Managing Public Innovation on the Frontline

(1)

Managing Public Innovation on the Frontline

Thøgersen, Ditte

Document Version Final published version

Publication date:

2022

License Unspecified

Citation for published version (APA):

Thøgersen, D. (2022). Managing Public Innovation on the Frontline. Copenhagen Business School [Phd]. PhD Series No. 01.2022

Link to publication in CBS Research Portal

General rights

Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.

Take down policy

If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us (research.lib@cbs.dk) providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim.

Download date: 21. Oct. 2022

(2)

MANAGING PUBLIC INNOVATION

ON THE FRONTLINE

Ditte Thøgersen

CBS PhD School PhD Series 01.2022

PhD Series 01.2022MANAGING PUBLIC INNOVATION ON THE FRONTLINE

COPENHAGEN BUSINESS SCHOOL SOLBJERG PLADS 3

DK-2000 FREDERIKSBERG DANMARK

WWW.CBS.DK

ISSN 0906-6934

Print ISBN: 978-87-7568-055-9 Online ISBN: 978-87-7568-056-6

(3)

Managing Public Innovation on the Frontline

Ditte Thøgersen

Primary supervisor: Susanne Boch Waldorff Secondary supervisor: Carsten Greve

Department of Organization CBS PhD School

Copenhagen Business School

(4)

Ditte Thøgersen

Managing Public Innovation on the Frontline

1st edition 2022 PhD Series 01.2022

ISSN 0906-6934

Print ISBN: 978-87-7568-055-9 Online ISBN: 978-87-7568-056-6

The CBS PhD School is an active and international research environment at Copenhagen Business School for PhD students working on theoretical and

empirical research projects, including interdisciplinary ones, related to economics and the organisation and management of private businesses, as well as public and voluntary institutions, at business, industry and country level.

No parts of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any informationstorage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

(5)

3

Acknowledgements

First of all, a big thanks to my primary supervisor, Susanne Boch Waldorff. Thank you for guiding me through these three years with encouragement and constructive comments. I have really enjoyed writing with you and attending conferences together, and all of our many, many discussions. You have been such an inspiration and such a huge help. And Carsten Greve, my secondary supervisor, thank you also for our many good conversations, and particularly thanks for all of your detailed and constructive comments on the many drafts of ideas and papers – it has been super helpful in terms of rendering the relatively fluid process of writing concrete and operational.

I have loved being a part of the IOA community – so many great co-workers, so many lunches and discussions and parties and fun. So many bright and charming and fabulous academics to sprinkle glitter on these dusted books. Thanks for bearing with me and including me in your club. All of the papers in this dissertation have been presented several times to patient colleagues at IOA who have contributed with difficult and helpful questions and comments. I am most certain, that I would not have been able to write any coherent texts without the feedback and assistance from this community. I have particularly appreciated the POVI research group. It has been great to have a safe space to give and receive feedback. A special thanks to Anne Reff Pedersen, who has been a sort of informal third supervisor and has supported me and shown me interest all throughout. I have found your work super inspiring, and it has been a privilege to share mine with you. And thanks to the writing group with Beate, Lene and Naima – you have taught me a lot – thanks for your patience and your help with untangling my arguments. Also, thanks to Lars Fuglsang for allowing me to visit with your research group at RUC, when I my foreign exchange was cancelled. Even though RUC is not as exotic as Edinburgh, I

(6)

4

still feel it expanded my horizon to spend a semester at another university and another department.

Thanks to COI for including me in you group and introducing me to your friends – so many inspiring and dedicated public managers and innovators. Particularly in the first year of the PhD, I benefitted greatly from your collective pool of knowledge as well as your great network to get the project rooted in the real world and to take a point of departure in the challenges facing public organizations today. You made me keep it real and relevant, and I have no doubt that the project is so much better for it. So thanks for all the talks and discussions. Especially thanks to Ole Lykkebo for sharing his passion for data – you really have a great eye for the story in numbers.

Thanks to Majken Præstbro for letting me come along with you from Silkeborg to Örebro and for introducing me to so many different debates and topics of interest in public innovation. And thanks to Pia Gjellerup for being such a generous host and for keeping an eye on the big picture.

A debt is owed to the many managers and professionals in the childcare-sector who has donated their time to this project, who has allowed me to tag along in seminars and who has allowed me to enter their workplaces and observe them. Without your participation, there would have been no story to tell, so thank you so much for sharing your experience and knowledge and commitment. I hope to be able to repay you some day.

The continuous flow of PhD fellows from around the world has been a central part of the IOA-experience. It has been such a privilege to feel like a part of global community with so many creative approaches to do relevant research. These cool and clever junior scholars has made coming to work a lot more fun, and even though we are all buried in each our own hole, there has been a shared understanding, a sense of community and a will to help each other. In the times when the work

(7)

5

seemed the hardest, it was the conversations in this community that got me back on track. Their insightfulness and engagement has been inspiring and humbling.

Finally, thanks to my parents for talking me through some of the darker phases of the PhD, particularly during the lockdown, where spirits were sometimes low. And thanks for sharing so much implicit, backstage knowledge about “the game,” which has certainly granted me an advantage from time to time. Thanks to my daughter, Naja, for reminding me, that being a firefighter is actually a lot cooler than being an academic - and undoubtedly harder too, so I should probably get over myself.

Finally, thanks to my partner, Anders, for listening to my endless ramblings, and for reminding me to celebrate my wins, for being proud of me, and for talking me up.

You made me believe I could do it.

(8)

6

Dansk Resumé

Denne ph.d.-afhandling undersøger offentlig innovation og værdiskabelse fra et organisationsperspektiv. Undersøgelsen starter bredt og spørger offentlige ledere på tværs af den danske offentlige sektor, hvilke organisatoriske betingelser de mener henholdsvis hæmmer og fremmer værdiskabelsen i deres innovationsprojekter.

Dernæst interviewes ledere fra 20 offentlige dagtilbud for at få en dybere forståelse for, hvordan offentlig innovation finder sted blandt de store velfærdsprofessioner i offentlige serviceorganisationer. I afhandlingens tredje studie zoomes helt ind på innovationsprocessen og de mikro-processer, som fører til, at abstrakte ideer forankres og realiseres i den daglige, faglige praksis.

