Review of Public Administration and Management

Employee Engagement as Catalyst for Collaboration in Public Service Innovation

Omar Khan^* Department of Economic and Administrative Sciences, Izmir Democracy University, Izmir, Turkey
^*Correspondence: Omar Khan, Department of Economic and Administrative Sciences, Izmir Democracy University, Izmir, Turkey, Email:

Received: 02-Feb-2023, Manuscript No. RPAM-23-19697; Editor assigned: 06-Feb-2023, Pre QC No. RPAM-23-19697 (PQ); Reviewed: 20-Feb-2023, QC No. RPAM-23-19697; Revised: 27-Feb-2023, Manuscript No. RPAM-23-19697 (R); Published: 06-Mar-2023, DOI: 10.35248/2315-7844.23.11.382

Description

Collaborations between public actors, private actors, and service customers are something that drive innovation in public services. The advantages of user involvement in public services have received much focus in the literature, but it is still unclear how user involvement might spur collaborative creativity. Economies are faced with new challenges when it comes to the organisation of public services, which are brought on by the rising expectations of public managers to provide high-quality services, the emergence of complex issues that lack obvious solutions, the rise in citizen and business demands, and the realisation by governments that their knowledge and resources are limited, which forces them to develop new, innovative services in partnership with various actors.

The creation and deployment of new services that are qualitatively superior to those offered previously is referred to as service innovation. Collaboration with external stakeholders enables synergies and learning that lead to innovation by providing access to a vast array of talents, resources, and information. This "collaborative innovation" includes not just public actors but also private players from businesses to nonprofits, users to citizens. Users and citizens are essential partners in these collaborations because users have the critical knowledge required to improve and innovate products and services and governments can boost their legitimacy by responding to citizen demands. Although user involvement in collaborative partnerships is thought to accelerate innovation processes, there is still much to learn about the precise circumstances in which user involvement results in collaborative service innovation. This is despite the fact that literature has focused extensively on how users can participate in policy and service creation.

User-driven innovation

Adopting user-generated innovations at the time seems nonsensical because the service provider was created to protect its service creation, distribution, and renewal processes from outside influences in order to secure its competitive edge. They are frequently in a unique position to see new trends and present novel ideas, and their comprehension of the value of the services, exposure to similar services, and desire to enhance the services they now use can spur innovation. "User-driven innovation basic" assumption is that users are best suited to introduce service innovations since they have a keen awareness of their own service needs. Their user experiences provide them an advantage over other innovators, like the government or the market, by providing them with essential knowledge about how services function and how they are expected to perform in a specific local environment. Users take advantage of this information by launching new services for their own use or by making changes to innovations after they have been released. Both the public and private sectors have benefited from this user-driven innovation. For instance, user-driven innovation has been noted in the private sector across a number of industries, such as sport goods, and construction. User-driven innovation has been used in the public sector to explain service innovation in "quadruple helix" partnerships, smart cities, living labs, and the healthcare industry.

Collaborative innovation

The need of successful interorganizational collaboration, both within government agencies and between government agencies and private-sector organisations. the effectiveness of public policy making and service delivery has been increasingly highlighted, notably in the field of public management, to the growing priority given to network theories of the public sector and meta-governance, as well as the growth of the New Public Governance (NPG) rationale. This blend of user-driven and collaborative innovation is especially widespread in Public-Private Innovation (PPI) partnerships. PPIs are alliances where public and private entities work together to develop novel solutions, frequently through user-driven innovation. These PPIs are frequently created around complicated services, including healthcare services, which are hard to obtain and heavily reliant on user experiences. Furthermore, these innovations rely heavily on the user experiences of specialized users who not only have the skills to identify the necessary components of the innovation but are also the best qualified to evaluate its effectiveness and usability.

Codesign of service innovation

A natural "partnership synergy" between users and service providers can develop as a result of the interdependence of users and service providers, which may lead to the codesign of services. When users are purposefully included as a part of the design process to produce services, this is referred to as codesign. Because public-private user interactions minimise feedback loops between designers and users and boost innovators' understanding of the problem because all important stakeholders are a part of the same innovation system, codesign can be particularly prominent in public-private collaborations. Such cross-disciplinary partnerships between coproducing customers and service providers foster innovative thinking and bring together pertinent problem-solving skills. By empowering users, service providers and customers can communicate bilaterally and engage in more effective negotiation and interaction.

Empowerment of users

By empowering users, tokenism is challenged, and the codesign process and its results are improved. We take into account two broad "levels" of empowerment to examine its effects on collaborative innovation. On the one hand, users can be included in the process of service design as advisers, which mean they offer information and knowledge with the people involved in the design process but do not actively participate in it. This user involvement may be purely educational, in which case the service provider tells the users about the service process and the users respond by offering suggestions. However, users can also participate as "user-innovators," which means they are heavily involved in the development of the services and have a lot of authority and responsibility.