Designing a co-creation tool for an innovation platform in the Dutch e-government

Abstract

Digitization often comes with its challenges. This thesis focuses on a new approach to innovating digital public services in the Netherlands. Innovation in the public sector encounters public sector specific innovation barriers, hampering the innovation process. Innovation in the public sector is still a little researched topic in the innovation literature. The co-creation lab is a proposed solution to overcome the innovation barriers through collaboration for innovation and experiments for innovation. Both of these have proposed benefits. Collaboration for innovation increases innovativeness and aids in creating ideas that are prone to adoption. Experimentation for innovation creates learning opportunities, increases the effectiveness of innovation processes, and proposes a solution to overcome governmental innovation barriers.
While the potential benefits of the co-creation lab are understood, it is unclear how the co-creation lab should be operationalized. This is the basis for the main research problem: Although experimentation and collaboration for innovation are adopted to overcome the government’s innovation barriers, it is not clear how to make those concepts operational in the co-creation lab. A tool is designed to support the co-creation lab’s operations. The design of the tool is the goal of the main research question: How can a co-creation tool be designed for a governmental innovation platform in which experiments are conducted with governmental IT infrastructures to foster innovation in the Dutch e-government? The co-creation tool is a tool that supports the co-creation lab in its operations to enable collaborations and to perform experiments. The main research question aims to solve the six challenges that are attached to the research problem: meager research into innovation in the public sector, the adoption of the quadruple helix model, enabling co-creation, requirements to perform experiments, the conditions of the technology used in experiments, and enabling use and reuse of already existing knowledge. The research is based on the design science research methodology of Peffers, Tuunanen, Rothenberger, & Chatterjee (2007), which focuses on design research of Information Systems (IS). This thesis alters the activities to create three research phases: discovery, utilization, and design. For the discovery phase, a review is carried out of relevant scientific literature related to the research challenges. Also, semi-structured interviews are conducted with five people close to the Digicampus to discover the current innovation journey for digital innovations in the Dutch government. The utilization phase is carried out by creating use cases about the process of the experiments according to the UML standard. From the use cases, functional requirements are derived. The design phase is carried out by creating a prototype of the co-creation tool. The UX program Sketch is used to create the prototype. The prototype is evaluated in an interactive workshop. The outcome of this research is a UX/UI design prototype of the co-creation tool. The tool’s design is a website that discloses the required information to support the innovation journey of innovators in the public sector.