På baggrund af disse tre studier er afhandlingens bidrag til den eksisterende viden om offentlig innovation fire artikler, som anskuer innovation fra organisationernes perspektiv. Dette fokus er væsentligt, fordi mange studier af offentlig innovation fokuserer på politikere og toplederes ambitioner om at transformere sektoren og dermed overser den myriade af innovationsarbejde som foregår inden i de offentlige organisationer, når de fortolker og omsætter visioner til praksis. Afhandlingen går eksplorativt til værks ud fra en antagelse om, at offentlige organisationer kan lære af hinandens erfaringer. Derfor hviler afhandlingen på et forandringsoptimistisk grundlag – omend med en implicit formodning om, at offentlige ledere og fagprofessionelle i høj grad selv er drivkraft bag kvalitetsløft og faglig udvikling i organisationerne.

Afhandlingen knytter an til en videnskabelig samtale om innovation i den offentlige sektor, som fastholder, at innovationsprocesser ikke bør løsrives fra sin kontekst og at en væsentlig del af innovationsarbejdet for ledere og medarbejdere i offentlige organisationer handler om at oversætte innovative ideer så de kan tilpasses og integreres i eksisterende rutiner og processer. Dermed handler innovationsarbejdet i lige så høj grad om at reflektere over egen praksis, som at opfinde nye processer

(9)

7

og services. Innovation målrettet faglig praksis, som udspringer af den daglige drift, kaldes hverdagsinnovation.

Den første artikel anvender et statistisk datasæt udarbejdet af Danmarks Statistik og Center for Offentlig Innovation og benytter logistisk regressionsanalyse til at undersøge, hvordan et antal organisatoriske betingelser påvirker offentlige lederes oplevelse af at skabe værdi med deres innovationsarbejde. Værdiskabelsen måles på fire bundlinjer: kvalitet, effektivitet, medarbejdertilfredshed og borgerinddragelse. De vigtigste resultater i den første artikel er, at medarbejdernes opbakning påvirker ledernes oplevelse af at øget kvaliteten positivt. Hvis økonomisk pres er anledningen til at innovere, er der flere ledere, som oplever at skabe øget effektivitet, men færre, der oplever at skabe kvalitet, medarbejdertilfredshed og borgerinddragelse. Hvis det er den nærmeste politiske ledelse, som har igangsat innovationsprojektet, oplever færre ledere, at den skaber kvalitet, effektivitet og medarbejdertilfredshed – hvorimod at ny lovgivning hverken påvirker deres oplevelse af at skabe værdi positivt eller negativt.

Den anden artikel er baseret på 20 dybdegående interviews med dagtilbudsledere.

Artiklen finder, at dagtilbuddene primært beskæftiger sig med hverdagsinnovation, som er målrettet udvikling af den faglige praksis og finder sted i løbet af dagligdagen. Lederne arbejder systematisk med at facilitere hverdagsinnovation gennem formidling af nye ideer, mikro-eksperimenter i praksis og gennem faglige diskussioner. Artiklen trækker på translation theory, og argumenterer for, at disse mikro-processer både kan bruges til at oversætte abstrakte ideer og reformer til praksis – og omvendt, at hverdagsinnovation kan akkumulere og på sigt resultere i en bredere udvikling af professionen.

Den tredje artikel er baseret på samme datasæt som artikel 2, men fokuserer i stedet på ledernes tilgang til at mobilisere medarbejderne til at indgå i innovative processer. Artiklen finder tre tilgange, en intuitiv, en strategisk og en refleksiv

(10)

8

tilgang. Artiklen argumenterer for, at valget af en hensigtsmæssig tilgang til innovationsledelse beror på en analyse af hvilken tilstand organisationen aktuelt befinder sig i. Således kan den intuitive tilgang være passende for organisationer med stærke fagprofessionelle, som dermed gives stort handlerum til at udvikle den faglige praksis, hvorimod andre medarbejdere risikerer at stagnere fagligt med denne tilgang. Den strategiske tilgang kan være nødvendig i organisationer, som ikke leverer på et tilfredsstillende niveau og som har brug for aktiv tilpasning.

Endelig giver den refleksive tilgang størst mulighed for at udnytte det innovative potentiale, hvis organisationen i øvrigt er i en god gænge, og hvor lederen kan fokusere på at skabe en fælles ramme, hvor medarbejderne kan byde ind med konkrete udviklingsideer.

Endelig rapporterer den fjerde artikel på et etnografisk studie over ti måneder i fem dagtilbudsorganisationer i det samme kommunale område. De fem organisationer arbejder samtidigt på at implementere en ny mission i organisationerne, kaldet Inddragelse af børns perspektiver. Gennem observationsstudier og interviews undersøger studiet, hvordan ledere og medarbejdere arbejder på at omsætte ide til praksis. Artiklen inddrager translation theory og finder at ledelsens tilrettelæggelse af innovationsprocessens gennem en række aktiviteter inviterer medarbejderne til at indgå i oversættelsesarbejdet. Disse øjeblikke af aktivt oversættelsesarbejde finder dog ikke sted samtidig på tværs af medarbejdergruppen, som responderer forskelligt på de forskellige tilbud om deltagelse. Artiklen argumenterer for, at denne forskel i timing har betydning for, hvordan hverdagsinnovationsprocesser bør tilrettelægges og at ledere med fordel kan variere tilbud om deltagelse og desuden genbesøge oversættelsesarbejdet flere gange i løbet af processen.

Det gennemgående tema i denne afhandling er ledelse af hverdagsinnovation.

Mange af de tilgængelige studier om hverdagsinnovation handler om medarbejdernes handlerum i forhold til at forbedre deres faglige praksis. Studierne

(11)

9

i denne afhandling anfører, at der også er brug for ledelse i denne sammenhæng.

Frontlinjeledere har en særlig position både i forhold til at udbrede og opskalere offentlig innovation og i forhold til at implementere offentlige reformer.

