Emergence of public-private innovation ecosystems

To properly serve the public, a digital society needs to offer services that are customer-centric and based on the needs of individuals and enterprises throughout the various stages of their lives. In order to provide holistic public services to citizens, public and private institutions need to collaborate by sharing data and platforms to deliver a focal value proposition. This way of collaboration takes form through innovation ecosystems, where actors, technologies and institutions come together to create and implement new products and services, and bring together the cumulative knowledge of customer needs, existing data and actors from various industries. This thesis explores barriers hindering the emergence of such innovation ecosystems, consisting of both public and private organizations. It also offers suggestions for how these types of collaborative solutions could be cultivated. The study was conducted as an inductive qualitative research using a single-case design. The case innovation ecosystem explored in the study has been initiated by a major Finnish public sector organization and at the time of the study was in its early stage of formation. The employees interviewed for the study were from organizations that represent the potential participants of the nascent innovation ecosystem. The interview data has been analyzed and presented using the Gioia methodology (Gioia et al., 2013), which provides a logical way of interpreting and visualizing empirical qualitative data. The findings of the study suggest that structural barriers exist for the emergent case innovation ecosystem and that the challenges are both sectoral and intraorganizational. The barriers experienced by public organizations are in line with the characteristic features of public administration. Perceived risks and benefits for joining varied between the different organizations, suggesting that the nascent ecosystem has to accommodate the various motivations and concerns of its members. Lastly, renewal of public sector structures through introducing funding schemes and strategies supporting ecosystem formation were believed to assist their emergence. Additionally, the fostering of open communication forums and dialogue over future visions for public services and customer needs was seen as integral to the success of launching public-private innovation ecosystems