Promoting open innovation in the public sector through social media monitoring

Abstract

Motivated by the multiple ‘success stories’ of the open innovation paradigm in the private sector, and also by the increasing complexity of social problems and needs, the public sector has started moving in this direction, attempting to exploit the extensive knowledge of citizens for the development of innovations in public policies and services. As the direct transfer of open innovation methods from the private sector to the public sector is not possible, it is necessary to develop effective ‘citizen-sourcing’ methods, which address the specific needs of the public sector, and then analyze and evaluate them from various political and management sciences' perspectives. This paper makes a two-fold contribution in this direction: i) It evaluates a novel method of monitoring relevant social media (e.g. political blogs, news websites, and also Facebook, Twitter, etc. accounts) by government agencies, by retrieving and making advanced processing of their content, and extracting from it external knowledge about specific domains of government activity or public policies of interest, in order to promote and support open innovation; ii) For this purpose it develops a multi-perspective evaluation framework, based on sound theoretical foundations from the political and management sciences, which can be of wide applicability; it includes three evaluation perspectives: a political perspective (based on the ‘wicked’ social problems theory from the political sciences), a crowd-sourcing perspective (based on previous management sciences research on crowd-sourcing) and a diffusion perspective (based on Roger's diffusion of innovation theory from management sciences). The above evaluation provides interesting insights into this novel method of promoting and supporting open innovation in the public sector through social media monitoring, revealing its capabilities and strengths, and at the same time its problems and weaknesses as well, and also ways/interventions for addressing the latter.