Frontlinjeledernes særlige opgave bliver således at få interne og eksterne interesser til at mødes og med hverdagsinnovation løbende udvikle organisationen. Det er en særlig form for innovationsledelse, som ikke hidtil har været beskrevet i litteraturen, og som både forskere og praktikere kan have glæde af at dykke dybere ned i.

God læselyst.

(12)

10

Summary

This PhD dissertation examines public innovation and value creation from an organizational perspective. The study starts broadly and asks public managers across the Danish public sector, which organizational conditions they believe inhibit and promote value creation in their innovation projects. Next, the scope is narrowed and managers from 20 public childcare facilities are interviewed to gain a deeper understanding of how innovation takes place among the major welfare professions in public service organizations. The third study of the dissertation zooms in on an innovation process and the micro-dynamics that lead an abstract idea to be translated into daily, professional practice.

Based on these three studies, the dissertation's contribution to the existing knowledge about public innovation is four articles that look at innovation from an organizational perspective. This focus is important because many studies of public innovation focus on the ambitions of politicians and top managers to transform the sector and thus overlook the myriad of innovation work that takes place within public organizations, when they interpret and translate visions into practice. The dissertation takes an exploratory approach founded on the basic assumption that public organizations can learn from each other's experiences. As such, the offset of the dissertation is in essence optimistic - albeit with an implicit assumption that public professionals are the driving force behind quality improvement and development in the organizations.

The dissertation contributes to a scholarly conversation about innovation in the public sector, which maintains that innovation processes should not be detached from their context. Moreover, a significant part of the innovation work for managers and employees in public organizations is about translating innovative ideas so they can be integrated into existing routines and processes. Therefore, innovation work is as much about reflecting upon one's own practice as inventing new processes and

(13)

11

services. Innovation that targets professional practice and emerges from daily operations, is termed everyday innovation.

The first article utilizes a statistical data set compiled by Statistics Denmark and the National Centre for Public Sector Innovation and applies logistic regression analysis to examine how a number of organizational antecedents affect public managers’

perception of creating value with their innovation work. Value creation is measured on four bottom lines: quality, efficiency, employee satisfaction and citizen involvement. The main findings of the first article are that the support of employees affects managers' perception of increasing quality positively. If financial pressure is the reason to innovate, more managers experience increasing efficiency, whereas fewer report that they created quality, employee satisfaction and citizen involvement. If the closest political leadership initiated the innovation project, fewer managers report that it creates quality, efficiency and employee satisfaction - whereas new legislation does not affect their perception of creating value positively or negatively.

The second article is based on 20 in-depth interviews with childcare managers. The article finds that the childcare services primarily deal with everyday innovation, which is targeted development of professional practice and takes place during everyday operations. The managers work systematically to facilitate everyday innovation through the interpreting and disseminating of new ideas, promoting micro-experiments in practice and by facilitating professional discussions. The article draws on translation theory, and argues that these micro-processes involved in everyday innovation can be used to translate abstract ideas and reforms into practice - and conversely, that everyday innovation can accumulate and over time develop the profession in general.

The third article is based on the same dataset as Article 2 but is focused on managers' approach to mobilizing employees to engage in innovative processes. The article

(14)

12

finds three approaches, an intuitive, a strategic and a facilitating approach. The article argues that the choice of an appropriate approach to innovation management must depend on an analysis of the current state of the organization. Thus, the intuitive approach may be appropriate for organizations with strong professionals, who are given ample room to develop their professional practice, whereas other employees risk stagnating professionally with this approach. The strategic approach may be necessary in organizations that do not perform adequately and that need active adaptation. Finally, for organizations that find themselves to be in good shape, the facilitating approach provides the greatest opportunity to utilize their innovative potential. With this approach, the manager focuses on creating a shared framework in which employees can contribute with concrete, innovative ideas.

Finally, the fourth article reports on an ethnographic study over ten months in five childcare organizations in the same municipal district. The five organizations were working simultaneously to implement a new mission in the organizations, called Inclusion of children's perspectives. Through observational studies and interviews, the study examined how managers and employees work to translate this abstract idea into their daily practice. The article employs translation theory, and finds that the management team’s orchestration of the innovation process, which included a number of activities, invites employees to take part in the translation work.

However, the employees did not accept this invitation to engage at the same time throughout the process, which meant that the moments of active translation work was not synchronized across the group of employees. The article argues that this asynchronicity has an impact on how everyday innovation processes should be organized and that managers should offer various opportunities for participation and also revisit the translation work several times during the process.

The central theme in this dissertation is the management of everyday innovation.

Many of the available studies on everyday innovation are about employees' space

(15)

13

for action in relation to improving their professional practice. However, the studies in this dissertation emphasize that leadership is also needed in everyday innovation.

Frontline managers have a unique position both in terms of spreading or upscaling public innovation and in terms of implementing public reforms. The special task of the frontline managers is to connect internal and external interests and to continuously develop the organization through everyday innovation. This is a special form of innovation management that has not been discussed in the literature so far, which both scholars and practitioners could benefit from exploring.

Happy reading.

(16)

14

Preface

This dissertation reports on the findings and contributions of a three-year PhD- project from August 2018 to July 2021. The dissertation is article-based and consists of four papers.

1. Ditte Thøgersen, Susanne Boch Waldorff & Tinne Steffensen (2020): Public Value through Innovation: Danish Public Managers’ Views on Barriers and Boosters, International Journal of Public Administration.

An earlier draft of this paper was presented at Innovation in Public Services and Public Policy Conference, 2019.

2. Ditte Thøgersen, Susanne Boch Waldorff (under review): Innovate or Die?

Interpretations of the imperative to innovate on the frontline of the public sector, Scandinavian Journal of Public Administration. Special issue:

Making sense of institutional changes in the welfare professions

An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the 2020 Workshop for New Institutionalism in Organizational Theory.

3. Ditte Thøgersen (2021): Managing Innovation on the Frontline. Three Approaches to Mobilise Professionals in Everyday Innovation, International Journal of Public Sector Management.

The published version has been revised since the printing of this dissertation.

