Leadership, contracts and evaluations: steering collaborative innovation from the top?

Collaborative innovation is increasingly put forward as a solution for the many wicked problems our society faces today. Collaboration with citizens, businesses, non-profit organizations, interest groups, and other... [ view full abstract ]

Collaborative innovation is increasingly put forward as a solution for the many wicked problems our society faces today. Collaboration with citizens, businesses, non-profit organizations, interest groups, and other stakeholders can offer government organizations different perspectives and innovative ideas on policies and services (Hartly, 2005, Sørensen, Torfing, 2013). Yet, how this collaborative innovation is best fostered and incentivized at the organizational level, is largely undiscovered in current literature.

In this paper we examine three top-down drivers at the organizational level: leadership, contracts and evaluations. First we examine the role of organizational leadership in an organization’s engagement in collaborative innovation. The literature indicates that not only the leadership style (transactional versus transformational) has an effect on innovation (Schweitzer, 2014), but also the consistency of leadership can be influential. Davis and Eisenhardt (2011), for example, found a positive relationship between rotating leadership and collaborative innovation. Next, we examine how civil servants are steered (contracts) and assessed (evaluations) and how this incentivises or restricts their engagement in projects of collaborative innovation. Hard contracts and rigid evaluations are expected to make employees more risk-aversive (Binderkrantz & Korsager, 2011), a trait that is a known barrier to collaborative innovation (Sørensen & Torfing, 2012). Civil servants can also decide against collaborative innovation because of the start-up cost involved, especially if these are not taken into account in the evaluations (Behn & Kant, 1999; Albury, 2005). In contrast, however, a pilot-case conducted showed that contracts and evaluations can also provide explicit incentives for collaborative innovation, for example by listing collaborations as a performance indicator.

Through case study analyses, we explore the interplay between these three top-down drivers in depth. We do so within a collaborative framework involving three universities (University of Antwerp, KU Leuven and UCL). By collaboratively creating a set of criteria for selecting cases of ‘collaborative innovation’, along with developing shared interview questions and common interview guidelines, we systematically collect in-depth data across nine cases - with each university covering data gathering in three cases. The shared data collection framework thus enables to conduct extensive fieldwork needed for in-depth case study analysis, yet at the same time increase the number of cases for comparative cross-case analysis, since each of the research partners involved conducts data gathering across three cases yet receives access to the dataset across all nine case studies conducted. The cases included in our comparative case study each entail a public sector innovation created within a collaborative framework that contains a government organization as central coordinator of the innovation project, and partner organisations including both public organizations at different government tiers and private partners (private for profit businesses as well as non-profit organizations). By collecting data across nine cases in a systematic way, we ultimately hope to offer a comprehensive analytical framework that covers the individual, organizational and network conditions of collaborative innovation. This paper serves as a step towards that framework.