Innovation types in public sector organizations: a systematic review of the literature
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Innovation types in public sector organizations: a systematic review of the literature Laurin Buchheim1
· Alexander Krieger2 · Sarah Arndt1
Received: 29 July 2018 / Accepted: 10 October 2019 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
Abstract When analyzing the process of organizational innovation, it is often argued that a distinction between different types of innovation is necessary to gain meaningful insights on what drives and impedes innovation and how organizations may best use innovation to stay competitive. While this holds as much for public sector organizations as it does for private businesses, the former do not seek to maximize profits but rather serve the common good, which may affect the types of innovation implemented. This article systematically reviews the literature on innovation types in the context of public sector organizations. Categorizing the multitude of typologies used by scholars, it aggregates findings on antecedents, outcomes, and combinative effects of product/service, process, governance, and paradigm innovations and derives management suggestions. Results indicate that research so far has focused on product/service and process innovations and their organizational antecedents. The variety of individual factors analyzed makes it difficult to extract generalizable findings and may hinder theory-building. Management needs to pay close attention to the organization’s innovation characteristics. Future research can profit from standardized definitions and more diversified data. Keywords Public sector innovation · Public management · Innovation types · Literature review JEL Classification H83 · O30 · O31
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Laurin Buchheim [email protected]
1
University of Mannheim, Schloss, 68131 Mannheim, Germany
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University of Trier, Universitätsring 15, 54296 Trier, Germany
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1 Introduction 1.1 Innovation research in the public sector The concept of New Public Management introduced well-established corporate principles to the public sector. This includes the idea of innovation as a means to improve service quality, stay competitive, and work effectively and efficiently in a dynamic market environment (Piening 2011; Arundel et al. 2015). Research has increasingly focused on innovation in the context of public sector organizations (PSO) (Lægreid et al. 2011). Public sector organizations are considered those organizations that operate in the public sector, which is defined as “those parts of the economy that are either in state ownership or under contract to the state, plus those parts that are regulated or subsidized in the public context” (Flynn 2007, p. 2). Scholars have suggested to categorize innovation according to different types because not all innovations are driven by the same success factors and different types of innovation may be optimal to reach different organizational goals (Osborne and Brown 2011). While there seems to be a consensus that innovation types should be taken account of, it is less clear what such a taxonomy of innovation should include (Ga
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