A bird in the hand: empirically grounded archetypes of collaborative innovation in the public sector

Abstract

Normative approaches have dominated research on collaborative innovation arrangements in the public sector, but actual practices remain underexplored and uncategorized. We conducted an inductive, in-depth study of 35 collaborative innovation arrangements originating from the public sector and categorized them into overarching archetypes. In creating this empirically grounded typology of collaborative innovation archetypes, we found that public organizations prefer project- and programme-based development archetypes, and focus primarily on co-exploration activities. Moreover, such organizations lack experience using the collaborative arrangements suggested in the recent theoretical literature, but they actively use effectual reasoning, which previous studies largely have overlooked.