Abstract
AbstractThe public sector is under pressure to provide new public services with increasingly scarce resources. In response, practitioners and academics have called for more innovation in the public sector. Our understanding of sources of innovation within public sector organizations, however, is inadequate. Motivated by this gap, we develop a conceptual model of how push and pull sources enable innovation within public sector organizations. Key to our theory is that push and pull sources of innovation are enabled by innovation capabilities. Five hypotheses are tested using cross‐country survey data from European public sector organizations. Empirical analysis offers strong support for the central role played by innovation capability in enabling push and pull sources of innovation within public sector organizations. This article advances knowledge of the sources of innovation in the public sector and extends theorizing on push and pull mechanisms by examining their relevance to innovation in a public sector context.
Highlights
In many countries, the public sector is under severe pressure from various new challenges, such as ageing populations and growing debt
We ask the following research question: What is the interplay between technology-push, demand-pull, and organizational capabilities in promoting innovation within public sector organizations? We develop five hypotheses that are empirically tested using a comprehensive dataset on innovation in European public sector organizations
We suggest that organizational capabilities—and those related to innovation capability—enable demand-pull and technology-push sources of innovation to enter the organization and its innovation process
Summary
The public sector is under severe pressure from various new challenges, such as ageing populations and growing debt. The relative importance of technology-push vs demand-pull has been one of the classic debates in the literature on industrial innovation, and this debate has been fundamental to scholarly understandings of the sources of innovation for organizations in the private sector (Di Stefano et al 2012). This literature has largely overlooked public sector organizations. This article seeks to bridge the literatures on innovation in the private and public sectors but, more importantly, seeks to integrate different theoretical perspectives on the sources of innovation within organizations (i.e., integration of technology-push/demandpull with theorizing on organizational capabilities). The theoretical nature of this relationship remains poorly understood, and there is little quantitative analysis of this
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