Systematic digital service innovation in the public sector for sustainable development

Project description

The research to be conducted within the doctoral project mainly concerns the research area of ​​digital innovation, which is developed within the research fields of management, organizational studies, and information systems. Within the field, the concept of digital innovation is understood as the process through which new products, services, processes, or business models are developed, used, and improved over time and where digital technology is used in both the innovation process and outcome. Digital service innovation is a perspective within the field specifically focused on how digital innovation takes place through co-creation and resource integration between internal and external actors.

Organizations increasingly need to be able to both manage and improve their core business and simultaneously explore new processes, services, and products, which is often prevented by organizational structures that are optimized for management and efficiency. Similarly, a well-established organizational identity and culture can limit what is seen as possible and desirable in the use of digital technologies. At the same time, digitization offers new opportunities to open innovation processes, to share resources with others and build innovation capacity, and to go beyond the cognitive limitations of one's own organization through, for example, digital platforms and ecosystems.

While digital technology has traditionally been seen as an enabler and designed within organizations to support best predetermined business strategies and structures, a shift towards digital strategy means that the possibilities of digitization and digital technology will instead act as a starting point for their development. This in turn requires new assumptions about the development of digital technology that do not start from the inertia and relative stability that characterizes IT systems, but instead from the plasticity and malleability of digital technology over time. Awareness and understanding of this dynamic have been shown to create new conditions for strategy development, which in turn can open up the development of a long-term digital innovation capability.

Although the research so far has identified important components in building a systematic capacity for digital innovation, there is a lack of important knowledge about how organizations in the public sector can do this. A significant reason for this is that the research area has predominantly developed based on how digital innovation is expressed in the private sector. In recent times, certain exceptions have shown that even if similar general challenges exist in both sectors, approaches from the private sector cannot be translated without a deeper understanding of and adaptation to the specific conditions of the public sector. Examples of these conditions highlighted by research so far are how political processes and results, isomorphic pressures between public actors, specialization and division of activities into units and administrations, as well as an effort to protect public value can all potentially influence whether and how public organizations work with digital innovation.