Conference Agenda

Background: The world does not stand still. In a dynamic world characterized by constant change, the imperative for adaptation and innovation extends beyond the realm of business to encompass public organizations as well. Fostering a culture of innovation and developing dynamic capabilities becomes crucial for public organizations to not only survive but also thrive in the face of uncertainty, addressing grand societal challenges while meeting stakeholders' needs. In healthcare, the imperative for innovation is particularly pronounced. As healthcare needs evolve, traditional models of care delivery are being reevaluated. The rise of chronic conditions and the growing importance of personalized care requires a departure from hospital-centric models towards more integrated and community-focused care solutions. Models like the Family and Community Nurse (FCN) exemplifies this shift towards organizational innovation in healthcare.

Objective: This study investigates how public administrations build capabilities for transformative action. The analysis aims to identify the combination of antecedent factors driving organizational innovation in the FCN model (framework readapted from Schilke et al. (2018)), analyzing how they interact and whether all of them are necessary for developing dynamic capabilities.

Method: Data collection consisted of interviews with regional and middle managers, cell mapping in the territories of the Tuscan local health authorities, surveys administered to FCNs from September 2022 to August 2023. We complemented this dataset with responses from the 2023 organizational climate survey distributed to Tuscan public health authority employees, including FNCs. To address the complex interplay among the antecedent factors and the development of dynamic capabilities, this study employed fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA). Our units of analysis are the Tuscan local health districts (n=26), representative of the FNC organizational model. Conditions were obtained by relating one or more questions to one specific antecedent item in the framework. The outcomes of the QCAs consist of the three dynamic capabilities constructs—sensing, seizing, and reconfiguring (Teece, 2007).

Preliminary results: The preliminary findings reveal diverse pathways to sensing and seizing capability development. Results confirm that dynamic capabilities’ constructs exhibit trade-off effects, with specific antecedent combinations acting as sufficient conditions for their development. Some cases show sensing development in the absence of external environment pressures combined with an appropriate interorganizational structure, capable of fostering interorganizational networks and communication. Other cases show the opposite configuration, while in other scenarios sensing is the result experience in primary care, combined with an organizational culture fostering trust and result orientation and an appropriate organizational structure. Seizing often arises from lacking an appropriate organizational structure under external pressures. In other cases, the right organizational culture and interorganizational structure foster seizing capabilities without external environment pressures.

Implications: Identifying the factors, along with innovation-oriented management, that drive public organizations to reinvent themselves in dynamic and uncertain environments is critical. This study aims to bridge the literature gap concerning dynamic capabilities development within public administrations, particularly in the context of organizational innovation. Our findings demonstrate that public organizations do not only respond to external pressures, but sometimes take proactive stances to innovate, proving the public sector is capable of adopting a lead-and-learn approach (Kattel & Mazzucato, 2018).

References

Kattel, R., & Mazzucato, M. (2018). Mission-oriented innovation policy and dynamic capabilities in the public sector. Industrial and Corporate Change, 27(5), 787–801. https://doi.org/10.1093/icc/dty032

Schilke, O., Hu, S., & Helfat, C. E. (2018). Quo vadis, dynamic capabilities? A content-analytic review of the current state of knowledge and recommendations for future research. Academy of Management Annals, 12(1), 390–439. https://doi.org/10.5465/annals.2016.0014

Teece, D. J. (2007). Explicating dynamic capabilities: The nature and microfoundations of (sustainable) enterprise performance. Strategic Management Journal, 28(13), 1319–1350. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.640

It has long been proposed that innovation capabilities play a crucial role for the success or failure of innovation processes (Marchiori et al., 2023; Trivellato et al., 2021; de Vries et al., 2015). While public sector organizations face challenges to deliver innovative solutions to conquer social, economic, and ecological issues despite often severe resource constraints (Moore, 1995; Bason, 2018; Clausen & Fichter, 2019), these constraints also influence their decision-making regarding the allocation and acquisition of resources and capabilities essential to fostering innovation and their innovation capabilities (Borins, 2001). Despite the academic interest in innovation capabilities, we still know little about it within the public sector context (Klein et al., 2013; Pablo et al., 2007). Therefore, this study seeks to bridge this gap by examining whether – and under what conditions – strategic choices influence innovation capabilities. Consequently, this article raises the question of how strategic choices affect innovation capabilities of local innovation labs in Germany.

By applying an explorative qualitative approach to 11 local innovation labs in Germany, the contribution of this study is twofold. Firstly, by examining the strategic response to external and internal resource dependencies in the innovation process of LILs explains the variance in innovation capabilities and outcomes. Innovation capability is not only determined by the number of innovations created, but also by the way in which these resources are integrated into the innovation process (Fuglsang & Sundbo, 2016; Kattel & Mazzucato, 2018; Marchiori et al., 2023). And secondly, the study aims to deepen our empirical knowledge on the manifestation of distinct strategic choices in innovation process and its outcome (de Vries et al., 2015).

