Open Innovation Maturity Model for the Government: An Open System Perspective

To meet the increasing expectations of citizens, governments have become increasingly open, transparent, accessible and consultative to deliver efficient public services. These trends can be fulfilled through open government data provision and usage. Governments can generate social and economic values by using data-driven open innovation processes, such as by adopting citizens’ ideas or knowledge related to open data and by providing government data to the public. Despite the trends of open innovation in the context of government, research on open innovation is lacking. Furthermore, most studies disregard the differences of countries in the level of open innovation maturity of open data provision and usage. Therefore, this study aims to understand data-driven open innovation practices in government by developing a government-level open innovation maturity model, evaluating the current status of open innovation of the government, and suggesting appropriate future directions and guidelines for the government

Could Alberta Enact a Sub-National Open Banking Regime?

Open banking is successfully operating, and has proved beneficial, in many countries.But Canada has not yet adopted it. Alberta doesn’t need to wait for the federal government to implement a national framework to benefit from this innovation. Using international precedent, this article charts a pragmatic course for how the province can immediately participate in the benefits of open banking, open finance, and consumer data portability, without requiring a complex sub-national regulatory and governance structure like the federal approach or expending scarce provincial policy resources. Using a market-facilitative approach, the province can utilize existing initiatives to takean accommodative and active advisory role to data portability use case development, foster market-driven use cases and industry partnerships through the Financial Innovation Act (FIA) regulatory sandbox, and utilize the existing Invest Alberta Financial Services Concierge to reduce frictions and barriers to market entry for data portability firmsand open finance entrepreneurs. Open banking creates a safer underlying ecosystem to share consumer financial data, develop data applications and new technology-driven financial products and services ina more secure way than screen scraping. This innovation promotes competition, enhances consumer product comparisons, lowers switching and transaction costs, creates new efficiencies, and allows financial product and service providers to tailor new customer offerings to individual needs. The federal open banking framework still has many implementation barriers, uncertainties, and frictions. Alberta can immediately develop expertise in consumer data portabilityby using the provincial regulatory sandbox established by the FIA. The FIA is a one ofa kind initiative in Canada. The FIA sandbox allows banks and fintech companies to develop and test data portability use cases under supervised parameters with regulatory relief. Provincial regulatory authorities can review the risks and benefits in real time, with real data. The province can potentially leapfrog the national framework by developing expertise through the FIA sandbox in data portability use cases beyond banking and relating to a financial product or service (the defined legislative scope of the FIA). Technological development and applications, fostered through the FIA, may have use value beyond banking and within a larger financial ecosystem, as well as in energy, utilities, consumer retail data, government housed data and self-sovereign digital identity solutions. The province can take three immediate steps under a market-facilitative approach.First, engage in public-facing educational efforts on the benefits, use-cases, processes, accessibility, functionality, and successes of the FIA sandbox as applied to data portability. This may include developing principles for safe data sharing, and recommended design standards and guidance. Second, in conjunction with the FIA, utilize and promote the Invest Alberta Financial Services Concierge service as a gateway to open banking partnerships and the FIA sandbox. Third, investigate how to create and implement a provincial consumer data right (CDR), which would serve as a catalyst in the province for a myriad of data-portability use cases beyond banking to an open-data paradigm, including applications in energy, investments, insurance, utilities, telecommunications, consumer retail and self-sovereign digital identify

Collaboration in Open Government Data Ecosystems: Open Cross-sector Sharing and Co-development of Data and Software

Background: Open innovation highlights the potential benefits of external collaboration and knowledge-sharing, often exemplified through Open Source Software (OSS). The public sector has thus far mainly focused on the sharing of Open Government Data (OGD), often with a supply-driven approach with limited feedback-loops. We hypothesize that public sector organizations can extend the open innovation benefits by also creating platforms, where OGD, related OSS, and open standards are collaboratively developed and shared. Objective: The objective of this study is to explore how public sector organizations in the role of platform providers facilitate such collaboration in the form of OGD ecosystems and how the ecosystem's governance may be structured to support the collaboration. Method: We conduct an exploratory multiple-case study of two such ecosystems, focused on OGD related to the Swedish labor market and public transport sector, respectively. Data is gathered through interviews, document studies, and prolonged engagement at one of the platform providers. Results: The study presents governance structure and collaboration practices of the two ecosystems and discusses how these contribute to the platform providers' goals. The case studies highlight the need for platform providers to take an active and multi-functional role in enabling the sharing of data and software from and between the members of the ecosystem. Conclusions: We conclude that OGD ecosystems offer public sector organizations a possibility to catalyze the potential innovation output of OGD, but that it requires investment and adoption of an open and collaborative mindset.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2208.0030

