Citizen Participation in Public Administration: Investigating Open Government for Social Innovation

A more open approach to innovation has become dominant in innovation management during the last decade (Enkel et al., 2009; Chesbrough and Bogers, 2014). There has been a call for companies to rely on the external knowledge of customers, users, suppliers, or other external experts when developing new products and services (Piller and West, 2014; West and Bogers, 2014). Recently, scholars argued that open innovation is also relevant outside the private sector (Hilgers and Ihl, 2010; Chesbrough and Di Minin, 2014; Schmidthuber and Hilgers, 2018). In developing the concept of open social innovation, Chesbrough and Di Minin (2014) assert that open innovation relates not only to private benefits, but also to initiatives aiming at societal and public impact. Promoting openness in the public sector and integrating knowledge and ideas from external actors is intended to counter these challenges (Hilgers, 2012). Hence, we see an increasing number of governments on both the national and regional levels collaborating with externals, such as citizens, to stimulate social innovation by utilizing external knowledge (Criado et al., 2013).