Public Sector Innovation Capacity in Core Administrative Organizations: Evidence from Norway’s Brønnøysund Register Centre

Public-sector innovation is frequently portrayed as the domain of dedicated innovation labs and experimental units, obscuring how innovation capacity can emerge within core bureaucratic institutions. This article explores how Norway’s Brønnøysund Register Centre (BRC), mainly a registry authority traditionally associated with administrative stability, has evolved into a central innovation intermediary within the country’s digital government ecosystem. Drawing on Meijer’s public innovation capacity framework, the study examines how innovation is mobilized, coordinated, tested, stabilized, and legitimized in practice. The findings show that the BRC performs key innovation functions by mobilizing and coordinating heterogeneous actors across a decentralized governance system, enabling experimentation through managed proofs-of-concept, and institutionalizing successful practices via authoritative registries, shared identifiers, and platform infrastructures. These arrangements support interoperability, data-centric service delivery, and the operationalization of once-only and life event-based service models. Trust emerges as an enabling condition that facilitates voluntary coordination, data sharing, and tolerance for experimentation, without substituting for formal governance or legal frameworks. The analysis further highlights how public-value considerations—such as data protection, identity management, accessibility, and accountability—are addressed alongside efficiency and innovation objectives. The article contributes to public-sector innovation research by demonstrating that transferability lies in functional adaptation—strengthening coordination, experimentation, and institutional foundations—rather than organizational replication.