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 u