Innovation in city governments: Structures, networks, and leadership

Innovation has become an important focus for governments around the world over the last decade, with greater pressure on governments to do more with less and expanding community expectations. Public sector innovation is related to creating new services that have value for stakeholders (such as citizens) in terms of the social and political outcomes they produce. Innovation in City Governments: Structures, Networks, and Leadership establishes an analytical framework for innovation capacity based on three dimensions: 1 Structure-governance structures and societal traditions, political and socioeconomic context 2 Networks-informal structures that shape and constrain actors and their ability to implement new ideas, connections outside the organization 3 Leadership-the qualities and capabilities of senior individuals within the organization. Each of these is analysed using data from a comparative an EU research project that compared Barcelona, Copenhagen and Rotterdam. The book provides major new insights on how structures, networks, and leadership in city governments shape the innovation capacity of cities. It provides groundbreaking analyses of how governance structures and local socioeconomic challenges are related to the innovations introduced by these cities. The volume maps and analyses the social networks of the three cities and examines brokerage and boundary spanning within and outside of the cities. It also examines what leadership qualities are important for innovation. Innovation in City Governments: Structures, Networks, and Leadership combines an original analytical approach with comparative empirical work, to generate a novel perspective on the social innovation capacity of cities and is critical reading for academics, students and policy makers alike in the fields of Public Management, Public Administration, Local Government, Policy, Innovation and Leadership.