Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Public sector innovation recently attracted extensive research attention (Bekkers et al. 2011). Public organizations had for a long time the image of being out-of-sync with societal needs and irresponsive to societal developments (Borins, 2002). While New Public Management (NPM) proposed the introduction of market mechanisms as a remedy for all the illnesses of public sector (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992), recent years research indicate that there is more nuance needed in formulating the impact of the macro level reforms such as NPM on the long term and pending on the politico-administrative context (Drechsler and Randma-Liiv, 2015).

Innovation perspective for studying public sector reform developed from the interest to investigate the strength of the pre-conceived notions regarding the lack of flexibility of public sector organizations. Public sector innovation is defined in the literature within the space outlined by novelty and discontinuity (Bekkers and Tummers, 2016:63, Osborne and Brown, 2005:4). The former dimension refers to how new is the product, idea, process adopted in the organization (Rogers, 2003). Discontinuity refers to the degree of separation from the past. The literature outlines environmental, organizational, and individual factors that influence the engagement in innovation (Van de Ven, 1999)

Comparative research regarding the determinants of (technological) innovations in public organizations remains, however, in incipient stage. The results are inconclusive as public organizations are often studied in specific national and sectoral contexts – with a large part of the studies based in the United States. The few cross-national studies that are available almost exclusively take countries as the unit of analysis, not organizations within countries. Moreover, a systematic empirical comparison between innovations in the public versus private sector is virtually absent.

To advance our understanding of public sector innovation, we propose to extend the research in three ways: (a) by looking at the level of individual organizations to examine previously untested micro-mechanisms of public sector innovation; (b) by applying a research design that is not only cross-national, but also cross-level in nature, i.e.: suited to determine how country-level factors moderate organizational-level relationships; (c) include private sector companies as a relevant comparison group. Ultimately, this article sets out to address the following question: “What are the organizational-level and country-level determinants of the technological innovations in public and private organizations in EU countries?”

Empirically, we use the 2013 wave of the European Company Survey (ECS) carried out by Eurofound. The ECS-2013 is a large-scale cross-national workplace survey in the European Union. The survey is applied to 27.000 public and private organizations located in all EU countries. This data covers a wide range of information on work organization, HR practices and workplace innovation. As a pivotal element of innovation, our focus is on the changes in the use of technology at the workplace. We supplement the ECS-2013 data with various country-level indicators from the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) database. The data is analyzed through a series of multilevel logistic regression models. Cross-level interaction effects are used to determine the conditioning effect of country-context.