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The temporary use of vacant spaces as a format to co-produce public services is becoming popular. Research addressing the question of whether the public outcomes created in temporary co-production lead to sustainable results is lacking. The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential sustainability of public outcomes created through temporary co-production.

The paper builds on the literature on creating sustainable outcomes in policy making and on co-production to design a theoretical framework that captures the sustainable co-production of public outcomes. Attention is directed to problem solving and capacity building, and to addressing the needs of society today and being responsive to the needs of tomorrow. A study of 8 temporary initiatives set in a large city in Flanders and 35 in-depth interviews with public servants, project coordinators and citizen co-producers provide empirical data for this exploratory study of the creation of sustainable outcomes in temporary co-production.

The data indicate that lasting collaborations, institutionalized (flexible) processes and empowered citizens support the creation of sustainable results from temporary co-production.

The paper bridges the literature on policy capacity, the co-production of public services and value creation. By doing so, the paper sheds light on the temporary use of vacant spaces as a way to effectively create outcomes. In addition, the paper addresses the paradox of temporary co-production and the creation of lasting outcomes. Finally, the framework presented offers a tool for analysts and practitioners to take into account various conditions for co-production to create lasting effects.

This study explores how street-level professionals translate and implement a co-production strategy, formulated by top management, in their professional practices, focusing on conflicts that arise during this process and the effectiveness of the coping strategies employed by these professionals to manage them.

This paper is based on a lower-level inquiry into three care services in Denmark. It adopted the translation perspective in organizational research to analyze the consequences of street-level professionals' translation choices. Data were collected through interviews and observations.

This study found that street-level professionals' translation choices contribute to conflicts of varying forms and extents. The finding suggests that the way conflicts are managed makes the difference between the actual organizational change and the more symbolic acceptance of co-production.

This study contributes to discourses on challenges in co-production implementation by deepening knowledge about the role of coping behavior and translation in sustainable implementation of co-production.

In coproduction, citizens may be confronted with a conflict between creating user value and a more collective understanding of public value creation. In order to deal with conflicts experienced as trade-off situations, coproducers follow various coping strategies leading to different results. This study aims to gain insight into what drives the choices for coping strategies, which are valuable for understanding the role of citizen coproducers in public value creation.

This article studies the effects of citizens' external efficacy and trust in public servants on citizen coproducers' preferences for coping strategies. The study presents a vignette experiment among n = 257 citizens involved in the temporary use of vacant spaces in Flanders, Belgium.

No statistically significant effects of external efficacy and trust in public servants on respondents' preferences for coping strategies are found. The results show that irrespective of the level of external efficacy or trust in public servants, citizen coproducers prefer to ask for help from the public servant involved in the project.

This result draws attention to the need for facilitation and guidance from public servants and the servants' organizations to help citizen coproducers balance out these otherwise paralyzing value conflicts. Moreover, the lack of statistically significant effects of trust and external efficacy is a valuable finding for literature. The result shows that, in the drivers of coproduction behavior, there is no consistent relationship between citizen trust in government or external efficacy and coproduction behavior.

The purpose of this study is examined whether coproduction appears spontaneously in the literature on public sector innovation and governance, the citizens’ role in coproduction and the implication of citizens’ participation in the governance of innovation networks.

The review complied with preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA) protocol. The search was performed in the Ebsco, Scopus and WOS databases. The authors analyzed 47 papers published from 2017 to 2022. Thematic and content analysis were adopted, supported by MAXQDA.

The papers recognize the importance of the citizens in public innovation. However, only 20% discuss coproduction, evidencing the predominance of governance concepts related to interorganizational collaborations – but not necessarily to citizen engagement. The authors also verified the existence of polysemy regarding the concept of governance associated with public innovation, predominating the term “collaborative governance.”

The small emphasis on “co-production” may result from the search strategy, which deliberately did not include it as a descriptor, considering the research purpose. One can consider this choice a limitation.