4. Ditte Thøgersen (under review): Windows of Translation in Public Service Innovation. Introducing a New Mission in Public Childcare. Journal of Change Management

This paper was presented at IRSPM 2021 and was awarded with the IRSPM Stephen Osborne Prize for best new researcher paper.

Due to journal requirements, Article 1 is in US English, whereas the rest of the dissertation is in UK English.

(19)

- First section -

(20)

18

Introduction

The challenges facing public sectors are tangible. Many public organizations face severe budgetary pressure, with increasing public demands for accountability and speedy communication, more public service users due to demographic changes and multiple political agendas that make the status quo seem unacceptable (Ferry et al.

2019). As opposed to private companies, public organizations are not established to make a profit. While required to keep their budgets, the measure of success for public organizations is their ability to create value for the public (Moore 1995).

However, what is counted - and what counts as public value - is a political question.

When the research behind this dissertation began in 2018, ‘public innovation’ was already a very hot topic. Already in 2007, the government stated that the Danish public sector should be ‘the most innovative and dynamic in the world’ and in 2015, a minister of public innovation was appointed (Hjelmar 2019). Denmark was found to be world leading in terms of digitisation of the public sector (UN 2020). For several years, trending process-innovations known from the private sector like lean or performance management had been adopted to optimise the productivity of administrations in public agencies (Nielsen et al. 2020). In other words, ‘innovation’

had momentum in the public sector.

However, the concept of innovation was – and still is – contested. Critical voices in the public debate denounce innovation as a superficial trend intended to keep external strategy consultants and top managers busy while wasting public resources on meaningless projects. Even though this critique is harsh, it reflects a concern that any amount of ‘working smarter, not harder’ will not be able to save a sector that has faced cut-back after cut-back and is left overworked and underpaid. However, while acknowledging that there are challenges that the public sector cannot innovate its way out of, this dissertation argues that the professions and the practices that constitute public services are not frozen in time. Rather, they are in continuous

(21)

19

development both from within, and in response to changes in the environment.

Change is inevitable, but even so, it is pertinent that the changes made are prioritized and managed as well as they can be. Consequently, the ambition of this dissertation is to acknowledge the political, professional and organizational context to discover how public managers approach innovation, with the hope that others might learn from their experience.

In the research field of public administration, the interest pursued in the innovation literature often has to do with some form of public governance or management. This inevitably skews the attention of scholars towards policy, top-level managers and strategic principles (Crosby et al. 2017; Moore & Hartley 2008; Sørensen & Torfing 2018a). A critical branch of these studies argues that public organizations are ill- equipped to innovate because of a self-enforcing public bureaucracy that is designed with robustness rather than innovation in mind. Therefore, they suggest that new structures need to be built, where citizens and politicians can meet to innovate the public sector outside of existing public organizations (Ansell & Torfing 2021;

Sørensen & Torfing 2018b).While this line of research that has certainly helped to illuminate the political context for public innovation, the focus on politicians and citizens downplays the work of public servants, and risks a somewhat detached position, which keeps implementation in a ‘black box’ (e.g. Hartley & Rashman 2018) and leaves the resources of public professionals unexploited.

Another common pursuit in studies of public innovation is the examination of large numbers of public innovation projects to extract general knowledge about public innovation. This line of inquiry has provided the innovation literature with findings like: The most commonly applied definition of innovation in the literature is Rogers’

(2003) stating that innovation is ‘an idea, practice, or object that is perceived as new by an individual or other unit of adoption’ (de Vries et al. 2016, p. 152). Most public innovations emerge from the operative levels and not for example the political

(22)

20

leadership or agency heads (Borins 2002). The most common type of public innovation is process innovation (de Vries et al. 2016). Organizational barriers to innovation include ineffective administration of process activities, resistance or a lack of support from central actors, lack of available resources and a rigid organizational culture (Cinar et al. 2019). While these findings certainly provide a robust baseline to proceed from, they do not reveal much about how the organizations navigate these conditions during innovation processes: Who does what? What motivates them? How are they even doing it?

In order to patch up the detached stance of the governance-perspective and the generalised insights of the quantitative approach, an emergent stream of qualitative case studies examines public innovation from an organizational perspective, and emphasises the importance of a local context and organizational resources. In this perspective, ‘implementation,’ is not left for someone else to deal with. Instead, it takes centre stage. These studies examine innovation activities emerging from the everyday operations within public organizations in e.g. health care (Pedersen 2016), elderly care (Fuglsang & Sørensen 2011) and education (Lippke & Wegener 2014).

Common for these studies of ‘everyday innovation’ is that the innovation activities are largely driven by professionals who strive to solve problems as they occur, improve the quality of their service provision or develop new processes or services during everyday operations. Unfortunately, because of the central role of professionals, the unique position of frontline managers remains largely underappreciated in this context.

Public innovations are often informed by reforms, trends and abstract ideas in the ecosystem surrounding the organization, which explains why similar ideas emerge simultaneously in various autonomous organizations (Czarniawska & Sevón 2005;

Røvik 2007). However, a central point in translation theory is that even though innovations maybe heavily inspired by an idea from another organization, they are

(23)

21

always adjusted to fit the norms and routines of the new organizational context (Sahlin-Andersson 1996). Adopting an innovation is not like picking a coat off the rack and wearing it. It needs to be tailored to fit. Analytically, the work of translating an innovation relies heavily on sensemaking (Boxenbaum & Pedersen 2009), which involves interpreting the meaning of the innovation in light of one’s own context, removing irrelevant features, and adding special alterations to suit local needs (Røvik 2007).

This dissertation seeks to bridge the emergent and the strategic line of inquiry in the two bodies of public innovation literature by exploring how frontline managers stimulate innovation in public service organizations. It also contributes to translation theory, by exploring the micro-processes of how an abstract idea is translated into concrete practice in the context of everyday innovation.

