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Today’s public administration is facing a wide range of challenges. This situation requires an ability to change and innovate. However, difficulties in the implementation of innovations have been seen as the cause of many administrations’ inability to achieve the intended benefits of innovations. The purpose of this study is, therefore, to empirically determine which – out of a wide range of enabling factors for innovations – may be the most important for the specific process step of moving from ideas to implementation of innovations in a public administration context, and, furthermore, to identify possible additional enablers for this specific process step.

This study is a qualitative study based on semi-structured interviews with city officials in four cities on four continents.

The study identifies five key enablers for transforming ideas into implemented innovations in public administration: a committed and hands-on leadership, internal as well as external networking, innovation processes over time alternately organized as a separate project and, as part of the standard operating procedures, a system understanding, including an understanding of how the parts contribute to a shared vision and communication of achieved, tangible, short-term results. Three of these enablers are previously identified as overall enablers for innovation and two complement previously identified enablers.

The article identifies enabling factors for the specific step of going from idea generation to implementation of innovations in a public sector context. The article also reviews enabling factors from real experiences. Much of the former literature is conceptual. The article analyses an area in which there is a general lack of empirical research.

The public sector seems to have a culture and structure for control and improvement of ongoing activities but lacks the culture and structures for innovation. Thus, capacity development among public sector employees can be an important method for the development of better conditions for innovation. The purpose of this paper is to identify key factors affecting the achievement of good results when municipal and regional organisations carry out capacity development of employees with the aim of creating greater leeway for innovation in their organisation.

The study behind this paper has looked at four different concrete cases, which have applied essentially different methods for capacity building for innovation issues. A qualitative research method was used. Data were collected via semi-structured interviews with 39 respondents. The analysis of the information revealed in the interviews was carried out through a thematic analysis in three steps.

The study shows that action learning makes it easier for employees to turn knowledge generated through action into reality. The study also shows that it seems difficult to work from a digital communication platform if the platform is not combined with physical meetings. The study shows that committed and hands-on leadership is very important, that there is a need for strategic communication related to the capacity development effort including clarification and definition of what innovation means in the local context.

This paper shows a number of important aspects to consider when municipalities and regional organisations plan their capacity development initiatives in innovation. By taking these into account increases the ability of public organisations to develop and adapt their operations and deliver high quality and value-adding services to the citizens.

The capability of an organization to perform not only incremental quality improvements to the existing processes and products but also innovative or radical improvements that explore new opportunities is referred to as organizational ambidexterity. Research indicates that the long-term success of organizations demands a dynamic balancing of and excelling at both perspectives. However, there is considerably less clarity as regards how this can be achieved. The purpose of this paper is to empirically explore enabling factors for organizational ambidexterity in the public sector.

This study is a qualitative study based on interviews with managers at two public organizations in Sweden. The analysis is conducted using a soft system methodology.

Nine enabling factors for organizational ambidexterity are identified and presented in two pictures inspired by the Soft System Methodology. The study indicates that it above all is important to create leeway for exploration to achieve organizational ambidexterity in the public sector. The study strengthens the belief that some quality movement values and tools can be considered important, whereas others can counteract the ability to achieve organizational ambidexterity in public administration.

Practitioners and scholars can use the identified enablers and the Soft System Methodology presented in this study to examine and develop the organizational ambidexterity of other public organizations.

This study explores empirically the concept of ambidexterity in the public sector, a perspective that few previous scholars have studied.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the phenomenon of innovation in the current Swedish governmental administration system. More specifically, the paper explores the current understanding within the system of what innovation is, as well as why and how it should be achieved. Innovation is currently at the top of many agendas worldwide: not only in the private sector but also when it comes to increasing quality, efficiency and effectiveness in public administration. In Sweden, this is reflected in the recent call from the Government for innovation in public management. However, innovation has not traditionally occurred to any significant extent on the strategic level of Swedish public management. Furthermore, governmental administration is a complex system in need of coordination and alignment for this new call to be effectively realized in practice.

This paper has been based on a qualitative approach with a case consisting of three embedded units: the Government itself, a ministry and a Government agency. The data have been collected from documents and interviews.

This paper shows that there is currently a notable disparity when it comes to how aspects of innovation are understood at different levels within the Swedish governmental administration system. Furthermore, the recent business development to increase the standardization of work processes is perceived as having created poorer preconditions for working with innovations.