Science-based health innovation in Uganda: creative strategies for applying research to development

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Uganda has a long history of health research, but still faces critical health problems. It has made a number of recent moves towards building science and technology capacity which could have an impact on local health, if innovation can be fostered and harnessed.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Qualitative case study research methodology was used. Data were collected through reviews of academic literature and policy documents and through open-ended, face-to-face interviews with 30 people from across the science-based health innovation system, including government officials, researchers in research institutes and universities, entrepreneurs, international donors, and non-governmental organization representatives.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Uganda has a range of institutions influencing science-based health innovation, with varying degrees of success. However, the country still lacks a coherent mechanism for effectively coordinating STI policy among all the stakeholders. Classified as a least developed country, Uganda has opted for exemptions from the TRIPS intellectual property protection regime that include permitting parallel importation and providing for compulsory licenses for pharmaceuticals. Uganda is unique in Africa in taking part in the Millennium Science Initiative (MSI), an ambitious though early-stage $30m project, funded jointly by the World Bank and Government of Uganda, to build science capacity and encourage entrepreneurship through funding industry-research collaboration. Two universities – Makerere and Mbarara – stand out in terms of health research, though as yet technology development and commercialization is weak. Uganda has several incubators which are producing low-tech products, and is beginning to move into higher-tech ones like diagnostics. Its pharmaceutical industry has started to create partnerships which encourage innovation.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Science-based health product innovation is in its early stages in Uganda, as are policies for guiding its development. Nevertheless, there is political will for the development of STI in Uganda, demonstrated through personal initiatives of the President and the government’s willingness to invest heavily for the long term in support of STI through the Millennium Science Initiative. Activities to support technology transfer and private-public collaboration have been put in motion; these need to be monitored, coordinated, and learned from. In the private sector, there are examples of incremental innovation to address neglected diseases driven by entrepreneurial individuals and South-South collaboration. Lessons can be learned from their experience that will help support Ugandan health innovation.</p