The research design of this dissertation begins at the macro-level, with a quantitative survey of public managers’ perceptions of innovation and value creation, and then proceeds to conduct two qualitative studies at the meso- and micro-level. The theoretical lens guiding this dissertation is found in Scandinavian institutionalism (Boxenbaum & Pedersen 2009) specifically the concept of translation (Czarniawska

& Joerges 1996; Czarniawska & Sevón 2005; Sahlin-Andersson 1996), which is applied to understand how organizations transform ideas into practice.

(24)

22 Research Questions

The working title of this research project was Innovation and Value Creation in the Public Sector. While this was initially a rather broad problem field, the focus on value creation did guide the research interest towards the realisation of innovation, rather than the invention or design of ideas. Embedded in this framing of the project lies an assumption that public value can in fact be created through innovation.

Consequently, the point of departure for this research project is, in essence, optimistic. The focus on value creation directed the focus towards the frontline of the public sector where professionals come face-to-face with the citizens they serve.

Moreover, the pertinent question implied in this problem field is how this value creation can be stimulated. Taken together, this curiosity led to the overall research question:

How do Danish frontline managers work to stimulate innovation processes among professionals in the everyday operations of public service organizations?

This research question is operationalized into four separate research questions, one for each article in the dissertation:

The first article: What organizational antecedents influence public managers’

perception of creating public value through innovation?

The second article: How do frontline managers interpret and enact the innovation imperative?

The third article: How do frontline managers approach everyday innovation management and what are the implications?

The fourth article: How do professional actors work to translate a new organizational mission into their everyday practices and what are the processual implications of this work?

(25)

23 Key Concepts

Public innovation: The dissertation adopts an inclusive approach to innovation sported by The National Centre for Public Sector Innovation (COI) and the OECD.

The definition roughly states, that innovation is something new to the organization that has been implemented and has created value. This approach rests on three central elements: (1) Innovation is not necessarily new to the world although it should be new to the organization; (2) Innovation is more than invention – it has to be implemented to count; (3) Innovation has to have created value – which means that mistakes do not count either. This definition is based on a number of assumptions that will be elaborated on in the state of the art section, reviewing the literature on public innovation.

Everyday innovation: Everyday innovation involve efforts to improve the practice of professionals during everyday operations. Acknowledging the pertinence of organizational context, everyday innovation identifies problems and solutions based on experiences derived from daily practice. Literature on everyday innovation argues that the privileged position of frontline professionals should be utilised to make continuous improvements to the service delivered to citizens (Lippke &

Wegener 2014; Pedersen 2020; Pedersen & Johansen 2012).

Public value: Unlike in the market place, public value is not traded in a fixed currency that allows us to objectively measure the worth of a service. In some sense, the UN addressed this problem with the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), which has since offered public organizations legitimation for their pursuits, by naming “Quality Education” or “Reduced Inequalities” the profit to be made. Public value is created in multiple bottom lines, and it makes little sense to try and compare the public value of, for example, sanitation and education. We need both of these, and we need them to work well. Therefore, the quality and value of public services

(26)

24

must be measured on their own merits and cannot be objectively detached from their context (Moore 2013).

Frontline: The frontline consists of public servants who have face-to-face contact with the citizens they serve. The frontline consists primarily of employees in public service organizations such as schools, childcare facilities and police stations. Team managers and daily managers typically share the same professional background as employees, interact with citizens and work as an integrated part of the frontline.

Therefore, they are referred to as frontline managers in the dissertation.

Methods and Research Design

Before outlining of the state of the art in public innovation, the theoretical framework of translation and the methodological considerations, this section will briefly present the overall research design of the dissertation.

Multiple methods are applied as public innovation is studied at the macro-, meso- and micro-level in the public sector. Firstly, the national public innovation statistic, the Innovation Barometer is analysed to discover what type of public value managers perceive to create with their innovation activities and what organizational antecedents influence their perception of creating these values. Then, daily

Figure 1: Data input and publication output

(27)

25

managers from 20 childcare organizations across the country are interviewed about how they understand public innovation and how they work to promote it in their organizations. Finally, a ten-month innovation project is studied in five public childcare facilities by conducting observation studies and interviews with employees and managers. In addition to this, secondary data in the shape of documents and observations at professional conferences and interviews with four municipal consultants have been collected.

These various sources of data allowed for an exploration of the overall research question from multiple angles, thereby enhancing the rigour of the conclusions drawn.

Practical Setup: A CBS-COI Collaboration

The idea to fund this PhD-project was conceived collaboratively between researchers at CBS and The National Centre for Public Innovation (COI). Therefore, a few words is dedicated to the practical setup.

Half of my teaching obligations were attributed to COI and took the shape of newsletters and workshops. COI did not raise any requirements for research topics, organizations or actors to pursue, and as such, I was free to explore public innovation wherever the research took me. We collaborated on the first paper of the dissertation, where a colleague from COI acted as co-author and assisted with access to data and statistical expertise.

For the first half of the project, I spent roughly three days a week at COI’s office and two days a week at CBS. In the second half of the PhD, I had so much fieldwork and teaching that it no longer made practical sense to divide my desk-time between the two offices, and I was permanently stationed at CBS.

The advantage of sharing an office with COI in the beginning was that it gave me an introduction to practitioners’ perspectives and the political aspects of public

(28)

26

innovation. COI collects knowledge and experiences from public servants, and works to encourage more public actors to engage in innovation. This means that a central part of their work is networking and staying in touch with various managers who are active in innovation and consultants and innovators from all types of public organizations. The constant flow of guests into the office and trips to professional conferences and network meetings gave me insights into the current state of the public debate and a sense of what is at stake for a variety of public actors.

Finally, the collaboration with COI provided me with an opportunity to test my results and ideas on practitioners throughout the project and to hear what their thoughts were on my tentative observations. I believe that these ongoing conversations helped me keep the enquiries relevant and recognisable to the practice field.

Structure of the Dissertation

The dissertation is divided into three main sections. This first section provides a coherent introduction to the four articles, which are the main contributions of the dissertation. The first section begins by introducing the philosophy of science behind the research. Then, a literature review of public innovation is conducted to situate the contributions of the dissertation within the state of the art. Next, a chapter is dedicated to translation theory, which informs the analytical lens of the studies.

