, and representatives from care and criminal justice systems. In the last decade Dutch government introduced the Veiligheidshuis (Safety House) as a platform for managing the above safety issues; a network environment for coordinating social care and criminal justice interventions in the realm of crime and security. This study aims to analyse the nature of the problem of persistent lack of service coordination and the value of the introduction of the Veiligheidshuis. The collaboration with in the Veiligheidshuis in two cities was studied and the service career of six of the most persistent habitual offenders was followed and discussed with the concerned professionals and teams. In this action research grounded theory was used to analyse data from interviews and observations. This study demonstrates how the practical work of dealing with habitual offenders is afflicted by conflicting logics of care and criminal justice. Conflicting cultures, diametrically opposed organizational structures and poorly connecting professional domains result in fragmented and often ineffective interventions towards habitual offenders. This study also demonstrates that cross-sector collaboration in a dense network of agencies to help bridge the gap between divergent professional sectors is possible. The innovation of the Veiligheidshuis leads to the development of a collaborative framework for action and the creation of various coordination mechanisms. These in turn stimulated the timely sharing of information, and the development of mutual trust and support. As a practical result from this study case management meetings were redesigned in a recursive way. Thus the effectiveness of these meetings as a management tool was greatly enhanced.

The chapter discusses how multi-level networks can stimulate public sector innovation. The case studied is the new water governance system in Norway. In accordance with the ecosystem principle in the EU Water Framework Directive, new multilevel networks are established in catchment areas, cutting across municipal, regional and national borders. The chapter first examines, on the basis of national surveys and empirical case-studies, whether the new networks stimulate cross-sector, multi-level coordination. Then, it discusses if and how coordination influences collaborative innovation. The study finds that the networks stimulate coordination, first and foremost understood as information- and knowledge sharing, and the coordination of world views. This type of coordination seems to spur public-sector innovation, by establishing common platforms of understanding, where the friction and conflicting interests can play out in constructive ways. Our informants report about rhetorical innovation and strategic innovation, as well as governance innovation. However, the full potentials are far from realized. Obstacles include lack of national harmonization of policy goals and sector legislation, and the lack of regional and local political will to engage actively and recognize the innovative potential in the new collaborative arenas.

In this chapter, we investigate how collaborative governance contributes to spurring innovation in regional water management. We analyze a collaborative innovation effort in regional water management in The Netherlands. In a unique endeavour, nine municipalities united in a city region and a regional water authority, together with private parties, crafted a joint innovation program aimed at developing new knowledge and innovative solutions for persistent inundation problems in the area. In addition to innovative solutions in selected experimental areas, the collaborative effort gave rise to a paradigm shift in regional inundation protection policy – from a norm-oriented approach to a more modern, adaptive, effect-oriented approach. We apply a multilevel perspective to analyze the (co-evolving) developments at three levels: the macro level of the national (policy) landscape, the meso level of the regional water management regime, and the micro level of experimental areas or niches. Our analysis reveals that learning processes on these three levels are important to trigger policy innovation, but that these processes have to become connected by the deliberate interventions of policy entrepreneurs to really result in a paradigm shift.

The main objective of the current chapter is to examine to what extent the European patent system, the decision-making process on the so-called “Patent Package” and its implementation reflect the conceptual framework of dynamic governance, a framework which aligns closely with the notion of collaborative innovation. In the global patent context, a gradual increase of more dynamic patent governance has been observed. The adoption of fundamental patent reforms in Europe calls for a review of those reforms from a dynamic governance perspective. After decades of negotiations on the European Union (EU) patent, the financial crisis has finally driven the EU Member States and the EU institutions to gain the momentum and to adopt a compromise on the Patent Package. These reforms are aimed at simplifying the European patent system, lowering the costs of patenting, improving legal certainty and limiting forum-shopping in terms of litigation. These objectives were supported widely by stakeholders. However, despite these laudable objectives, the way the decision-making process was spun out and then suddenly rushed through and the actual content of the package are highly controversial. In the end, the reforms will further increase the complexity of the European patent system, patent protection in Europe will probably remain rather expensive and the risk of forum shopping may continue to persist to a certain extent. This raises the fundamental question whether stakeholders have actually been sufficiently involved in the decision-making process.

The aim of this chapter is to examine how the lead user approach successfully can be applied in the public sector and how it can contribute to collaborative innovation. This chapter is based on a case study of lead user innovation in the Danish Ministry of Taxation. In the last decade, the Ministry has increased the participation of citizens and thereby strengthened the role of the users in the innovation process. Encouraged by studies showing that users contribute more to the innovation than producers, the Ministry wanted to examine whether lead users could also contribute to public innovation on complex problems. This was done by doing a lead user study concerning bookkeeping. On the basis of the project, it is described and discussed how the lead user approach can be used to make collaborative innovation happen and increase the outcome of the innovation process. The conclusion is that the lead user approach can be used in the public sector and it increases the possibility for radical innovation. However, development of the lead user approach is needed. Firstly, by adding a fifth phase to the existing lead user approach to be sure innovation happens in a collaborative way, and secondly, by expanding the bottom lines to the complexity in the public sector and thirdly, by updating the methods used to engage citizens.

Third sector organisations (TSO’s) increasingly provide alternatives to public services, manage community ownership of local assets, and offer relational models of production and exchange. Many TSO’s have relatively flat structures, valorise peer relations and are seen as a democratic alternative to local state bureaucracies. This chapter draws on two empirical case studies to argue that a psychosocial understanding of lateral peer relations is essential if displacement anxiety and rivalry are to be avoided and conflict used as productive feedback for organisational development. Taking the UK as an example, and a context where the functions of local authorities have been sufficiently curtailed, it concludes that TSO’s may still need the vertically organised mediating functions of the local state if they are to carry out their roles effectively.

This chapter explores micro processes of collaborative innovation from a learning perspective. The point of departure for the chapter is my ongoing research with welfare service professionals who display considerable ambivalence towards innovation, feeling both enthusiastic towards it and burdened by it. I start by framing the Danish discourse of public collaborative governance in two empirical fields: sitebased management and democracy in the 1990s, and social entrepreneurship and social innovation in the 2000s. I demonstrate how the prevailing discourses offer a number of scripts for action, performance and learning, which can produce important results. However, by analysing learning in collaborative innovation processes from a psychosocial perspective I also demonstrate how identification, ambivalence, idealisation and defence are significant features of the professionals’ learning and performance and consequently how contemporary collaborative innovation can lead both to constructive and destructive processes.

This chapter considers learning, change and innovation in a public sector where the certainties of ‘New Public Management’ (NPM) have been replaced by uncertainty and flux. In this setting, policy actors may resort either to innovation or retrenchment. New solutions to policy problems may be generated or actors may revert to foundational approaches. This impacts upon practice as stakeholders search for meaning and engage in sense-making. Drawing from the authors’ research within the UK public sector, this theoretical paper argues that rapid change and the failure of old solutions (for instance, to the global financial crisis) do not necessarily generate positive innovation. There may indeed be a retreat to previous failed responses, with entrenched learning producing negative results. The chapter concludes that innovation requires the core component of creativity if it is to be of value. As the modernist conception of gradual mastery of the world has fallen away, different theoretical tools are needed in understanding this changed policy environment. It is suggested that established governance and network theories are of limited assistance. It is more useful to adopt an anti-foundationalist position, using sense-making perspectives informed by both Weberian and critical approaches while avoiding grand meta-narrative.