Kunta ja käyttäjälähtöinen innovaatiotoiminta

Käyttäjälähtöinen innovaatiotoiminta uudistaa kuntien palveluja Palvelujen käyttäjät osallistava innovaatiotoiminta antaa uusia mahdollisuuksia kuntapalvelujen ja demokratian kehittämiseen. Tämä käy ilmi Tuula Jäppisen väitöskirjasta, jossa tarkastellaan kunnan ja kuntalaisen vuorovaikutusta palvelujen uudistamisessa. Uuden käyttäjälähtöisen innovaatiotoiminnan mahdollisuudet tulevat tutkimuksessa konkreettisesti esiin kolmen Itä-Uudellamaalla, Mikkelissä ja Helsingissä toteutetun esimerkin avulla. Taloustieteen oppien mukaisesti kuntien kannalta optimi palvelujen järjestämistapa on sellainen, jossa palvelut tuotetaan taloudellisesti, palvelut ovat kuntalaisten saatavilla ja kuntalainen on niihin tyytyväinen. Käyttäjälähtöisten kehittämismenetelmien avulla voidaan lisätä kuntalaisten tyytyväisyyttä tunnistamalla heidän piileviä tarpeitaan ja tuottamalla palveluita heidän kannaltaan sujuvina palvelupolkuina. Palveluhenkilöstön näkökulmasta käyttäjälähtöisyys jakaa palvelujen suunnitteluvastuuta ja lisää työtyytyväisyyttä. Käyttäjälähtöiset palvelut voivat johtaa myös vähäisten palvelu- ja tuoteparannusten sijasta kunnan koko palvelutuotannon radikaaleihin muutoksiin. Kuntalaisten osallistuminen palvelutuotannon suunnitteluun voi palauttaa kuntalaisten luottamuksen poliittiseen ja hallinnolliseen toimintaan. Kun kunta on aktiivisessa vuorovaikutuksessa palvelutuotantonsa uudistamiseksi palvelujen käyttäjien, yritysten ja järjestöjen kanssa, innovaatiotkin demokratisoituvat ja palvelut tuotetaan jatkossa yhteistyössä näiden eri tahojen kanssa. Laajimmillaan käyttäjälähtöinen innovaatiotoiminta voi tarjota myös uusia ratkaisuja yhteiskunnan ilkeisiin sosiaalisiin ongelmiin kuten nuorten syrjäytymisen ennaltaehkäisyyn.Municipalities and user-driven innovation Interaction between a municipality and a resident in decision-making on services and service restructuring. Acta Publications No. 230. The Association of Finnish Local and Regional Authorities. Helsinki. The subject of this study is user-driven innovation in the public sector. Innovation is usually examined from the perspective of the private sector and regional development, excluding service restructuring in the public sector. For this reason, innovation is typically studied from the perspective of economic science, as a source of prosperity of businesses and regions. Also, innovation researchers tend to come from the fields of economics, engineering and geography. Yet, regional development and innovation often aim at social goals that cover a wider area than economic development only, because the objective is to improve the quality of life and well-being of residents. Municipalities provide most of these public services in a welfare society. The public sector is continuously restructuring administration and services even though these development measures or reforms have not been traditionally labelled, or studied, as innovations. Innovation research in the public sector did not essentially start in Finland or internationally until the turn of the millennium. The latest Finnish innovation research in the local government sector has focused on innovation activities in the public sector in general, or on innovations from the perspective of governance, services, innovation processes, management and public procurement. The recent debate on innovation has brought to the fore the openness of innovations, and the increased role of clients and networking. These concepts are brought together in the term open innovation promoted by Chesbrough, which refers to network-based innovation, and the term user-driven innovation introduced by von Hippel. This research was carried out as an action research in local government studies. Its primary aim is to depict how the local government sector can benefit from user-driven innovation. The empirical data of the study comprises three cases from the period 2006 2010. These cases from the Itä-Uusimaa region and the cities of Mikkeli and Helsinki provide an inductive analysis of municipal innovation activities and identify their key characteristics and concepts. The ability of municipalities and local residents to act in an innovative environment is examined through various roles. These roles reflect the transition that is taking place in the European local government sector. In this process, the role of Finnish 'welfare municipalities' is changing from that of a service provider to a service organiser. In the transition, individual municipalities will, to an increasing degree, become 'network municipalities' and provide welfare services in cooperation with other municipalities, businesses and organisations. This research looks at the interaction between municipalities and residents in decision-making on services and service restructuring through the concepts of participation and user-driven approach. It has another objective as well; it aims to build a dialogue between the different perspectives of local government and innovation research to support public sector service reform. In this dialogue, the concepts of new public governance and open innovation paradigm are used. The open innovation concepts that emerge in the study and enrich the new local government paradigm include user-drivenness, polyphonic voices and networking. This study shows that there are two channels through which local residents can participate in public service reform: the traditional way of participating in decision-making on services through representative or direct democracy, and a new, more innovate way where residents participate in the planning and development of service provision through user-driven innovation activities. Over the past 20 years, participation of local residents in decision-making on services has steadily increased. Their participation has been supported since the 1990s through government programmes, legislation and a national participation project. There are also new, empowering forms of resident participation such as community planning, building of visions, focus group work and participation in a resident forum. The first decade of the 2000s saw the introduction of the concept of user-drivenness in the Finnish and international innovation policy. The government programmes of the early 2000s and the national innovation strategy adopted in 2008 have aimed to safeguard residents' ability to develop services as service users. At the same time, new innovative user-driven methods of resident participation have become available, for example methods of service design. However, both international and Finnish studies show that services planned and provided in collaboration between a municipality and residents are not yet common. A reform of local government services through user-driven innovation also means changes to local democracy and the management of local community. In changing circumstances the leadership of local community, too, must be seen as an interactive and shared process where a municipality uses networks as a means to manage cooperation, innovation, learning and development. This research uses the framework of discursive institutionalism to describe innovation and its management as practices of interaction. According to the first interpretation of discursive institutionalism, local government as a hierarchy conducts discourse on their service reform only with the elite in power, in other words with political decision-makers. According to another interpretation, local government as local civic network is already conducting discourse on ideas acting as a breeding ground for change both with the elite and service users. The cases show that service users are more ready for public debate and changes required to introduce a user-driven approach than politicians and local government officials responsible for the provision of services. The findings show that the methods of participation and user-driven approach are partly identical but take place within different processes. User-driven innovation may offer a new kind of discussion forum for the decision-making elite and residents. In this forum, users can express their own service needs proactively already at the stage when services are planned, and later at service development stage they can act as change agents together with politicians, local government officials and the media. At the end of the research the methods of participation are linked to the different stages of administrative and political decision-making processes, and the methods of user-driven approach to the different stages of innovation processes, and these processes are united as a single common process. This is an ideal model where a local resident can interactively participate in decision-making on and development of services via the different stages of joint planning. From the perspective of economic science, the cross-sectoral processes brought about by the user-driven approach modernise service provision and make municipalities more competitive. This competitiveness may be seen, for example, as faster reaction to resident needs. When used systemically, the user-driven approach also improves productivity and quality. The methods of service design make it possible to anticipate residents' future needs. They introduce new scientific ways of identifying users' latent needs and may, instead of small improvements to services and products, also produce radical innovations at the level of the organisation. Municipalities further benefit from innovation activities in terms of democracy. Increasing resident participation and improving opportunities for contributing and influencing are means of restoring residents' confidence in politics and governance and changing decision-making and produced services to better meet the needs of residents. The user-driven approach has also received positive feedback from service personnel. From their perspective, the user-driven approach spreads the responsibility for the planning of services and increases job satisfaction. When innovation is seen in the broader context of welfare and social policy, not merely as part of business and regional policies, the holistic, interactive methods of service design can offer new cooperative solutions to the wicked social problems. Interactive learning can help a municipal organisation question and change the current normative practices; create a new model for the municipal service system and put this model into practice. In this ideal model of a service system, the resident-oriented coexistence of municipalities and municipal residents will, if realised, lead to a reformed local government where residents become responsible co-producers of services. In this renewed local governance model, municipalities act, in accordance with the new public governance, as networking authorities, and municipal residents are naturally participating in both decision-making and service processes