Following this, the empirical context of the studies is outlined, continuing with a presentation of the complete data set consisting of three cases. Finally, a catalogue of multiple methods applied is presented along with a discussion of the validity of the methodological choices.

The second section presents the four research articles, which are the main outcomes of the PhD project. The first article, “Public Value through Innovation. Danish Public Managers’ Perceptions of Boosters and Barriers,” is co-authored with Susanne Boch Waldorff and Tinne Steffensen and was published in International

(29)

27

Journal of Public Administration in 2020. The layout of the paper has been adapted to fit the format of this book, but otherwise, it has not been altered. This also means, that unlike the rest of the dissertation, this article is written in US-English due to the publisher’s requirements. The paper finds a high level of innovation activity across the public sector and surveys public managers to find out what organizational antecedents influence their perception of creating public value with their innovations.

The second article, “Innovate or Die? Transforming Professions through Everyday Innovation,” is co-authored by Susanne Boch Waldorff and is awaiting reviewer scores from Scandinavian Journal of Public Administration. This study is based on interviews with frontline managers from the childcare sector and examines how the

‘imperative to innovate’ is interpreted in the frontlines and how the managers work to systematically facilitate innovation in their organizations.

The third article, “Managing Innovation in the Frontline. Three Approaches to Mobilise Professionals in Everyday Innovation,” is solo-authored and under review in International Journal of Public Sector Management. This paper is based on the same data as the second article as they were originally written as one paper, but split up in the revision process. It finds that public managers have different approaches to innovation leadership, which are divided into three categories. Some emphasise employee empowerment while others emphasise shared focus of attention. A third group lies somewhere in between these two positions.

Finally, the fourth article, “Windows of Translation in Public Service Innovation.

Introducing a New Mission in Public Childcare,” is also solo-authored and is under review in Journal of Change Management. This paper was presented at the International Research Society for Public Management (IRSPM) 2021 where it won the Stephen Osborne Prize for Best New Researcher Paper. This case study applies various ethnographic methods to follow a ten-month innovation process in five

(30)

28

childcare facilities. The study finds variance in the translation speed and intensity among employees, which leads to an asynchronous translation process.

The third and final section of the dissertation concludes the work. It summarises the findings in the four papers and answers the research questions and it lists the contributions made to the literature on public innovation, as well as to translation theory. Finally, implications for practitioners and future research are drawn up.

(31)

29

Public Sector Innovation: State of the Art

This chapter reviews existing studies of public innovation to position the dissertation within the existing literature. Each article has its own specific literature review, so this section briefly outlines the state of the art at a more general level to introduce the shared academic context of the dissertation.

Studies of public sector innovation are usually found in journals about public administration and public management. The definition most commonly referred to is still from Rogers’ (2003, p. 12) classic book on the Diffusion of Innovations, which states that ‘an innovation is an idea, practice or object that is perceived as new by an individual or other unit of adoption’ (de Vries et al. 2016). The OECD is also a common point of reference for many studies on innovation and their definition is slightly more elaborate as it states that ‘an innovation is the implementation of a new or significantly improved product (good or service), or process, a new marketing method, or a new organizational method in business practices, workplace organization or external relations’ (OECD 2005, p. 46) Notable in the OECD’s definition is the emphasis on implementation and improvement.

Osborne and Brown (2011) studied the proliferation of the innovation agenda in policy papers and found that the term ‘innovation’ was applied almost synonymously with ‘improvement.’ This fairly vague but generally positive connotation of innovation has rendered innovation a ‘magic concept’ (Pollitt &

Hupe 2011) that can be applied in most contexts. While the public sector has arguably been innovating throughout its history (Hartley 2005) the requirement to renew, adapt and adjust, has carried different labels throughout time. For instance, in the 1980’s, the term ‘rationalisation’ replaced ‘planning’ as the keyword to provide purpose and direction for development and change in the public sector (Sørensen & Torfing 2018b). In that sense, ‘innovation’ can be interpreted as a performative term (Mast 2013) that serves to define an activity in a positive and

(32)

30

exiting way to mobilise support for change. The innovation discourse has proliferated in public policy with a normative requirement for public organizations to be able to find creative solutions to the challenges they face. This ‘innovation imperative’ delegitimises resistance towards innovative procedures, processes and products, and infuses ‘good’ public management with a moral obligation to innovate (Jordan 2014).

A number of recent systematic reviews of studies of public innovation have been conducted to outline the major trends in the research agenda. For instance, the outcome of innovation processes are commonly viewed as a result of complex interactions between external and internal organizational conditions (de Vries et al.

2016). External events that may encourage innovation in public organizations can be e.g. changes in regulations, available resources or citizen expectations (Walker 2014). Focusing on process innovations, Walker (2014) conducted a meta-analysis of innovation studies to identify and test a large number of variables, but the results were limited in their significance, suggesting that it is difficult to make generic, context-free predictions about process innovation. Although unable to clearly predict the importance of for example, slack resources or organizational learning, he was able draw the interesting conclusion that internal conditions were more decisive than external pressure in determining whether public organizations would adopt an innovation. A classic insight from organization theory is that while decision-making processes are often described in retrospect as a rational response to a current problem, the process is in reality far from linear, with the emergence of both problems and possible solutions being intertwined, therefore resting on the organization’s interpretation of options at a given point in time (March & Olsen 2016). This point may explain why it can be difficult to isolate organizational variables and find causal links between them.

(33)

31

Chen, Walker and Sawhney (2019) conducted another systematic review of studies of public service innovation to refine the classification of innovation within this category and found six types of public service innovations, which are displayed in Table 1. There are a number of similar public innovation typologies (Tidd & Bessant 2013; de Vries et al. 2018) with slightly different labels.

