Innovation in Public Service Design: Developing a co-creation tool for public service innovation journeys

Outpaced by the speed of digital innovation in the private sector, governments are looking for new approaches to public service innovation. Drawing on three complementary innovation theories – open innovation, recombinant innovation and co-creation – this paper presents a prototype that is designed to enhance the online innovation journey for public services. The main strategy explored is that of online public-service co-creation, allowing innovators to combine online and offline efforts. The outcome of this research is a prototype of an online co-creation tool. The tool is consumed via a web-portal that includes an overview of ongoing experiments, tools, labs data sets and digital building blocks. This paper contributes by presenting the requirements and lessons learned when developing a co-creation tool for innovation in public service design. While the proposed co-creation tool is expected to enhance and speed up online cocreation efforts, findings indicate that innovators from the public and private sector still need to learn how to combine online and offline co-creation efforts. The added value expected from the online tool is that it should provide an up to date oversight of digital building blocks, innovation methods and labs. Interviews with prospective users suggest that this oversight is needed to jumpstart the first step of the innovation journey. Development of a digital sandbox – a shared online experimentation environment – is considered to be an important next step for innovation in public service design.