Innovation is a recurring theme in public administration. It has been used to frame the transformation of public sector organizations in order to enhance the effectiveness, efficiency, and legitimacy of their public value... [ view full abstract ]
Innovation is a recurring theme in public administration. It has been used to frame the transformation of public sector organizations in order to enhance the effectiveness, efficiency, and legitimacy of their public value creation processes (Bekkers et al., 2013). As needs of citizens are changing, and technology is advancing, there is an immense need for innovation in the public sector. On one hand, citizens have higher expectations about public services and government interventions. On the other, public managers and elected politicians have growing ambitions concerning improved public governance mechanisms and tighter control. Finally, public tasks have become more and more complex and have developed into “tangled problems” or even “wicked problems” – problems that are often too difficult to be solved by a single entity or include many different layers of complexity (Sørensen & Torfing, 2010).
Although there is a certain level of consensus on the fact that innovation, and particularly public services innovation, is a good solution (see, among other, Walker, 2014; Borins, 2014; Hartley et al., 2013; Brown & Osborne, 2013; Damanpour et al., 2009), there does not seem to be a consensus about its specific role in the public sector or simply what innovation is, which is a concept that has been defined very differently across disciplines and domains. What’s more, the way public administrations have innovated throughout time has evolved, coinciding with different waves of administrative reforms (Osborne & Strokosch, 2013). In particular, Mergel (2015) identifies three different types of innovation in the public sector: closed, externalized, and open innovation.
Chesbrough (2003) defines open innovation as a strategy by which firms commercialize external (as well as internal) ideas by deploying outside (as well as in-house) pathways to the market: “specifically, companies can commercialize internal ideas through channels outside of their current businesses in order to generate value for the organization (…) In addition, ideas can also originate outside the firm’s own labs and be brought inside for commercialization” (Chesbrough, 2003: 37). Despite its private sector origins, Chesbrough & Bogers (2014) argue that there are important opportunities for open innovation in the public sector through, for example, initiatives like open government and open data.
Given this context, this paper aims at exploring how innovation, and particularly open innovation, takes place in the Mexican public sector. Mexico has implemented important changes on several public policies and government programs. However, being a developing country, Mexico also has important structural limitations in terms of government action and participation of civil society and other actors in the decision making processes. Therefore, we think Mexico could be an interesting case, which could provide lessons for other developed and developing countries interested in open innovation. In order to understand the main benefits, drivers and barriers to open innovation in Mexico, two different types of initiatives will be explored: open data and urban labs. The paper will contribute to a better understanding of the variables that drive/hinder (open) innovation in the public sector as well as of the role of relevant contextual variables.
