How to spur collaborative innovation in turbulent environments: An exploration of necessary and sufficient conditions

Governments and people around the world are slowly moving on what Boin et al. (2021) called “the year of the unthinkable”, when a mega-crisis (Helsloot et al. 2012) affected and disrupted governments’ modus operandi and people’s lives. One of the basic lessons arising in the fog of the pandemic is that our future will never be the same and that turbulences will be the rule rather than the exception. It follows that the ability to promptly re-invent, adapt and innovate policies and practices, so as to provide effective and legitimate responses to always new unforeseen and unpredictable needs, seems to become a critical issue for governments in the future (Ansell et al. 2020).
In other words, the public sector is expected, today more in than in the past, to be innovative. Public innovation was considered for long time a sort of “oxymoron”. Today, new research has shown how the public sector is much more innovative than its reputation (Torfing et al. 2020). It has also highlighted the fact that public innovation is often the result of collaborative efforts in networks and partnerships (Hartley, 2005; Ansell and Torfing, 2014). “Multi-actor collaboration helps to produce a more precise and nuanced understanding of the problem at hand, bring forth a greater richness of ideas, stimulate mutual learning, facilitate negotiated risk management, build joint ownership over new and bold solutions, enable coordinated implementation and adaptation, and accelerate the diffusion of successful innovations” (Torfing et al. 2020: 249). However, the presence of multiple actors with contrasting perspectives, the fact that they may be risk adverse and the transaction costs related to long and complex interactions may make the elaboration of new solutions quite problematic.
Scholars have shown how institutional design and leadership may help to cope with these problems and spur collaborative innovation (Torfing et al. 2020): they can help to creating a framework for fostering participation, sustaining collaboration, facilitating alignment and join decision-making (Torfing, 2016).
In this perspective, our aim in this paper is to explore how institutional design choices (such as stakeholder heterogeneity and network governance modes) and leadership behaviors (such as rational or pragmatic approach) may differently combine in complex and turbulent environment to spur collaborative innovation. More specifically, our aim is to identify necessary and sufficient conditions (or combinations of conditions) for collaborative innovation.
For this purpose, we studied the Covid-19 vaccination campaign in all 20 Italian Regions, which we see as a “turbulence within turbulence” that requires appropriate, continuously new and especially innovative solutions. As in most European countries, the vaccination campaign in Italy started on December 27, 2020 (V-day) and is progressing among newly emerging challenges. This volatile context forces Italian Regions to continuously re-invent their policies and governance solutions, so as to be able to vaccinate the highest number of people in the shortest time. Italian Regions are subordinate to the National Health Ministry in health matters, but have also a high degree of autonomy, in general, and in relation to the organization of the vaccination campaign, in particular. This produced different strategic and governance solutions to cope with the challenges of the vaccination campaign, with a different degree of innovation.
We employed a mixed-method approach to conduct the study. In particular, we combined insights from a single case study (Yin 1984, 2014) and from Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) (Rihoux and Ragin 2009; Schneider and Wagemann 2012). As a result, we identified competing constellations of factors characterizing collaborative innovation. Data were collected through documentary and press analysis, search of official data on the vaccination campaign, and interviews.