What is it about?
Studying digital innovation in the public sector, we find that “publicness” reshapes what matters. In State-owned Enterprises (SOEs) with higher autonomy, digital innovation increases with leaders’ capacity. In Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organizations (QUANGOs), higher levels of government funding and performance shortfalls relative to peer organizations increase digital innovation. At the same time, isomorphic pressures push both types toward higher levels of digital innovation.
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Why is it important?
The key implication of this study is that the core drivers of digital innovation differ depending on the level of organizational publicness. Because SOEs are public organizations primarily shaped by market authority and characterized by relatively high autonomy, leadership capability-based decision making translates more directly into substantive digital innovation adoption. By contrast, QUANGOs are influenced mainly by political authority, and they tend to achieve higher levels of digital innovation adoption when they face legitimacy risks due to poorer performance than peer public organizations or when they have a stable financial structure supported by government funding. This highlights that even for the same type of digital innovation, the underlying driving forces should be understood differently depending on which form of authority exerts greater influence.
Perspectives
We wish that this article encourages readers to view organizational publicness, the extent to which an organization is subject to political authority, as a spectrum that shapes the core drivers of digital innovation adoption. Because digital innovation is widely regarded as an effective strategy for increasing public value, we hope our findings will be useful to both public managers and policy decision-makers.
Tony M. Han
City University of Hong Kong
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Digital innovation across the publicness spectrum, Public Management Review, December 2025, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/14719037.2025.2607625.
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