Harnessing the Innovation Potential of Citizens: How Open Innovation Can be Used to Co-develop Political Strategies

Information and communication technologies provide firms with new opportunities to co-create innovations with their customers. The resulting trend towards “open innovation” has revitalized firm’s interest in systematically tapping into external innovation sources. Whereas the first open innovation cases typically dealt with product innovation, latest developments show that also intangible service innovation or corporate strategies can be co-developed with users, customers, or employees. As internet technologies are also increasingly pervasive in the public sector, virtual citizen co-creation systems also constitute an important but unexplored research area within the public administration research. This is especially relevant since real case examples in the public sector underline the need for more openness in governmental decision making. To tackle the research question, how an online co-creating approach may be designed to develop a political strategy together with experts and citizens, we conducted a 22-month research project together with the state chancellery of North Rheine Westphalia. A virtual co-creation system to rework an existing political strategy together with experts and citizens was created, implemented and evaluated. During the 3 month live-phase the platform attracted more than 60,000 visitors and about 270 active and registered members. Furthermore, 250 contributions, uploads of 236 additional documents and studies, about 500 evaluations, and over 1,050 written messages were counted. Our results show how intangible public innovations, which are tied to social welfare, public ethics, and legitimization, can be systematically co-created. These insights add relevant theoretical contributions to the research fields of service innovation, open innovation, and most importantly to the research community of public administration. From a practical and managerial point of view, our insights are of practical relevance for system designers and managers within public administration, politicians, and consulting agencies which intend to virtually integrate citizens, experts as well as politicians into co-creation processes.