The Role of Open Innovation in Governmental Sustainability

Open innovation is an emerging practice in the public sector, requiring time and energy from public officials and managers. Therefore, it is an imperative need to highlight the problem of how to legitimate open innovation cases in the public sector and the implications for their institutionalization. In this context, public managers need to keep the momentum inside and outside their organizations. Open innovation processes do need suitable managerial tools to develop their full potential, enabling public managers to lead innovation initiatives within their organizations. This study covered instances where open innovation and governance are co-functional and provided evidence of future avenues of public management, based on open innovation. Such future endeavors involve the collaboration of citizens with public authorities, pinpointing the social implications and challenges of open-innovation structured governance. The managerial legitimacy and the procedural accountability were assessed by defining two decades of analysis: the pre-COVID-19 pandemic period and the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. In this emergency the long period of confinement posed challenges and opportunities to develop initiatives, channeling the civic energy to co-produce solutions among a wide range of actors. The key features of collaborative governance that guided open innovation initiatives in public sector were also denoted.