Considering collaborative governance as a governing arrangement where public agencies directly engage nonstate stakeholders in a collective decision-making process that is formal, consensus-oriented and deliberative (Ansell and Gash, 2007), the forum where the citizen is supposed to be engaged should be initiated by public agencies or institutions and formally organized, as suggested by Österberg and Qvist (2020) and Campomori and Casula (2022). These notions can be useful for public managers concerning their role and how the forums structure should be to promote collaboration and the presence of innovation assets needed to make the process fruitful (Crosby et al., 2017).

Despite the collaborative nature of public innovation, the need for adequate governance characteristics, and the importance of citizens in the innovative process, most studies generically address collaborative relationships, focusing on interorganizational collaboration, with little focus on specific actors such as citizens in the governance of public innovation. Thus, it is assumed that the literature that discusses public innovation and governance includes the discussion of coproduction. The originality and contribution of this study is to verify this assumption.

This paper contributes to the literature on performance management by offering an inside look at a collaborative process that worked to define outcomes in the field of personal social services. It asks if different kinds of trust and leadership have an effect on the outputs of a collaborative process that aims at defining outcomes.

The paper uses an exploratory case study based on mixed method analysis. Using a practitioner-researcher method, it first presents the collaborative process implemented to bring stakeholders together to define the desired outcomes. It then explores findings from a participants survey and focuses on the effect of different kinds of trust and leadership on the collaborative process outputs.

The findings show a unique collaborative effort aimed at defining outcomes in the field of personal social services. They reveal the importance of organizational trust to learning outputs and suggest the significance of “shared leadership”.

Given the study's exploratory nature, the findings cannot be generalized to a larger population, but the study aimed at transferability. On a practical level, the findings can help mangers identify preferred conditions to implement collaborative initiatives aimed at performance measurement.

The paper contributes to the theoretical and empirical literature on performance management and collaborative governance. It pinpoints the importance of organizational trust and shared leadership as bridging mechanisms between participants in collaborative arrangements.

The purpose of this chapter is to analyze the evolution in the provision of public services’ delivery, with a specific focus on housing policies. New practices are being implemented, thanks to the cooperation of the public sector, private, and nonprofit actors. Rather than just providing assistance to households with income levels falling below specific thresholds, social housing addresses the broader and more complex areas of vulnerability that affect several categories, such as single parents, young students and professionals, and temporarily unemployed people. Co-production also comes into the picture, since many social housing projects require that beneficiaries contribute to the implementation of the project itself, for example by managing the buildings and common areas or by creating communities.

The chapter will start from considerations on the emergence of new housing needs. It will then review the literature on the concept of co-production of public services and provide a definition of social housing. Then, examples of social housing will be analyzed based on specific criteria derived from the literature and the theoretical framework. The methodology is qualitative and based on descriptive case analysis.

The chapter analyzes the evolution of public housing policies by taking into account the social and economic changes that have determined greater and more complex areas for public intervention, adopting a twofold approach of partnership and collaboration between the three sectors, and of co-production of public services by directly engaging the users.

Recent technological advances have enabled consumers and citizens to contribute to organizational processes through co-production and co-creation in ways that challenge traditional co-production. However, the practices and capabilities for value co-creation are less understood, particularly in an increasingly networked social government ecosystem. The purpose of this research is to examine the enablement of new digital co-production practices in social media platforms (SMPs) and theorize SMP-enabled digital co-production vis-à-vis traditional co-production for public sector.

Primarily using principles of interpretivist approaches, a qualitative content analysis of communication practices (i.e. genres) observed within Australian government Facebook pages was carried out to examine the salient digital forms of co-production practices.

SMPs enable new practices in digital co-production for public sector (information dissemination, Q&A, feedback and co-creation), ranging from lower to higher intensity in terms of resource integration, scale of contributions, engagement and extent of relationship vis-à-vis traditional co-production.

This research is bounded by its geographical emphasis on Australian Federal government. Hence, the results may not be readily transferable to other contexts.

Our framework offers an array of choices for digital co-production strategies to suit agency's focus and goals for engagement in the Facebook Pages. As agencies progress to reach higher intensity co-production, public engagement and impact increases.

