Public Innovation through Collaboration and Design

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book edited by Christopher Ansell, and Jacob Torfing: “While innovation has long been a major topic of research and scholarly interest for the private sector, it is still an emerging theme in the field of public management. While ‘results-oriented’ public management may be here to stay, scholars and practitioners are now shifting their attention to the process of management and to how the public sector can create ‘value’.

One of the urgent needs addressed by this book is a better specification of the institutional and political requirements for sustaining a robust vision of public innovation, through the key dimensions of collaboration, creative problem-solving, and design. This book brings together empirical studies drawn from Europe, the USA and the antipodes to show how these dimensions are important features of public sector innovation in many Western democracies with different conditions and traditions.
This volume provides insights for practitioners who are interested in developing an innovation strategy for their city, agency, or administration and will be essential reading for scholars, practitioners and students in the field of public policy and public administration.
Contents:

1. Collaboration and Design: New Tools for Public Innovation (Christopher Ansell and Jacob Torfing) 2. Necessity as the Mother of Reinvention: Discourses of Innovation in Local Government (Steven Griggs and Helen Sullivan) 3. Reconstructing Bureaucracy for Service Innovation in the Governance Era (Robert Agranoff) 4. The Complexity of Governance: Challenges for Public Sector Innovation (Susanne Boch Waldorff, Lone Søderkvist Kristensen, and Betina Vind Ebbesen) 5. The Impact of Collaboration on Innovative Projects: A Study of Dutch Water Management (Nanny Bressers) 6. Understanding Innovative Regional Collaboration: Metagovernance and Boundary Objects as Mechanisms (Stig Montin, Magnus Johansson Joakim Forsemalm) 7. The Importance of Joint Schemas and Brokers in Promoting Collaboration for Innovation (Barbara Gray and Hong Ren) 8. Collaborative Networks and Innovation: The Negotiation-Management Nexus (Robyn Keast and Jennifer Waterhouse) 9. Innovative Leadership Through Networks (Katrien Termeer and Sibout Nooteboom) 10. Designing Collaborative Policy Innovation: Lessons from a Danish Municipality (Annika Agger and Eva Sørensen) 11. Design Attitude as an Innovation Catalyst (Christian Bason) 12. Collaborating on Design – Designing Collaboration (Christopher Ansell and Jacob Torfing)“

Knowledge is Beautiful

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by David McCandless: “In this mind-blowing follow-up to the bestselling Information is Beautiful, the undisputed king of infographics David McCandless uses stunning and unique visuals to reveal unexpected insights into how the world really works. Every minute of every hour of every day we are bombarded with information – be it on television, in print or online. How can we relate to this mind-numbing overload? Enter David McCandless and his amazing infographics: simple, elegant ways to understand information too complex or abstract to grasp any way but visually. McCandless creates dazzling displays that blend the facts with their connections, contexts and relationships, making information meaningful, entertaining – and beautiful. Knowledge is Beautiful is an endlessly fascinating spin through the world of visualized data, all of it bearing the hallmark of David McCandless’s ground-breaking signature style. Taking infographics to the next level, Knowledge is Beautiful offers a deeper, more wide-ranging look at the world and its history. Covering everything from dog breeds and movie plots to the most commonly used passwords and crazy global warming solutions, Knowledge is Beautiful is guaranteed to enrich your understanding of the world.”

Reality Mining: Using Big Data to Engineer a Better World

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by Nathan Eagle and Kate Greene : “Big Data is made up of lots of little data: numbers entered into cell phones, addresses entered into GPS devices, visits to websites, online purchases, ATM transactions, and any other activity that leaves a digital trail. Although the abuse of Big Data—surveillance, spying, hacking—has made headlines, it shouldn’t overshadow the abundant positive applications of Big Data. In Reality Mining, Nathan Eagle and Kate Greene cut through the hype and the headlines to explore the positive potential of Big Data, showing the ways in which the analysis of Big Data (“Reality Mining”) can be used to improve human systems as varied as political polling and disease tracking, while considering user privacy.

