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Co-Creation and Co-Production as a Strategy for Public Service Innovation: A study to their appropriateness in a public sector context

William Voorberg

Governments are facing complicated issues such as financial retrenchment, climate change, globalization, increasing demand for a stronger focus on citizens’ needs and an urge for regeneration of urban deprived areas. In order to oppose these challenges, partnerships between stakeholders from various backgrounds are considered a necessary strategy. The central idea hereby is that, since different actors possess their own specific resources, these partnerships are better equipped to come up with innovative solutions to these kind of problems. This is what we call [i]co-creation or co-production in social innovation[/i]. This research aims to reveal the mechanisms, underlying these concepts and seeks to conclude what kind of outcomes co-creation and co-production generates. Also, this thesis estimates the kind of implications of this research for actors involved in social innovation. In doing so, it contributes to our understanding of a very important topic, for which both the academic and professional attention is still increasing.