Governance and innovation in public sector services: The case of the digital library

Based on a longitudinal case study of ICT adoption and e-services development in a Danish library, we examine how governance modes affect technical and organizational change in the public sector. We contribute to extant literature on the links between governance and innovation by highlighting three important aspects that characterize such links. First, our case study shows that the transition from what could be considered as a spurious New Public Management approach towards a “networked model” implies important organizational innovations and more emphasis on bottom-up decision making. Second, we provide evidence of increasing involvement of end users in innovation and co-creation activities. Third, the increasing involvement of users has created important innovation opportunities that are more and more characterized by their frugal/bricolage nature, hence more localized but not necessarily trivial and relatively easy to diffuse to different contexts.