Eagle, a recognized expert in the field, and Greene, an experienced technology journalist, describe Reality Mining at five different levels: the individual, the neighborhood and organization, the city, the nation, and the world. For each level, they first offer a nontechnical explanation of data collection methods and then describe applications and systems that have been or could be built. These include a mobile app that helps smokers quit smoking; a workplace “knowledge system”; the use of GPS, Wi-Fi, and mobile phone data to manage and predict traffic flows; and the analysis of social media to track the spread of disease. Eagle and Greene argue that Big Data, used respectfully and responsibly, can help people live better, healthier, and happier lives.”

In Tests, Scientists Try to Change Behaviors

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Wall Street Journal: “Behavioral scientists look for environmental ‘nudges’ to influence how people act. Pelle Guldborg Hansen, a behavioral scientist, is trying to figure out how to board passengers on a plane with less fuss.
The goal is to make plane-boarding more efficient by coaxing passengers to want to be more orderly, not by telling them they must. It is one of many projects in which Dr. Hansen seeks to encourage people, when faced with options, to make better choices. Among these: prompting people to properly dispose of cigarette butts outside of bars and clubs and inducing hospital workers to use hand sanitizers.
Dr. Hansen, 37 years old, is director of the Initiative for Science, Society & Policy, a collaboration of the University of Southern Denmark and Roskilde University. The concept behind his work is known commonly as a nudge, dubbed such because of the popular 2008 book of the same name by U.S. academics Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein that examined how people make decisions.
At the Copenhagen airport, Dr. Hansen recently deployed a team of three young researchers to mill about a gate in terminal B. The trio was dressed casually in jeans and wore backpacks. They blended in with the passengers, except for the badges they wore displaying airport credentials, and the clipboards and pens they carried to record how the boarding process unfolds.
Thirty-five minutes before a flight departed, the team got into position. Andreas Rathmann Jensen stood in one corner, then moved to another, so he could survey the entire gate area. He mapped where people were sitting and where they placed their bags. This behavior can vary depending, for example, if people are flying alone, with a partner or in a group.
Johannes Schuldt-Jensen circulated among the rows and counted how many bags were blocking seats and how many seats were empty as boarding time approached. He wore headphones, though he wasn’t listening to music, because people seem less suspicious of behavior when a person has headphones on, he says. Another researcher, Kasper Hulgaard, counted how many people were standing versus sitting.
The researchers are mapping out gate-seating patterns for a total of about 500 flights. Some early observations: The more people who are standing, the more chaotic boarding tends to be. Copenhagen airport seating areas are designed for groups, even though most travelers come solo or in pairs. Solo flyers like to sit in a corner and put their bag on an adjacent seat. Pairs of travelers tend to perch anywhere as long as they can sit side-by-side….”

The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by Stephen Goldsmith, and Susan P. Crawford: “The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance. The Responsive City is a guide to civic engagement and governance in the digital age that will help leaders link important breakthroughs in about technology and big data analytics with age-old lessons of small-group community input to create more agile, competitive, and economically resilient cities. Featuring vivid case-studies highlighting the work of individuals in New York, Boston, Rio de Janeiro, Stockholm, Indiana, and Chicago, the book provides a compelling model for the future of cities and states. The authors demonstrate how digital innovations will drive a virtuous cycle of responsiveness centered on “empowerment” : 1) empowering public employees with tools to both power their performance and to help them connect more personally to those they service, 2) empowering constituents to see and understand problems and opportunities faced by cities so that they can better engage in the life of their communities, and 3) empowering leaders to drive towards their missions and address the grand challenges confronting cities by harnessing the predictive power of cross-government Big Data, the book will help mayors, chief technology officers, city administrators, agency directors, civic groups and nonprofit leaders break out of current paradigms in order to collectively address civic problems. Co-authored by Stephen Goldsmith, former Mayor of Indianapolis, and current Director of the Innovations in Government Program at the Harvard Kennedy School and Susan Crawford, co-director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

The Responsive City highlights the ways in which leadership, empowered government employees, thoughtful citizens, and 21st century technology can combine to improve government operations and strengthen civic trust. It provides actionable advice while exploring topics like:

