IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/servic/v35y2015i6p325-344.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Making bottom-up and top-down processes meet in public innovation

Author

Listed:
  • Eveliina Saari
  • Mikko Lehtonen
  • Marja Toivonen

Abstract

Innovations in an organisation derive from multiple sources. In the public sector, users and the policy sphere provide important but often unconnected impulses for innovation. These impulses are transmitted to the organisation by grassroots employees who interact with users and managers who implement policy requirements. The paper examines the actors and activities that coordinate bottom-up and top-down initiatives and promote their development into innovations. It creates a theoretical framework that combines the views of employee-driven innovation and strategic reflexivity and supplements them with an analysis of coordination in innovation processes. The functioning of this framework is illustrated in the context of children's day care services. The results highlight the central role of middle managers and provide new knowledge regarding their 'bridging' activities in innovation. The adjustment of bottom-up and top-down processes requires the personal involvement of managers, and the creation of communication arenas, networks and mediating tools.

Suggested Citation

  • Eveliina Saari & Mikko Lehtonen & Marja Toivonen, 2015. "Making bottom-up and top-down processes meet in public innovation," The Service Industries Journal, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 35(6), pages 325-344, April.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:servic:v:35:y:2015:i:6:p:325-344
    DOI: 10.1080/02642069.2015.1003369
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/02642069.2015.1003369
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/02642069.2015.1003369?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Karine Oganisjana & Konstantins Kozlovskis, 2019. "The Identification of Opportunities for Innovations through Collecting Problems from Citizens," JOItmC, MDPI, vol. 5(4), pages 1-15, September.
    2. Chukwuemeka Echebiri & Stein Amundsen & Marit Engen, 2020. "Linking Structural Empowerment to Employee-Driven Innovation: The Mediating Role of Psychological Empowerment," Administrative Sciences, MDPI, vol. 10(3), pages 1-19, July.
    3. Rosemary Hiscock & Linda Bauld & Deborah Arnott & Martin Dockrell & Louise Ross & Andy McEwen, 2015. "Views from the Coalface: What Do English Stop Smoking Service Personnel Think about E-Cigarettes?," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 12(12), pages 1-11, December.
    4. Jon Mikel Zabala-Iturriagagoitia, 2022. "Fostering regional innovation, entrepreneurship and growth through public procurement," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 58(2), pages 1205-1222, February.
    5. MISURACA Gianluca & BARCEVICIUS Egidijus & CODAGNONE Cristiano, 2020. "Exploring Digital Government transformation in the EU – Understanding public sector innovation in a data-driven society," JRC Research Reports JRC121548, Joint Research Centre.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:servic:v:35:y:2015:i:6:p:325-344. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/FSIJ20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.