Innovating and Optimizing for Public Performance : the case of the Dutch Regional Water Authorities

Innovating and optimizing both contribute to public performance. Public organizations need to be able to incrementally improve their policies, processes, technology and services as well as innovate them to enhance public processes. This thesis describes which capacities are needed to support both processes, and which organizational antecedents contribute to a balanced approach of innovating and optimizing. It also describes the contribution of innovating and optimizing to performance. A mixed method approach was used: after testing the contribution of connective, ambidextrous and learning capacities at the individual, organisational and network level to optimizing and innovation by structural equation modelling, a focus group approach was used to enhance our understanding of the relationships found. Connective capacity at the individual l

Ambidextrous practices in public service organizations

For public service organizations (PSOs) it is essential to be able to simultaneously optimize and innovate policies, processes and services. This article explores how PSOs shape these dual practices by examining optimization and innovation practices in eight Dutch regional water authorities (RWAs) using focus groups. It uncovers mutually reinforcing differences in culture, strategy and management leading to different ambidextrous configurations. In low ambidextrous RWAs a legalistic taskorientation goes along with a transactional management style and focus on optimization only. In high ambidextrous RWAs a societal value-orientation, integrative strategies, and a more transformational management style lead to more embedded innovation practices

Innovating and optimizing in public organizations: does more become less?

To enhance public service performance (PSP), public organizations are challenged to optimize and innovate their processes, techniques, policies and services. But can public organizations go too far when innovating and optimizing? Based on survey data from Dutch water authorities, we show that optimization initially contributes more to PSP than innovation, but its contribution is curvilinear: the impact of optimization becomes smaller the more optimization is conducted. The relation between innovation and PSP is, however, linear. Based on additional qualitative data, we show that ambidextrous water authorities run less risk of over-optimizing and use integrative strategies to deal with innovation-optimization tensions