Designing an instrument for scaling public sector innovations

MAR van Hout*, RB Braams, P Meijer, AJ Meijer

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

Governments worldwide invest in developing and diffusing innovations to deal with wicked problems. While experiments and pilots flourish, governments struggle to successfully scale innovations. Public sector scaling remains understudied, and scholarly suggestions for scaling trajectories are lacking. Following a design approach, this research develops an academically grounded, practice-oriented scaling instrument for planning and reflecting on the scaling of public sector innovations. We design this instrument based on the academic literature, an empirical analysis of three scaling projects at the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management, and six focus groups with practitioners. This research proposes a context-specific and iterative understanding of scaling processes and contributes a typology of scaling barriers and an additional scaling strategy to the literature. The presented instrument increases our academic understanding of scaling and enables teams of policymakers, in cooperation with stakeholders, to plan and reflect on a context-specific scaling pathway for public sector innovations.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)654-668
Number of pages15
JournalScience and Public Policy
Volume51
Issue number4
Early online date20 Mar 2024
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Aug 2024

Keywords

  • design research
  • public sector innovation
  • scaling instrument
  • scaling strategies

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