Reflections on the triple-helix as a vehicle to stimulate innovation in technology and security : a Belgian case study

In this contribution the main argument is that a triple helix collaboration between industry, government and knowledge institutes can be a vehicle to stimulate innovation and technology in the field of safety and security. To underpin this argument the significance of the evolution from a state model to a triple-helix model is described as well as the paradigm of open innovation that is a necessary condition for the triple-helix model. Relying on experiences since 2014 with the Belgian Innovation Centre for Security reflections are made on the dynamics of the triple-helix collaboration taking into account its creation, objectives, ambition, methodology, partners and funding. Some of the (perceived) barriers encountered and logics used by government, as one of the ‘hesitating’ participants in the triple-helix collaboration, are further discussed

Towards evaluation design for smart city development

Smart city developments integrate digital, human, and physical systems in the built environment. With growing urbanization and widespread developments, identifying suitable evaluation methodologies is important. Case-study research across five UK cities - Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester, Milton Keynes and Peterborough - revealed that city evaluation approaches were principally project-focused with city-level evaluation plans at early stages. Key challenges centred on selecting suitable evaluation methodologies to evidence urban value and outcomes, addressing city authority requirements. Recommendations for evaluation design draw on urban studies and measurement frameworks, capitalizing on big data opportunities and developing appropriate, valid, credible integrative approaches across projects, programmes and city-level developments

Public entities driven robotic innovation in urban areas

Cities present new challenges and needs to satisfy and improve lifestyle for their citizens under the concept “Smart City”. In order to achieve this goal in a global manner, new technologies are required as the robotic one. But Public entities unknown the possibilities offered by this technology to get solutions to their needs. In this paper the development of the Innovative Public Procurement instruments is explained, specifically the process PDTI (Public end Users Driven Technological Innovation) as a driving force of robotic research and development and offering a list of robotic urban challenges proposed by European cities that have participated in such a process. In the next phases of the procedure, this fact will provide novel robotic solutions addressed to public demand that are an example to be followed by other Smart Cities.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

U.S. SDG Data Revolution Roadmap

One year after adopting the SDGs, in an addendum to its Open Government National Action Plan, the U.S. Government committed to develop an SDG Data Revolution Roadmap that "charts the future course of efforts to fill data gaps and build capacity to use data for decision-making and innovation to advance sustainable development." The U.S. Government's SDG Data Revolution Roadmap will outline the government's commitments-to-action from 2017-2018. With a deadline of June 2017, it will be developed by the U.S. Government "through an open and inclusive process that engages the full range of citizen, non-governmental, and private sector stakeholders."This report represents the beginning of that engagement process. On December 14, 2016, the Center for Open Data Enterprise and the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data convened a Roundtable to develop recommended priorities for the U.S. Government's SDG Data Revolution Roadmap The Roundtable brought together more than 40 stakeholders from government, civil society, and the private sector with expertise in achieving and promoting sustainable development