Innovation in public services: Filling a gap in the literature

International audienceThe objective of this Special Issue of Structural Change and Economic Dynamics is to contribute to fill the gap that can be observed in the literature as regards innovation in public services, at the theoretical, empirical and methodological level. In the following introductory notes, we will first describe the nature of this gap (which we shall refer to as “innovation gap”) in academic research and in the statistics. Then we will briefly illustrate how it has been dealt with by the (scanty) previous literature on this topic. Section two will provide a synthetic close-up on each of the articles included in the Special Issue, and section three will conclude. The core of this collection of papers is drawn from presentations made at the 1st International EIBURS-TAIPS Conference, which was hosted by the Department of Economics, Society and Politics of the University of Urbino (Italy) in April 2012