Managing Public Innovation on the Frontline

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.