  • Visualizing service delivery and predicting improvement
  • Making the work of government employees more meaningful
  • Amplification and coordination of focused citizen engagement
  • Big Data in big cities – stories of surprising successes and enormous potential”

 

Interpreting Hashtag Politics – Policy Ideas in an Era of Social Media

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by Stephen Jeffares: “Why do policy actors create branded terms like Big Society and does launching such policy ideas on Twitter extend or curtail their life? This book argues that the practice of hashtag politics has evolved in response to an increasingly congested and mediatised environment, with the recent and rapid growth of high speed internet connections, smart phones and social media. It examines how policy analysis can adapt to offer interpretive insights into the life and death of policy ideas in an era of hashtag politics.
This text reveals that policy ideas can at the same time be ideas, instruments, visions, containers and brands, and advises readers on how to tell if a policy idea is dead or dying, how to map the diversity of viewpoints, how to capture the debate, when to engage and when to walk away. Each chapter showcases innovative analytic techniques, illustrated by application to contemporary policy ideas.”

Generative Emergence: A New Discipline of Organizational, Entrepreneurial, and Social Innovation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by Benyamin Lichtenstein: “Culminating more than 30 years of research into evolution, complexity science, organizing and entrepreneurship, this book provides insights to scholars who are increasingly using emergence to explain social phenomena. In addition to providing the first comprehensive definition and framework for understanding emergence, it is the first publication of data from a year-long experimental study of emergence in high-potential ventures—a week-by-week longitudinal analysis of their processes based on over 750 interviews and 1000 hours of on-site observation.  These data, combined with reports from over a dozen other studies, confirm the dynamics of the five phase model in multiple contexts…

Key insights from the book include:

  • Findings which show a major difference between an aspiration that generates a purposive drive for generative emergence, versus a performance-driven crisis that sparks organizational change and transformation.  This difference has important implications for studies of entrepreneurship, innovation, and social change.
  • A definition of emergence based on 100+ years of work in philosophy and philosophy of science, evolutionary studies, sociology, and organization science.
  • The most inclusive review of complexity science published, to help reinvigorate and legitimize those methods in the social sciences.
  • The Dynamic States Model—a new approach for understanding the non-linear growth and development of new ventures.
  • In-depth examinations of more than twenty well-known emergence studies, to reveal their shared dynamics and underlying drivers.
  • Proposals for applying the five-phase model—as a logic of emergence—to social innovation, organizational leadership, and entrepreneurial development.”

Privacy-Invading Technologies and Privacy by Design

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by Demetrius Klitou: “Challenged by rapidly developing privacy-invading technologies (PITs), this book provides a convincing set of potential policy recommendations and practical solutions for safeguarding both privacy and security. It shows that benefits such as public security do not necessarily come at the expense of privacy and liberty overall.
Backed up by comprehensive study of four specific PITs – Body scanners; Public space CCTV microphones; Public space CCTV loudspeakers; and Human-implantable microchips (RFID implants/GPS implants) – the author shows how laws that regulate the design and development of PITs may more effectively protect privacy than laws that only regulate data controllers and the use of such technologies. New rules and regulations should therefore incorporate fundamental privacy principles through what is known as ‘Privacy by Design’.
The numerous sources explored by the author provide a workable overview of the positions of academia, industry, government and relevant international organizations and NGOs.

  • Explores a relatively novel approach of protecting privacy
  • Offers a convincing set of potential policy recommendations and practical solutions
  • Provides a workable overview of the positions of academia, industry, government and relevant international organizations and NGOs”

