COGOV’s Ewan Ferlie, Andreja Pegan and Brittney Regal will chair the panel “Making co-creation work: The relevance of strategic management” at 5th International Conference on Public Policy (ICPP5) taking place in Barcelona, 6-8 July 2021. They are inviting interested researchers and scholars to submit their abstracts for consideration by 29 January 2021.
CALL FOR PAPERS
Co-creation – defined as the as a collaborative process through which government and public sector organisations solve problems and seek solutions by working together with citizens and stakeholders in the private, public and voluntary sector – has been promoted as part of the solution to austerity and the trust deficit. Despite co-creation’s advanced potential, we continue to lack understanding of what managerial efforts are needed to make co-creation successful. Yet, this knowledge is critical if we think of co-creation as a way to “build back better” systems of governance after the Covid-19 pandemic. Therefore, the panel “Making co-creation work: The relevance of strategic management” investigates the strategic management features of co-creation in cases where it has been implemented.
There are at least three dimensions to strategic management, which the panel seeks to examine:
1) Strategic management as a means towards an objective. For example, to what extent do organisations see co-creation as a strategic objective of their organisation or as a means to deliver public value outcomes? To what extent do organisations exhibit a strategic intent for co-creation as evidenced in the adoption of co-creation in strategic documents, creation of physical or digital platforms for implementing co-creation, organising training of administrators and frontline staff implementing co-creation?
2) Strategic management as a process: How do the stakeholders involved in co-creation develop shared knowledge, understanding and commitment to mission, goals, strategies and actions? How do strategic management documents and analyses on co-creation come about? How are they generated and performed? What role does the public value school of management play in the implementation of co-creation? How do public managers, professionals, and frontline staff implement co-creation? What barriers do they face?
2) The implementation of co-creation through strategic management and the relationship between strategic management and co-creation outputs: To what extent does a strategically managed approach to co-creation contribute to the achievement of public value outcomes? What strategic management approaches are commonly found in the successful implementation of co-creation? To what extent do models of strategic management aid in understanding the drivers of co-creation? What happens when co-creation is not managed strategically?
The panel is open to theoretical and empirical contributions. We welcome all types of research designs including case studies, mixed methods, and design experiments. We aim to bring together scholars researching co-creation and strategic management in different policy domains, levels of government and administrative traditions.