Local coordination across structures

With collaborative innovation as main theoretical base the paper discusses current insights from an ongoing municipal project on how to organize for social sustainability. The research rests on a participatory design, where... [ view full abstract ]

With collaborative innovation as main theoretical base the paper discusses current insights from an ongoing municipal project on how to organize for social sustainability. The research rests on a participatory design, where the main empirical material for this paper consists of interviews and discussions with a development projects group members and group managers. The study concludes that the project do not fulfil the requirements for collaborative innovation so far, but instead gives an example for how public organizations can create local coordination across structures. Reasons for this limited advance is, according to the themes of this study, a diverging understanding of organizational needs between organizational levels, lack of priority and support, influence from existing structures and, most vital, a demarcation to involve only personel from public organization at the core of the project. In all, the project has come to handle social sustainability as an organizational problem rather than a societal problem where many other actors more naturally would be involed. There are though advances that partly move into the direction of collaborative innovation, where the paper ends with some reflection upon how this can be achieved. From the process of analysing the paper also have used the division between outer flexibility and inner flexibility as well as verbal priority and action priority, which are presented as candidate theoretical contributions.