Innovation: Mission Policy Management Partner Service Citizen Definition: New

worldview, mission or purpose for the org.

as a whole

New benefits or obligations of stake- holders

New

management practice, process, structure or techniques

New partner- ships to reach organizational goals

New services to reach organizational goals

New platforms to

facilitate citizen collaboration Table 1: Typology of public service innovation adapted from Chen et al. (2019)

This typology was applied in the third case study of the dissertation, to classify the innovation process as a ‘mission innovation.’ A mission innovation in Chen et al.’s typology resembles what Tidd and Bessant (2013) call a paradigm innovation or de Vries et al. (2016) call a conceptual innovation. All these typologies share the common element that they emphasise that this type of innovation targets the very world view or mental model of the organization. Examples can be when a tax agency changes its core purpose from controlling to advising citizens or when hospitals adopt patient-centric workflows. As such, the mission in the third case, called Inclusion of Children’s Perspectives, share many similarities with other contemporary projects in the public sector that strive to place citizens before bureaucratic structures – e.g. ‘putting the patient in the centre’ of healthcare services.

Cinar, Trott and Simms (2019) focused specifically on barriers in different phases of the innovation processes and concluded that most barriers were found in the implementation phase – which is sometimes referred to as the ‘black box’ of

(34)

32

innovation (Piening 2011). The most commonly found barriers to successful implementation of innovation were rigid organizational structure, a top-down approach, lack of time, lack of knowledge, power struggles and staff resistance – all of which are internal antecedents. Taken together, these reviews suggests that the puzzles for future innovation studies are found firstly within the implementation rather than the invention and design phase and secondly, that they concern the organizational conditions and dynamics of the innovation rather than external actors and factors.

In a Danish context, the innovation agenda has been strong for the past two decades in both the popular press, in public policy and among practitioners in public organizations. Particularly after the financial crisis in 2008, ‘innovation’ was considered the key to solving the ‘grand challenges’ and ‘wicked problems’ facing the welfare state. Innovation goals were written into municipal strategies, innovation offices were established and consultants appointed. In 2007, the government proposed, that the Danish public sector should be the most innovative and dynamic in the world, and from 2015-2019 Denmark even had a minister for public innovation (Hjelmar 2019).

In 2016 The National Centre for Public Innovation (COI) published their first biennial innovation statistic, the Innovation Barometer, which showed that 86% of the Danish public organizations had introduced an innovation within the past two years (COI 2016) – making it a rough tie with the private sector where 83% of Danish private enterprises had achieved the same the year before (European Commission 2015). While Denmark is performing well in innovation statistics compared to most other countries, the high levels of innovation activity measured in both the private and the public sector begs the question of what these innovative activities consists of.

(35)

33

The Danish public sector employs roughly 800.000 people and based on head count, the three largest sectors are handicap and eldercare, healthcare and childcare. While the Danish public sector may be the most digitised in the world (UN 2020), the majority of innovations introduced in the public sector are new processes or ways of organizing the work (COI 2016). While the concept of innovation was derived from the private sector and was promoted intensely in public organizations during the New Public Management era, a number of organizational conditions distinctly separate innovation in the two sectors (Hartley 2005). As opposed to their privately owned counterparts, public organizations do not really have anything to lose by copying others or by sharing their ideas. Moreover, public organizations are not required to make a profit for shareholders, but they are, however, required to fulfil the service level agreements regulated by public policy, annual budgets and local strategies. Changes made to the policy governing a specific service sector can have a significant impact on the organizations and sometimes, they will need to innovate to realise the goals of the new policy such as a “cancer package” or a primary school reform. Some scholars argue that the constant reforms and changes made to the public sector explain the high levels of innovation activity reported in surveys (Bugge & Bloch 2016).

The first article in the dissertation relates to the macro-level focus in the public innovation literature, which is also pursued in the systematic reviews mentioned above. However, as suggested by the reviews, we also need context-sensitive knowledge about what happens within organizations, especially during the implementation of innovation. Therefore, the following section will introduce a branch of public innovation literature that takes the everyday context of public organizations as its point of departure.

(36)

34 Everyday Innovation

The concept of everyday innovation suggests that innovation made to organizational processes and services are inseparable from the everyday activities and professional practice of the organization (Lippke & Wegener 2014; Pedersen 2020). A common way of talking about innovation is in terms of size. Big and small. Macro and micro.

Radical and incremental. However, Weick and Quinn (1999) broke with that dichotomy by arguing that size is merely a matter of how closely the innovation is observed. Any radical innovation can be broken down into incremental steps and incremental innovation can accumulate and have radical results. Therefore, everyday innovation rejects the radical-incremental scale and instead claims that what matters is not size, but the organizational context. Everyday innovation takes place at the operative levels of public service organizations, for example, including healthcare (Pedersen 2020), primary school (Lippke & Wegener 2014) or elderly care (Fuglsang & Sørensen 2011). Because everyday innovations are so deeply embedded in the daily operations of the organization, they may seem small, or even invisible to outsiders (Lippke & Wegener, 2014) – but paradoxically, this deep embeddedness is also what makes them so complex (Røvik, 2016).

In politically governed organizations, managers’ ideas are often informed by for instance policy-changes or by higher management levels, where the manager then serves to mediate external ideas and relate them to the local context (Fuglsang &

Sørensen 2011; Pedersen 2016). Regardless of where the inspiration for the innovation stems from, studies of everyday innovation emphasise that it is never inserted into an empty space, but must be translated actively into the existing practice (Pedersen & Johansen 2012; Røvik 2007). For this translation to take place across an organization, the individual professional must make sense of both problem and solution in the context of everyday operations (Pedersen 2016, 2020). Therefore an organizational perspective on innovation rejects the notion of the hero-innovator and argues that innovation is inevitably a social endeavour (Meijer 2014).

(37)

35

When professionals take the initiative to improve their service delivery with whatever resources are available to them, it is sometimes referred to using other related terms than everyday innovation. Some scholars use the term ‘bricolage’

(Fuglsang & Sørensen 2011), ‘employee-driven innovation’ (Kesting & Ulhøi 2010; Wihlman et al. 2015) or simply ‘bottom-up innovation’ (Arundel et al. 2015).

While these labels emphasise slightly different aspects of the innovation process, they share the pursuit of acknowledging innovations that emerge from the operative levels of the organization.

Lippke and Wegener (2014) emphasise the cumulative potential of everyday innovation and argue that it is ultimately about pushing the boundaries of the institutions of one’s professional practice, without abandoning them completely.