The full paper will be structured as follows. The first and second section presents the existing literature on theories of innovation capabilities and theorizes strategic choices within the innovation process through the resource dependency lens. The conceptualization is built upon the strategic choices to innovate of cooperation and integration of resources and skills (Wang & Zajac, 2007). This leads to identifying a gap in our existing understanding about how context and resources might influence capabilities, and the derivation of working hypotheses. The next section on methods and data highlights the case study methodology I deploy. The fifth section reports findings from the case studies of German LILs (matrix for innovation capabilities based on strategic choices to innovate), followed by a discussion of the implications. I conclude by outlining the possible contributions of the present study to existing theory and practice and suggestions for further research.

The societal operating environment is constantly changing due to challenges such as geopolitical tensions and pandemics. Simultaneously, various threats and crises change shape, becoming intertwined and increasingly overlapping. Complex situations require societal crisis resilience, covering not only the ability to cope within crisis situations, but also the aspects of preparedness and post-crisis learning and renewal. Crises challenge knowledge-based decision-making, highlighting the need to acknowledge the information dimension linked to crises. Crises inevitably increase informational uncertainty, ambiguity and confusion. This observation demonstrates the need to safeguard the integrity, reliability and availability of information in an increasingly interconnected and data-driven world.

This paper examines democratic resilience from the perspective of information and knowledge. It presents a knowledge-based view on resilience, meaning that the changes in the societal security environment, various reforms and innovations shaping the information environment, and new phenomena, such as affective polarisation, pose significant challenges to joint knowledge formation, uncertainty management and coping with crises. The paper aims to understand resilience that helps with information-related challenges, such as lack or excess amount of information, its ambiguity or unusability as well as different forms of false information, thus answering the research question: How does a knowledge-based view on resilience support a democratic society's ability to cope with crises?

Resilience can be broadly defined as the ability to survive in various crisis situations. A knowledge-based view on resilience focuses specifically on information not only as a factor of environmental uncertainty, but also as a resource needed to face and respond to crisis situations. Resilience can, and has been, applied in different contexts. Emphasizing the knowledge-based view on resilience reflects the identification of information as a basic and vital resource, especially in crisis situations. For this study, the understanding of knowledge-based resilience is formed abductively through concept analysis and subsequent interviews, expert panels and workshops. The understanding of the phenomenon is formed iteratively, i.e. the following stages are reflected on the observations made in the previous phases, while enabling the emergence of new insights.

With regard to democracy, few key observations are made about knowledge-based resilience. First, societal decision-making needs to focus on creating multidirectional connections, especially by building common understanding with knowledge from different levels, sectors and disciplines. Secondly, it is important to identify information intermediaries who are able to act as reciprocal gatekeepers both enabling information to be transmitted between different groups and discussion forums and preventing the spread of false information. Thirdly, opportunities for democratic citizen participation can be established through social institutions by means of an educational system that strengthens different capabilities and legislation that supports participatory knowledge base building. Fourthly, knowledge-based resilience requires foresight that recognises and accepts the uncertainty and ignorance inevitably associated with crises, is able to make plans that enable flexibility and experimentation, and steers governance in a future-oriented manner.

Innovation in the public sector has gained an increased interest from scholars and practitioners. Many embrace the idea that innovation can contribute to improve the quality of public services as well as to enhance the problem-solving capacity of governmental organizations to deal with societal challenges. However, they only focused on the positive effects of innovations, where only a few articles specified failures of innovation or reported less innovative activity. More than half of the studies found used qualitative methods, such as interviews or focus groups. Quantitative studies – and especially mixed methods studies – were less present.

In this article, we therefore explore the empirical evidence of innovation practices and its impact on public service quality. We conduct quantitative analysis, applying linear regression and correlation test to seek the answer for our research question. The sample was observed consist of 547 institutions, representing 79 national government institutions, 34 provincial governments and 434 regency/city government.

As a result, we found that Innovation in public sector organizations has contribute to the public service quality. However, the determination of innovation is to the improvement of public service quality is considered empirically minor. We have three presumptions on this such condition. First, Innovation is isolated by contextual factors of public organization such as silo mentality and fragmented structure. Second, replication as the strategy of fostering innovation merely increase the number of innovation program but cannot creating the value of services. The last, administrative reform initiatives, such as refining business process of public service delivery and co-creation public services, have greater impact than innovation replication to improve public service quality. Acquiring and distributing information about successful attempts at institutional innovation and then adopting selected innovations within a given agency promotes contagion or mimetic isomorphism in administrative governance. But contagion and mimetic isomorphism do not by themselves promote or guarantee authentic reform.