The results highlight critical areas of disparity and possibilities for improvement toward a shared understanding and aligned innovation actions within the system.

This paper contributes knowledge about the current understanding of innovation in the Swedish governmental administration system.

The Florida electorate passed Amendment One on January 29th, 2008. The portability provision of this Amendment allows homestead owners to transfer the difference between assessed value and estimated market value of their current homestead property to their new property. Since passage, there has been limited and declining utilization of the portability provision. This paper explores whether the accrued tax savings due to the property assessment limit provide sufficient incentive for homesteaders to move by examining aggregated utilization of the portability provision among counties. Based on a panel regression using 67 counties from 2008 to 2012, our findings indicate the portability provision has had limited impact on Florida's depressed housing market and only a small number of well-educated and white homesteaders have availed themselves of this mechanism.

We construct yearly fiscal series for Sweden between 1719 and 2003 including expenditures, revenues, deficits and debt. We present measures for the fiscal branch of the central government as well as for the consolidated fiscal and monetary branch, which includes fiscal seigniorage. We evaluate the reliability and consistency of the series by calculating the difference between budget deficits and the change in debt to test if the differences are serially uncorrelated around zero, which we confirm.

Accessibility and inclusion are at the very core of what libraries are all about and libraries and librarians have an essential, catalytic role to play in facilitating the full participation of people with disabilities in society. Inclusive librarians ensure that their library’s facilities, services, programs, collections, and technology are designed in ways in which all people, regardless of their ability, have an opportunity to participate in and use them. The purpose of this chapter is to raise librarian awareness to the importance of providing effective, well-designed, inclusive programs and services to patrons with disabilities and ensuring that all libraries are physically and virtually accessible to everyone.

The chapter provides a brief review of the history and current state of accessible and inclusive libraries, including the laws and policies governing it and identifies some of the major barriers to successful accessibility and inclusion (including insufficient time and money, externally controlled decision-making, unawareness of existing services, and inadequate training).

The chapter offers a variety of practical strategies for overcoming those barriers, with potential or actual examples of how librarians have/can put them into action.

The chapter concludes with descriptions of special national, regional, and state initiatives, including Syracuse University’s Project ENABLE (Expanding Non-discriminatory Access By Librarians Everywhere), Florida State University’s Project PALS (Panhandle Autism Library Services), and the Illinois State Library’s Targeting Autism projects, all designed to help librarians ensure that their library’ facilities, programs, and services are accessible and inclusive.

The purpose of the paper is to show that a syndrome of problem behaviours, i.e. early substance abuse, school and family problems and sexual promiscuity impairs normal development in adolescence. This comparative study looked for differences in the problem behaviour profiles of 15‐year‐old adolescents in the Pitkäranta district in Russia and in eastern Finland, in order to develop more effective strategies for adolescents' health promotion.

Data from the Russian Pitkäranta Youth Study (n=385) and the Finnish North Karelia Youth Study (n=2098) were used. A K‐means clustering algorithm was used to identify homogenous groups of adolescents based on variation in selected health behaviour variables.

The paper finds that four different profiles including the variables of current smoking, first smoking experiments, first drinking experiments, experiences of drunkenness and sexual experiences were identified. The identified profiles, titled “Non‐ or late experimenters”, “Middle experimenters”, “Early experimenters” and “Child experimenters”, were found to be distinct across gender, country and other external variables. Adolescents more often in Pitkäranta than in eastern Finland belonged to “Non‐ or late experimenters” of minimal risk‐taking behaviours. Unhealthy dietary habits, use of illegal drugs, psychosomatic disorders and problems with parents were more common among “Early experimenters” and Child experimenters”. These findings added to the evidence of grouping of problem behaviours.

The paper shows that there is a need to develop and implement tailored and coordinated health promotion programs for specific target groups of adolescents. Obviously, adolescents with a high level of risk‐taking behaviours would benefit from programs that acknowledge their cultural expectations in their everyday life contexts.

This paper describes a cross‐sectional comparison of health surveys among adolescents in two countries. It will be interesting to carry out a follow‐up survey in, for example, ten years to see how health issues have changed, especially among Russian adolescents, of whom there is not much research available.

Cluster analysis was a useful method in identifying adolescents' problem behaviours in a cross‐cultural study.