Changing the Engine While Flying the Plane
Abstract: Governments around the world are experiencing increasingly complex issues to solve. They are battling to make means meet ends, while citizens are relying on their governments to mitigate challenges so complex that their extent is unknown. These wicked challenges include global warming, financial crises and the COVID-19 crisis. Increasingly, governments are feeling the pressure to solve these challenges but realize that they can not solve them all by themselves. Previous research suggests that one way to solve these challenges is through using co-creation. However, when administering the co-creation projects, organizations encounter difficulties. This thesis investigates how the Swedish Tax Agency (STA), the best rated agency in public opinion, manages to administrate the innovation capabilities emerging from co-creation projects. A qualitative study has been performed, with 11 in-depth interviews. The authors have analyzed their findings from both an organizational and an individual level of analysis using the theories; co-creation, ambidexterity, sensemaking and the civil servant ideal. The analysis concludes that it is evident that the STA has difficulties in administering co-creation projects due to three findings. The first is that employees at the STA have conflicting views regarding the customer's role in co-creation projects. The second is that the traditional legacy structure creates a person-dependency problem which inhibits the employees from prioritizing the co-creation projects. The third is that employees are stuck in an old mindset because of the failure to adopt the new strategies about citizen participation into the civil servant's ideal. In turn, these findings contribute to the field of innovation and co-creation in the public sector where studying traditional views of citizens participation, narrative identities, institutional design and old thinking patterns has been encouraged.
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