A proposed innovation model for public organizations: empirical results from federal government innovation experts in the United Arab Emirates

Abstract

Innovation management and associated modeling have garnered significant research interest in recent decades. The considerable interest in the topic resulted in the development of several innovation models for private and public sector organizations. A comprehensive literature review conducted by the authors of this paper on various innovation management models in the private and public sectors revealed that the majority of models share common stages. The authors presented the results of this study at a relevant international conference in 2018 that is published by IEEE and indexed by Scopus. However, it was seen that when modeling for the public sector, sufficient focus has not been placed on commercialization and practical utilization. The objective of the present study is, therefore, to develop an innovation model that allows public organizations to maximize commercialization and practical utilization. In this regard, interviews with innovation experts from different federal government entities in multiple emirates within the United Arab Emirates were conducted in order to understand the current situation for the innovation management process in the UAE government. The data from interviews were collected, conceptualized, and organized for ease of management using a Thematic Analysis approach (Braun and Clarke in Qual Res Sport Exerc Health 11(4):589–597, 2019). The outputs were analyzed to identify common themes in the results. Based on the results of the literature review, its comparative and content analysis and the results from the interviews an innovation model for public organizations is developed. The proposed model, focuses on three main areas: the type of innovation model, the stages in the entire process, and the tools associated with each stage. The proposed model is useful in that it addresses the critical aspect of commercialization and operational sustainability of the ideas, which was absent in the majority of existing models. The proposed model could help government entities identify, generate and conceptualize ideas for improvements, thereby exploiting new services that are more effective and efficient.