Assessing ICT-enabled Innovation for Governance and Policy Making

The objective of the thesis is to deepen the understanding of the interplay between ICT-enabled innovation and governance by providing evidence of the changes they are producing on governance processes and policy making mechanisms. Moreover, the thesis aims to explore possible future directions and identify research and policy implications for applying promising ICT-enabled innovations to support better governance and evidence-based policy-making. Within this context, we define 'ICT-enabled innovation for governance and policy-making'' as an umbrella term enfolding a number of ICT-enabled innovations that are applied in order to achieve the target of participative, evidence-based governance and policy-making. Furthermore, we consider governance as a multidimensional construct, the focus of the research being on the way the different stakeholders interact when introducing ICT- enabled innovations in governance and the way these interactions affect institutions and communities, and the related policy-making mechanisms. The governance changes under scrutiny are both technologically and socially driven and manifest themselves in new governance models and public management practices, revised institutional processes and organisational structures. In particular, the research is based upon the belief that the socio-economic perspectives, which stand at the interface between analyses of individual behaviour and wider societal structures, are well placed to elucidate the impacts of ICTs on governance processes. The conceptual framework underpinning the thesis thus builds on several disciplines and academic traditions, ranging from public administration and governance theories to network science, innovation management, organisational theories, and social shaping of technology, among others. The overall research question addressed by the thesis is: what are the key elements (value drivers and indicators) to consider for evaluating ICT-enabled innovation potential for governance and policy-making in a future-oriented perspective? ICTs, in fact, are hopefully not only raising new challenges not so obvious to tackle but also helping solve problems and contribute to some wealth creation and social cohesion. The current evolution of ICTs indicates - in particular- strong trends towards Mobile uptakes, Social Computing expansion and local forms of service development, the main question being how to emphasize whether these new forms are indeed creating a meaningful change, for evidence-based benefits, and which indicators can be used to monitor those processes, or whether they are just marginal variations of a massive heavy trend linked to ICT development, but not so clearly impacting specific types of needs nor expectations. In order to address this meta-question and contribute to responding to the research question underpinning the thesis, a specific effort relies on the need to capture (and possibly measure) the impacts that ICT-enabled innovations (especially user-enabling ICTs) generate on governance and policy-making processes. For this purpose, the focus of the research is on exploring three ‘target areas’ or application domains where we claim ICT- enabled innovations can have a disruptive impact on governance processes and policy-making mechanisms, and thus in turn change radically the way society operates. These target areas are: Mobile ICTs (Chapter 3), Social Computing (Chapter 4) and ICT-enabled governance at city level (Chapter 5). Through our exploratory analysis we map the state of the art and analyse the meaning and implications of these ICT-enabled innovations in specific contexts and conditions, so as to first analyse ‘synchronically’ the state of the art (as it is now) through empirical research and case studies, and compare it through an evolutionary analysis with the ‘dynamics’ and future perspectives of these domains, and their possible societal impacts (as it could be in the future). In doing so, the thesis presents facts and findings of empirical analysis and exploration, as well as results from various case studies and exhaustive literature reviews, to show the state of play, opportunities and risks, major trends, research and policy directions. In addition to this, the thesis provides indications aiming to contribute to enhancing methodological approaches for measurement of ICT-enabled innovation for governance and policy-making, developing an original proposal of assessment framework to evaluate the multi-faceted and multi-dimensional elements unfolding under the concept of ICT-enabled governance. This emerging concept has been further explored through an empirical analysis (a mapping survey to European cities) and the assessment framework has then been applied to four 'real-life' examples by conducting in-depth case studies at city level in order to test and validate the assumptions and the operational 'fit' of the proposal (Chapter 5). The conclusion of the thesis (Chapter 6) presents the key findings of the analysis in terms of implications emerging from the analysis of the disruptive potential of ICT-enabled innovations in the mobile and social computing ecosystems, as well as the results from the focus on the city governance level. It further provides elements to envision future applications of ICT-enabled innovations for better governance and evidence-based policy-making at the horizon 2030, as well as assessing the contribution of the research to knowledge and policy, its limitations and outlining proposals for future research.