Projekte

Living Labs—innovation units established to introduce new methods and approaches into public sector organizations—have received a lot of attention as methods for experimentation and open innovation practices in public sector organizations. However, little is known so far about how they co-create public value and which conditions influence these co-creation practices. Therefore, the research questions are: which organizational factors influence the process of public value co-creation and which outcomes and values are produced as a result? The research questions were answered by employing a qualitative research approach conducting semi-structured interviews with employees and participants of three living labs in Germany and Austria. The results show top-level support and lab leadership as the most important context factors. Living labs produce tangible and intangible outcomes. The tangible outcomes are the products developed within the lab, and the intangible outcomes are created by the interaction between the lab’s participants. The main contributions are twofold: first, context factors are identified that lead to the success of co-creation processes within living labs. Second, the study contributes to the literature on public value because it is shown that participation in living labs itself leads to added value in addition to the tangible and intangible outcomes.

The public administration literature and adjacent fields have devoted increasing attention to living labs as environments and structures enabling the co-creation of public sector innovation. However, living labs remain a somewhat elusive concept and phenomenon, and there is a lack of understanding of its versatile nature. To gain a deeper understanding of the multiple dimensions of living labs, this article provides a review assessing how the environments, methods and outcomes of living labs are addressed in the extant research literature. The findings are drawn together in a model synthesizing how living labs link to public sector innovation, followed by an outline of knowledge gaps and future research avenues.

Attracting highly skilled IT talent has become a priority and an immense burden for government organizations—especially when they have other—higher paying—employment opportunities. We set out to explore why IT professionals choose a government job to make an impact on society. We aim at disentangling the effects of different types of motives, such as extrinsic, intrinsic, and other-oriented motivational forces on the decision to accept a challenging government IT job. We use self-determination theory (SDT) to analyze publicly available statements of former private sector IT professionals reporting their reason for joining 18F. Our study is one of the first attempts to use SDT as a comprehensive framework for conducting qualitative research into work motivation in the public sector. We shed light on the conceptual and empirical distinctiveness of motives, behaviors, and perceptions of prosocial impact, which are often lumped together in the public service motivation (PSM) literature. We contribute novel empirical evidence to a nascent stream of research that uses SDT to disentangle the intrinsic, prosocial, and purely extrinsic motives that drive individuals’ decisions to join public-sector organizations.

National governments are setting up digital service teams (DST) – IT units outside the centralized CIO's office – to respond to complex governmental and societal challenges in a responsive and agile manner. DSTs emerge as a third space between centralized and decentralized IT departments that are triggered by large-scale IT failures and the need to abandon black swan IT projects - tasks that traditional CIO offices were not able to handle so far. DSTs design principles have been replicated from the initial idea of the UK's Government Digital Service team and implemented in other countries, such as the U.S., Canada, Italy, or Finland. For this article, a qualitative interpretative approach was chosen to understand external and internal context factors that contribute to the emergence of these digital service teams. The article brings initial clarity of the composition and tasks of DSTs and extends the existing theory of context by providing insights about this third space between centralized and decentralized IT departments to organize IT Governance in public sector organizations.

Digital transformation approaches outside the public sector are changing citizens' expectations of governments' ability to deliver high-value, real-time digital services. In response to the changing expectations and triggered by supranational agreements, governments are changing their mode of operation to improve public service delivery, be more efficient and effective in their designs, and achieve objectives such as increased transparency, interoperability, or citizen satisfaction. However, beyond the availability of consultancy reports, there is little systematic insight into the way that public administrators themselves are currently defining digital transformation in their own day-to-day practices, how they are approaching digital transformation projects, and what their expected outcomes are. We provide an empirically-based definition of digital transformation derived from expert interviews and develop a conceptual framework with reasons for, processes to, and expected outcomes of digital transformation in the public sector.

Bisher orientieren sich Digitalisierungsbemühungen in der öffentlichen Verwaltung vor allem an den Fachverantwortlichkeiten und Fachprozessen, die in oftmals isoliert operierenden Ressorts organisiert sind. Ein erster Schritt in Richtung Orientierung der Dienstleistungen an den Bedürfnissen der Bürger wurde mit dem OZG angestoßen. Fachverantwortliche müssen sich nun an den Lebenslagen der Bürger orientieren. Auf der Basis von Experteninterviews wurden fünf Schritte abgeleitet, die dabei helfen, digitale Transformationsprojekte umzusetzen (siehe Abbildung).

Die digitale Transformation der öffentlichen Ver- waltung umfasst die Neukonzeption von internen und externen Verwaltungsleistungen. In Deutsch- land ist dieses Reformvorhaben maßgeblich durch das Onlinezugangsgesetz (OZG) angestoßen wor- den, auf dessen Grundlage bis 2022 alle Verwal- tungsleistungen digital umgesetzt werden sollen. Basierend auf Interviews mit Digitalisierungsex- perten der deutschen öffentlichen Verwaltung schlägt dieses Thesenpapier Verbesserungsmaß- nahmen für die Umsetzung des OZG vor, so dass digitale Verwaltungsleistungen im Sinne der Nut- zer neu konzipiert werden können.

Koproduktion von öffentlichen Dienstleistungen bedeutet, dass diese nicht nur von Verwaltungsmitarbeitern erstellt werden, sondern in Zusammenarbeit mit Bürgern und der Zivilgesellschaft. Dabei muss die öffentliche Verwaltung zunehmend eine Nutzerperspektive einnehmen, um ihre Dienstleistungen effektiv und effizient erbringen zu können.