A WORK MODEL FOR EMPLOYEE-DRIVEN INNOVATION IN PUBLIC ORGANIZATIONS

Digitization offers employees the opportunity to take part in the innovation development processes within organizations. Although employees’ integration as innovators offers promising opportunities, the topic has been fairly neglected both in research and practice. Organizations could take a step in this direction by following examples such as Google’s ‘Innovation Time Off’, where employees are temporarily released from their ordinary work to generate new ideas. Although organizations of various backgrounds should be able to reap benefits of such work models, implementation might fail due to an organizational culture built on hierarchical structures and rigid processes. Especially in public organizations, little is known about the successful implementations of such work models. In particular, research on drivers and barriers of such work models is scarce. Using the socio-technical systems model as a guiding lens, our case study shows that implementation success in public organizations increases with the existence of four aspects: 1) innovation time to foster innovative mind-sets, 2) innovation champions who move beyond the confines of their assigned work, 3) a digital innovation platform enabling an internal crowdsourcing community, 4) an innovation culture leading to beneficial changes in organizational structure.