Crowd-Sourced Augmented Realities: Social Media and the Power of Digital Representation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Pre-publication version of a chapter by Matthew Zook, Mark Graham and  Andrew Boulton  in S. Mains, J. Cupples, and C. Lukinbeal. Mediated Geographies/Geographies of Media. Springer Science International Handbooks in Human Geography, (Forthcoming): “A key and distinguishing feature of society today is that its increasingly documented by crowd-sourced social media discourse about public experiences. Much of this social media content is geo-referenced and exists in layers of information draped over the physical world, invisible to the naked eye but accessible to range of digital (and often) mobile devices. When we access these information layers, they mediate the mundane practices of everyday life, (e.g., What or who is nearby? How do I move from point A to B) through the creation of augmented realities, i.e., unstable, context dependent representations of places brought temporary into being by combining the space of material and virtual experience.
These augmented realities, as particular representations of locations, places and events, are vigorously promoted or contested and thus become important spots in which power is exercised, much in the same way that maps have long had power to reinforce or challenge the status quo. However, because many of the processes and practices behind the creation of augmented realities are unseen, its power is often overlooked in the process of representation or place-making. This paper highlights the points at which power acts and demonstrate that all representations of place – including augmented realities derived from social media – are products of and productive of, social relationships and associated power relations.”
Building upon a case study of Abbottabad, Pakistan after the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound we construct a four-part typology of the power relations emerging from social practices that enact augmented realities. These include: Distributed power, the complex and socially/spatially distributed authorship of user-generated geospatial content; Communication power, the ways in which particular representations gain prominence; language is a particularly key variable; Code power, the autonomy of software code to regulate actions, or mediate content, or ordering representations in particular ways; and Timeless power, the ways in which digital representations of place reconfigure temporal relationships, particularly sequence and duration, between people and events.

The People’s Platform

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book Review by Tim Wu in the New York Times: “Astra Taylor is a documentary filmmaker who has described her work as the “steamed broccoli” in our cultural diet. Her last film, “Examined Life,” depicted philosophers walking around and talking about their ideas. She’s the kind of creative person who was supposed to benefit when the Internet revolution collapsed old media hierarchies. But two decades since that revolution began, she’s not impressed: “We are at risk of starving in the midst of plenty,” Taylor writes. “Free culture, like cheap food, incurs hidden costs.” Instead of serving as the great equalizer, the web has created an abhorrent cultural feudalism. The creative masses connect, create and labor, while Google, Facebook and Amazon collect the cash.
Taylor’s thesis is simply stated. The pre-Internet cultural industry, populated mainly by exploitative conglomerates, was far from perfect, but at least the ancien régime felt some need to cultivate cultural institutions, and to pay for talent at all levels. Along came the web, which swept away hierarchies — as well as paychecks, leaving behind creators of all kinds only the chance to be fleetingly “Internet famous.” And anyhow, she says, the web never really threatened to overthrow the old media’s upper echelons, whether defined as superstars, like Beyoncé, big broadcast television shows or Hollywood studios. Instead, it was the cultural industry’s middle ­classes that have been wiped out and replaced by new cultural plantations ruled over by the West Coast aggregators.
It is hard to know if the title, “The People’s Platform,” is aspirational or sarcastic, since Taylor believes the classless aura of the web masks an unfair power structure. “Open systems can be starkly inegalitarian,” she says, arguing that the web is afflicted by what the feminist scholar Jo Freeman termed a “tyranny of structurelessness.” Because there is supposedly no hierarchy, elites can happily deny their own existence. (“We just run a platform.”) But the effects are real: The web has reduced professional creators to begging for scraps of attention from a spoiled public, and forced creators to be their own brand.
…
The tech industry might be tempted to dismiss Taylor’s arguments as merely a version of typewriter manufacturers’ complaints circa 1984, but that would be a mistake. “The People’s Platform” should be taken as a challenge by the new media that have long claimed to be improving on the old order. Can they prove they are capable of supporting a sustainable cultural ecosystem, in a way that goes beyond just hosting parties at the Sundance Film ­Festival?
We see some of this in the tech firms that have begun to pay for original content, as with Netflix’s investments in projects like “Orange Is the New Black.” It’s also worth pointing out that the support of culture is actually pretty cheap. Consider the nonprofit ProPublica, which employs investigative journalists, and has already won two Pulitzers, all on a budget of just over $10 million a year. That kind of money is a rounding error for much of Silicon Valley, where losing billions on bad acquisitions is routinely defended as “strategic.” If Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon truly believe they’re better than the old guard, let’s see it.”
See : THE PEOPLE’S PLATFORM. Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age By Astra Taylor, 276 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company.