The paper contributes to co-production in social government ecosystem by increasing the theoretical and practical understanding of new form of SMP-enabled digital co-production defined as “small-scale, repetitive, user-driven co-production that is flexible, durable, ad-hoc, and sporadic, where many hands make light work”. The proposed “co-production to co-creation” framework provides valuable guideline for enhancing public service provision via SMPs.

The purpose of this article is to show (1) how social innovations are created through co-production in social enterprises in Finland and (2) how enabling ecosystems for the creation of social innovations can be enhanced by the government.

This study is a descriptive case study. The data comprises focus group interviews that were conducted during a research project in Finland in 2022. The interviewees represented different social enterprises, other non-profit organisations and national funding institutions.

Social enterprises create social innovations in Finland through co-production, where service innovation processes, activism and networking are central. Also, to build an enabling ecosystem, government must base the system upon certain elements: enabling characteristics of the stakeholders, co-production methods and tools and initiatives by the government.

The authors address an important challenge that social enterprises struggle with: The position of social enterprises in Finland is weak and entrepreneurs experience prejudice from both the direction of “traditional” businesses and the government which often does not recognise social enterprise as a potential partner for public service delivery. Nonetheless, social enterprises create public value by contributing to the co-production of public services. They work in interorganisational networks by nature and can succeed where the traditional public organisations and private businesses fail.

Digital platforms have transformed how brands engage with collaborative consumption actors, such as prosumers. This study aims to examine the role of customer innovativeness and perceived economic value as important boundary conditions on the effects of customer brand engagement behavior on co-production, which subsequently influences customer satisfaction.

The authors test the model using survey data from 430 users of a digital platform (i.e. UBER) in Australia. Hypotheses were tested using the bias-corrected bootstrapping method.

The findings suggest that customer innovativeness and perceived economic value positively moderate the effects of customer brand engagement behavior on co-production. Further, the mediating effects of co-production on satisfaction are stronger for highly innovative customers and for those who associate high perceived economic value with the brand.

This study provides novel insights on the boundary conditions of the effects of customer brand engagement behavior on co-production. Future research could apply this study’s conceptual framework to other digital platforms to extend the generalizability of this framework.

This study provides managerial insights into how firms can customize marketing strategies to encourage customers as prosumers in co-production by targeting highly innovative customers and focusing on perceived economic value.

This study builds on service-dominant logic and social exchange theory to examine the role of customer innovativeness and perceived economic value as novel boundary conditions in digital platform ecosystems.

The purpose of this paper is to assess, clarify and consolidate the terminology around the co-creation of services, establish its forms and identify its outcomes, to resolve the conceptual pluralism in service co-creation literature.

A focused literature review screened the articles published in five major service research journals to determine relevant contributions on the concept of co-creation of services. Then, a thematic analysis identifies the forms, themes and outcomes of co-creating services in the set of 80 qualifying articles.

The study reduces conceptual pluralism by establishing different forms of co-creating services and developing an explicit definition of co-creation in services. The authors develop an integrative framework that recognizes involvement, engagement and participation as prerequisites for co-creation. Relating to the different phases of the service process, the specific co-creation forms of co-ideation, co-valuation, co-design, co-testing and co-launching are classified as regenerative co-creation, while the specific co-creation forms of co-production and co-consumption are recognized as operative co-creation. Both beneficial and counterproductive outcomes of co-creation are identified and arranged into a typology.

The integrative framework illustrates that service providers and customers are involved, engaged and participate in co-creating services, which manifests in specific forms of co-creation; they attain beneficial and counterproductive outcomes (personal, social, hedonic, cognitive, economic and pragmatic); and are influenced by a contextual multi-actor network.

Co-creation in services is actionable; the typology of outcomes suggests service managers ways to motivate customers and employees to participate in co-creating services.

This paper defines and establishes the conceptual forms of co-creating services and the identified outcomes, and develops an integrative framework of co-creation in services.