As part of the current economic crisis, the public sector is subject to major budget constraints. At the same time, the demand for public services in many advanced countries is growing faster than the rest of the economy. In order to respond to these challenges, the public sector needs to continue to innovate, as innovation can help to improve public sector efficiency (costs per service, reduced administration…) and to deliver new and better quality services. According to the general innovation results, the public sector in Europe innovates, but it still faces a number of internal and external obstacles. The European Public Sector Innovation Scoreboard 2013, identified internal barriers as lack of human and financial resources, a lack of management support and staff incentives, and a risk-averse culture or staff resistance. Therefore, it is worth finding mechanisms that help minimize internal barriers in order to enhance innovation capability in the public sector.
Borins (2006) divides the innovation barriers in public sector into three groups. The first, internal barriers, primarily within the bureaucracy, included hostile or skeptical attitudes, difficulty coordinating organizations, and public sector opposition to entrepreneurial action; the second, political barriers, arising in political environment and, finally the third, external barriers, caused by the environment outside the public sector. The European Public Sector Innovation Scoreboard 2013 also highlights internal and external barriers.
Treating citizens as customers has been one of the key elements in transforming public sector from bureaucratic organizations into public service providers. Around this view has emerged Public Value Theory (Moore, 1995) and eGovernment (Stowers, 1999) which combined together have re-asserted a focus on citizenship, and the role of governmental and local administrations and public authorities in working with citizens to generate public value. Although some researchers have emphasized the different roles of citizen in the modernization of public sector, more in-depth studies should carry out to stimulate a more innovative-oriented culture in public sector organizations to remove its risk-averse culture and staff resistance.
The objectives of this study are: a. describe the steps to implement an internal idea management contest initiative which encourage the participations of all employees and which promotes intrapreneurship in a public organization - City Hall of Madrid (Spain) case-, b. analyze which elements of an innovative-oriented culture are influenced by that initiative.
We have used a single holistic case study design, adapted from Villarreal (2007) and Villarreal and Landeta (2010). This design has been drawn up using the most relevant contributions (Eisenhardt, 1989; Maxwell, 1996; Yin, 1998, 2014) from literature review. We use multiple sources of information to confirm evidence obtained in two phases. The first one, essentially qualitative, it was carried out to describe the motivations and characteristics of each stage of the internal idea management contest initiative in the city hall of Madrid (Spain). Gathering the evidence from: a. internal and external documentation review, b. multiple in-depth interviews to 11 key informers, c. use of physical, technological and cultural artefacts. In addition, we obtained a review of the case report developed by key informers.
For the second –quantitative- phase, we constructed an instrument based on the innovation culture model of Rao and Weintraub (2013) that we have used as a theoretical framework to analyze which elements of an innovative-oriented culture are influenced by the mentioned initiative. The instrument allowed to analyze the 54 items grouped in six dimensions: Values, Behaviors, Climate, Resources, Processes and Success. The questionnaire was sent to the 209 employees that participate in the initiative. From April 8 to April 22, 2015, we received answers from 72 participants. With this data we made an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) using SPSS v23 program.
The study provides a schematic diagram of the framework of an internal idea management contest initiative which encourage the participations of all employees and which promotes intrapreneurship in a public organization. Some services have currently been launched as a result of this initiative.
Regarding the quantitative analysis, the first strand of findings shows that through its initiative, Madrid City Hall, has managed to enable participation, leverage collective intelligence, change behaviors, and definitely stimulate an entrepreneurial spirit within their organization.
The main problem identified was the lack of effectiveness of complementary actions (seminars) for raising awareness among coordinators and general managers as a way of encouraging the participation of their team members. Nevertheless, it is true that this task is complicated by a pyramidal organizational structure, with various levels of management, and by the standardization of public employee jobs.
Therefore, on a practical level, the research provides other public institutions with valuable, new empirical information which can help them identify successful practices for implementing an internal crowdsourcing initiative to enhance their innovation capability and deal with the increasing competitiveness among European cities (Parkinson, Hutchins, Simmie, Clark, and Verdonk, 2004) to attract talent.
Although the type of single case study used here allows considerable quality and depth of information, it should be accepted that it constitutes a relevant limitation to any wider application of the conclusions. The single case study reduces the chance of using Yin’s replication logic, compared with a multiple-case study. In this regard, it is proposed as line of future research to use Yin’s replication logic, both in other cases with a similar context (literal replication) and in different contexts (theoretical replication), with a view to achieving a greater degree of transferability (Maxwell, 1996).
Campos-Calderon_2016_OUI-Conference-Final.pdf 