A Journal is born!

The journal was initiated by the Norwegian research network INNOFF last year, and a Nordic editorial team has worked hard to realize this very first issue. The journal aims to spread knowledge about public sector innovations in the Nordic context, which we know is a theme of interest to a wider academic audience, and to link together academic research and practice in the field, which we believe should be strengthened.

In this first issue, we lend ears and eyes to seven distinguished scholars from the three Scandinavian countries. In “Innovate or die,” Ditte Thøgersen and Susanne Boch Waldorff discuss and analyze how the present imperative to innovate is understood and coped with among frontline staff in a Danish context. In “Public services and service innovation,” the second article written by Per Skålén, the author departs from the weak theoretical understanding of concepts like public services and public service innovation and argues that we need to conceptualize public services in terms of public value co-creation practices (PVCP), and public service innovation as the creation of PVCPs. The third article, “The three orders of Public Innovation” by Eva Sørensen and Jacob Torfing, discusses how we can transform the public sector to pursue innovation permanently and systematically and points to three levels that need to be developed. In the fourth and final article, “Co-creation, Collaborative Innovation and Open innovation in the Public Sector,” Ailin Aastvedt and Ulla. Higdem report from a literature review where the aim is to map the various and often interchangeable terms used in this type of research.

The journal is published with golden open access, and the first issue is available at https://lnkd.in/gbQhBAVj, which is the portal for journals run by our publisher – the Norwegian Universitetsforlaget, and which also contains all necessary information for future authors. We plan to publish two issues yearly, and we welcome papers from authors engaged in this research field.