Designing Public Innovations in Public Sector: The Process and Challenges in Taiwanese E-government

Researchers have found that a one-sided focus on technology dominates many e-government projects; ICT has been used mainly as a tool to enhance the efficiency and service delivery of the government. In fact, e-government should achieve public innovation goals, such as redesigning information relationships among stakeholders, enhancing citizen participation in the policymaking process, and reinforcing policy enforcement to create public value. These goals are more valuable, but also more complex than the digitization of existing governmental processes. Beside, only a few projects could achieve the public innovation diffusion goal among many e-government projects. Therefore, this case study focuses on a very important and successful e-government project in Taiwan – the e-invoicing project, by following the development timeline of this 12-year project to understand the reasons of loosing focus and the turning points to achieve the final success. With the results of this case study, this research address four main factors of success in public innovation diffusion: (a) cooperate with the right stakeholder: e-government projects requires intensive cooperation with both public and private organizations, otherwise the change agency has no complete control over its innovation offering; (b) the selection of the right diffusion mode: centralized innovation-diffusion is difficult to overcome the stereotyped perception that citizens hold toward the government, and thus, it is better to implement by a decentralized fashion; (c) the diversity of services: public innovations have an inherently higher complexity than commercial innovations because they intend to serve a diversity of citizens; and (d) assignment of the right change agent for the project: because the burden on the change agent is tremendous, only a few “policy entrepreneurs” can push through the innovation process, despite few material rewards.