They point out that because everyday innovation takes place during operations, it inevitably involves balancing stability and renewal – routine and innovation – maintenance and disruption. Focusing on the micro-processes of public innovation, these studies share the assumption that many small improvement actions combined can have immense results. This means that although everyday innovation consists of numerous micro-actions by individual actors, they can form a movement of small innovations that may eventually inform changes at the macro-level (Hartley, 2012;

Harris & Albury, 2009).

Just like the imperative to innovate dictates that good public managers are obliged to find innovative solutions to pressing issues (Jordan 2014), they are also subjected to a related imperative to disseminate. This imperative includes a moral obligation for public managers in so far as if they find an innovative solution to a problem, they should share it with other public organizations. The obligation to ‘spread’ one’s innovations is based on the bureaucratic principle of offering equal services to the population (Osborne & Brown 2005). Moreover, it is generally regarded a waste of resources to reinvent the wheel, and as the public sector is not governed by the laws

(38)

36

of marked competition, there is no real punishment for being unoriginal if it helps you to improve (Hartley 2005). Finally, in the imperative to disseminate, receivers’

reservations about copying the innovations of others are delegitimised by accusations of vanity or ‘the not invented here-syndrome’ (e.g. Bessant, Hughes, &

Richards, 2010). These assumptions are embedded in much of literature on the diffusion of public innovation. However, too much focus on the ‘sender’ of an innovative message risks presenting potential adopters as passively waiting around for someone to tell them about a good idea, which is problematic because it places implementation in a black box yet again. In the following chapter, translation theory is introduced to explain the active work of adopting organizations that makes innovations travel from one organization to the next (Czarniawska & Sevón 2005).

The Danish public workforce is generally well-educated and a massive amount of resources is spent on professionalising public managers to teach them to extend their expertise from their original trade to include leadership competences such as change and innovation management. This dissertation builds on the position that frontline professionals represent a vast pool of knowledge specific to the context of the operations they are engaged in and that frontline managers are uniquely positioned to steer that professional competence towards innovating public services from the inside out (Wihlman et al. 2015).

Some innovation scholars argue that innovation can be both intentional and unintentional, for example the invention of the post-it, which was allegedly a fortunate accident (Osborne & Brown 2011). Meanwhile, scholars who favour more strategic coordination argue that without political leadership, emergent everyday innovation will be no more than ‘random incrementalism’ (Bason 2018). Generally, the debate about which actors have the legitimate mandate to innovate is recurring in the public administration literature. Some scholars take the position that elected politicians have the rightful mandate to develop public services based on input from

(39)

37

the constituency (Torfing & Sørensen 2019). This line of thought has been found to risk condemning entrepreneurial public managers as loose cannons or rule breakers (Borins 2000).

From an organizational perspective, routine and innovation are not each other’s counterparts, but rather each other’s prerequisites. Instead of focusing on printed strategies and political statements by top-managers, studies of everyday innovation look within organizations and find the innovative potential in the intersection between organizational dynamics, professional institutions and external input.

The reviewed meta-studies in the previous section suggested that important organizational factors included structural elements as well as resources. Moreover, the Innovation Barometer indicates that public innovation is usually initiated by the employees or by the organization’s manager (COI 2020). Accordingly, studies of everyday innovation tend to focus on professionals and their nearest managers, their collaboration and negotiations and on the space for action readily available to them.

This dissertation is placed in the intersection between strategic and emergent innovation, because the main puzzle addressed in this research concerns how managers can systematically facilitate everyday innovation. Obviously, the future of the public welfare state cannot depend on luck. Meanwhile, the evidence that public employees are in a unique position to improve public services from within is

Figure 2: Junction for everyday innovation

(40)

38

compelling. Therefore, the dissertation focuses on how innovation leadership and management can emerge from the operative levels and thereby reap the benefits of intimate knowledge of organizational conditions and professional institutions combined with a conscious ambition to raise the bar. Perhaps there is such a thing as making your own luck. Studies of everyday innovation often promote a strategy of letting a thousand blossoms bloom and argue that the right and responsibility to innovate should not be assigned one specific person or group, but rather that the more people who take responsibility for developing their own corner of the organization, the better it will do. Therefore, the notion that fortune favours the prepared (Cohen & Levinthal 1994) goes well with the assumption in everyday innovation that the deep contextual knowledge of professionals can be utilised for an innovative responsiveness to challenges and opportunities as they occur. The studies in the dissertation follow this curiosity by examining the conditions under which frontline managers and staff take cues from the institutions of their profession and their external environment to develop their practice, step by step.

Summing up, innovation is considered a performative term in this dissertation, which means that the content of the innovation activity and how is it carried out form an empirical question to be assessed on the merits of the specific organizational context. Based on prior studies, the dissertation seeks to advance the knowledge about how public value is assessed and how innovation is conducted by professionals in public service organizations.

The literature on public innovation can be scoped at a generic, macro-level and a specific, micro-level:

(41)

39 Public innovation Managing Public Innovation

on the Frontline

Everyday innovation Research

results

Generic Context sensitive

Object of analysis

Sector/macro-level Operative/micro-level Central

actors

Top-managers and politicians

Professionals Theoretical

contribution

Diffusion/invention/

policy

Sensemaking/implementation/

public value creation Table 2: The dissertation bridges the strategic and the emergent view on innovation

Taken together, the research in this dissertation is wedged in between these two streams of literature as it tries to bridge knowledge about innovation management and leadership with the context-sensitive concept of everyday innovation. The dissertation contributes to the literature by examining the balance between strategic and emergent innovation and the unique position of frontline managers who share the professional background of their employees, but are also positioned to know the organizational environment and to scout for ideas from above, below and in neighbouring organizations.

Managing Public Innovation on the Frontline

Managing Public Innovation on the Frontline

MANAGING PUBLIC INNOVATION

ON THE FRONTLINE

Managing Public Innovation on the Frontline

Ditte Thøgersen

Acknowledgements

Dansk Resumé

Summary

Table of Contents

Preface

- First section -

Introduction

Public Sector Innovation: State of the Art