Kunta ja käyttäjälähtöinen innovaatiotoiminta

Abstract

Käyttäjälähtöinen innovaatiotoiminta uudistaa kuntien palveluja

Palvelujen käyttäjät osallistava innovaatiotoiminta antaa uusia mahdollisuuksia kuntapalvelujen ja demokratian kehittämiseen. Tämä käy ilmi Tuula Jäppisen väitöskirjasta, jossa tarkastellaan kunnan ja kuntalaisen vuorovaikutusta palvelujen uudistamisessa.

Uuden käyttäjälähtöisen innovaatiotoiminnan mahdollisuudet tulevat tutkimuksessa konkreettisesti esiin kolmen Itä-Uudellamaalla, Mikkelissä ja Helsingissä toteutetun esimerkin avulla. Taloustieteen oppien mukaisesti kuntien kannalta optimi palvelujen järjestämistapa on sellainen, jossa palvelut tuotetaan taloudellisesti, palvelut ovat kuntalaisten saatavilla ja kuntalainen on niihin tyytyväinen. Käyttäjälähtöisten kehittämismenetelmien avulla voidaan lisätä kuntalaisten tyytyväisyyttä tunnistamalla heidän piileviä tarpeitaan ja tuottamalla palveluita heidän kannaltaan sujuvina palvelupolkuina. Palveluhenkilöstön näkökulmasta käyttäjälähtöisyys jakaa palvelujen suunnitteluvastuuta ja lisää työtyytyväisyyttä. Käyttäjälähtöiset palvelut voivat johtaa myös vähäisten palvelu- ja tuoteparannusten sijasta kunnan koko palvelutuotannon radikaaleihin muutoksiin.

Kuntalaisten osallistuminen palvelutuotannon suunnitteluun voi palauttaa kuntalaisten luottamuksen poliittiseen ja hallinnolliseen toimintaan. Kun kunta on aktiivisessa vuorovaikutuksessa palvelutuotantonsa uudistamiseksi palvelujen käyttäjien, yritysten ja järjestöjen kanssa, innovaatiotkin demokratisoituvat ja palvelut tuotetaan jatkossa yhteistyössä näiden eri tahojen kanssa. Laajimmillaan käyttäjälähtöinen innovaatiotoiminta voi tarjota myös uusia ratkaisuja yhteiskunnan ilkeisiin sosiaalisiin ongelmiin kuten nuorten syrjäytymisen ennaltaehkäisyyn.

Municipalities and user-driven innovation Interaction between a municipality and a resident in decision-making on services and service restructuring. Acta Publications No. 230. The Association of Finnish Local and Regional Authorities. Helsinki.

The subject of this study is user-driven innovation in the public sector. Innovation is usually examined from the perspective of the private sector and regional development, excluding service restructuring in the public sector. For this reason, innovation is typically studied from the perspective of economic science, as a source of prosperity of businesses and regions. Also, innovation researchers tend to come from the fields of economics, engineering and geography. Yet, regional development and innovation often aim at social goals that cover a wider area than economic development only, because the objective is to improve the quality of life and well-being of residents. Municipalities provide most of these public services in a welfare society. The public sector is continuously restructuring administration and services even though these development measures or reforms have not been traditionally labelled, or studied, as innovations. Innovation research in the public sector did not essentially start in Finland or internationally until the turn of the millennium. The latest Finnish innovation research in the local government sector has focused on innovation activities in the public sector in general, or on innovations from the perspective of governance, services, innovation processes, management and public procurement. The recent debate on innovation has brought to the fore the openness of innovations, and the increased role of clients and networking. These concepts are brought together in the term open innovation promoted by Chesbrough, which refers to network-based innovation, and the term user-driven innovation introduced by von Hippel. This research was carried out as an action research in local government studies. Its primary aim is to depict how the local government sector can benefit from user-driven innovation. The empirical data of the study comprises three cases from the period 2006 2010. These cases from the Itä-Uusimaa region and the cities of Mikkeli and Helsinki provide an inductive analysis of municipal innovation activities and identify their key characteristics and concepts. The ability of municipalities and local residents to act in an innovative environment is examined through various roles. These roles reflect the transition that is taking place in the European local government sector. In this process, the role of Finnish 'welfare municipalities' is changing from that of a service provider to a service organiser. In the transition, individual municipalities will, to an increasing degree, become 'network municipalities' and provide welfare services in cooperation with other municipalities, businesses and organisations. This research looks at the interaction between municipalities and residents in decision-making on services and service restructuring through the concepts of participation and user-driven approach. It has another objective as well; it aims to build a dialogue between the different perspectives of local government and innovation research to support public sector service reform. In this dialogue, the concepts of new public governance and open innovation paradigm are used. The open innovation concepts that emerge in the study and enrich the new local government paradigm include user-drivenness, polyphonic voices and networking.

