Abstract
The public service sector plays a vital role in every country, providing citizens with services that support individual and community well-being and prosperity. In general, the public sector is a major economic actor in OECD countries in terms of size, representing 20-30% of gross domestic product (GDP). However, governments across the OECD countries face unprecedented social, health, environmental and economic challenges that have an impact on the success of regions. The ability to respond to these rapidly evolving, complex and often large-scale socio-economic challenges, especially where public funding is limited, demands novel approaches to how governments operate, what services they deliver and how they design and deliver them. Multi-stakeholder collaboration between government, citizens, businesses and the not-for-profit sector has been demonstrated to offer many benefits for public sector innovation. Collaboration helps to ensure customer focus in the design and delivery of public services.
Service design has rapidly become a popular practice in the public sector as a driver of service innovation. For public service managers, service design has been described as offering new ways to innovate and pave the way towards a customer-centric governance model. However, based on the literature review of this research, there is a clear need to increase the knowledge of how service design can be applied to address wider organisational and policy context issues in the public sector. For example, participatory methods are not yet fully exploited, and they are difficult to integrate into existing innovation practices. As a result, service design has so far had limited impact on public service innovation. Recently, the intersection of ’service-dominant logic' (SDL) and service design has been recognised as an important area of research for enhancing service innovation. In the public sector context, ‘public service logic' (PSL), previously known as ‘public service-dominant logic' (PSDL), could provide substantial input to a theoretical framework for the development of public service design. However, research in this area is still in its infancy and more research is needed. This study aimed to explore how service design can improve the management of innovation in the public service sector.
The philosophical approach of this study is based on interpretivism and phenomenology, the latter being one of the main forms of interpretivism. This
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philosophical approach was chosen because the study focuses on a social phenomenon, namely innovation in the public service sector. Innovation and its management is a socially constructed activity within an organisation. This study comprises of inductive qualitative research, which is frequently used in interpretivist philosophy. In addition, grounded theory was chosen as the strategic approach for this research. The inductive approach often uses grounded theory, and thus serves the explorative nature of this study well. The data were collected from people with experience of the innovation process in the public health services sector. They have been involved in and/or managed the process of innovation in public services in various capacities. The study focuses on the four levels of public sector management: political actors, executive management, upper middle management and middle management. The data were collected through 27 semi-structured interviews.
The empirical findings of this study show that the existing process models for innovation management in public health organisations are not yet consistent. Only two of the seven public health organisations that participated in the study had recently launched an innovation process model. Furthermore, the study revealed that public health organisations had successfully used data and information generated through service design to improve individual areas of public health services, but less often to support management. In turn, the empathic perspective enabled by service design was recognised as important in providing public managers with new insights to support their decision-making. As a result, this study proposes a new model for innovation management in public services, based on service design and public service logic.
The main theoretical contribution of this study is a more precise operationalisation of service design in the context of public service logic. It extends the knowledge on the use of service design on policy-making and macro level in improving public services. From a practical/managerial perspective, the study provides an insight into public sector innovation management as an evolving concept that can be applied in different ways in different contexts. This provides an opportunity for public sector managers to broaden their understanding of service design as an integral part of public sector innovation.