Building strategic agility through user-driven innovation: the case of the Finnish public service sector

This paper investigates how to build strategic agility through the lens of user-driven innovation. Drawing on survey data collected in the public service sector in Finland, our study suggests that the strategic rigidity of public service organisations, assessed according to their strategic sensitivity, resource fluidity and leadership unity, can hamper their effective adoption of the user-driven innovation approach to build strategic agility. We propose a 4C model of building strategic agility through user-driven innovation, addressing the need of taking actions in four areas: commitment, competences, communications and climate. Our research highlights that actions in the four dimensions, which are closely interlinked and reinforce each other, should involve actors at different levels both internally and externally.     

The legitimacy gap of algorithmic decision-making in the public sector: Why it arises and how to address it

Algorithmic decision-making (ADM) systems are increasingly adopted by the state to support various administrative functions and improve the effectiveness and efficiency of public services, such as in unemployment services or policing. While these systems create challenges of opaqueness, unfairness, and value trade-offs, the present paper argues that a more fundamental challenge lies in the way these systems alter the epistemic bases of decision-making. It contributes to the literature by highlighting why procedural standards of legitimacy in operative decision-making no longer suffice for certain applications and by discussing how the resulting legitimacy gap can be addressed through stakeholder involvement. By adapting research on participatory technology assessments to the particularities of ADM system design, it is possible to identify the core challenges of such a stakeholder process and the necessary steps to deal with them.