This study shows that there are two channels through which local residents can participate in public service reform: the traditional way of participating in decision-making on services through representative or direct democracy, and a new, more innovate way where residents participate in the planning and development of service provision through user-driven innovation activities. Over the past 20 years, participation of local residents in decision-making on services has steadily increased. Their participation has been supported since the 1990s through government programmes, legislation and a national participation project. There are also new, empowering forms of resident participation such as community planning, building of visions, focus group work and participation in a resident forum. The first decade of the 2000s saw the introduction of the concept of user-drivenness in the Finnish and international innovation policy. The government programmes of the early 2000s and the national innovation strategy adopted in 2008 have aimed to safeguard residents' ability to develop services as service users. At the same time, new innovative user-driven methods of resident participation have become available, for example methods of service design. However, both international and Finnish studies show that services planned and provided in collaboration between a municipality and residents are not yet common.

A reform of local government services through user-driven innovation also means changes to local democracy and the management of local community. In changing circumstances the leadership of local community, too, must be seen as an interactive and shared process where a municipality uses networks as a means to manage cooperation, innovation, learning and development. This research uses the framework of discursive institutionalism to describe innovation and its management as practices of interaction. According to the first interpretation of discursive institutionalism, local government as a hierarchy conducts discourse on their service reform only with the elite in power, in other words with political decision-makers. According to another interpretation, local government as local civic network is already conducting discourse on ideas acting as a breeding ground for change both with the elite and service users. The cases show that service users are more ready for public debate and changes required to introduce a user-driven approach than politicians and local government officials responsible for the provision of services.

The findings show that the methods of participation and user-driven approach are partly identical but take place within different processes. User-driven innovation may offer a new kind of discussion forum for the decision-making elite and residents. In this forum, users can express their own service needs proactively already at the stage when services are planned, and later at service development stage they can act as change agents together with politicians, local government officials and the media. At the end of the research the methods of participation are linked to the different stages of administrative and political decision-making processes, and the methods of user-driven approach to the different stages of innovation processes, and these processes are united as a single common process. This is an ideal model where a local resident can interactively participate in decision-making on and development of services via the different stages of joint planning.

From the perspective of economic science, the cross-sectoral processes brought about by the user-driven approach modernise service provision and make municipalities more competitive. This competitiveness may be seen, for example, as faster reaction to resident needs. When used systemically, the user-driven approach also improves productivity and quality. The methods of service design make it possible to anticipate residents' future needs. They introduce new scientific ways of identifying users' latent needs and may, instead of small improvements to services and products, also produce radical innovations at the level of the organisation.

Municipalities further benefit from innovation activities in terms of democracy. Increasing resident participation and improving opportunities for contributing and influencing are means of restoring residents' confidence in politics and governance and changing decision-making and produced services to better meet the needs of residents. The user-driven approach has also received positive feedback from service personnel. From their perspective, the user-driven approach spreads the responsibility for the planning of services and increases job satisfaction. When innovation is seen in the broader context of welfare and social policy, not merely as part of business and regional policies, the holistic, interactive methods of service design can offer new cooperative solutions to the wicked social problems. Interactive learning can help a municipal organisation question and change the current normative practices; create a new model for the municipal service system and put this model into practice. In this ideal model of a service system, the resident-oriented coexistence of municipalities and municipal residents will, if realised, lead to a reformed local government where residents become responsible co-producers of services. In this renewed local governance model, municipalities act, in accordance with the new public governance, as networking authorities, and municipal residents are naturally participating in both decision-making and service processes.