Veiko Lember

• PhD
• Professor at Tallinn University of Technology

Public-private partnership (PPP) is a multifaceted phenomenon with a long and rich history. The chapter provides a short overview of the main PPP types and how the different kinds of public-private interactions structure service provision. The chapter will also look at how the concept of PPP has evolved over time and what are some the emerging issu...

Public administrations are increasingly relying on collaboration within inter-organizational networks to coordinate the development and provisioning of integrated digital public services. Collaboration strategies are necessary to focus collaborative efforts, align and prioritize goals, and leverage concrete results that advance integrated service d...

Exploring academic and policy thinking on e-participation, this book opens up the organizational and institutional 'black box' and provides new insights into how public administrations in 15 European states have facilitated its implementation.

Drawing from case studies from the Estonian biotechnology sector, we demonstrate that a focus on the classic formal approach to technology transfer does not fully capture the dynamics and challenges of technology transfer in a peripheral context. We focus on biotechnology because this is an area where entrepreneurial orientation of knowledge instit...

Digital transformation has the potential to profoundly change the way public administrations deliver public services to its users. One of the challenges involved in the inter-organizational networks that often govern integrated digital services is to identify what coordination instruments are effective. In this paper we examine this issue through a...

The rise of smart city and the increasing use of digital technologies to govern cities and steer citizen behavior in form of big data, internet of things, and social media as participatory platform leads to incessant waves of innovations in public services. The impact of technology on public sector is almost always mediated by the institutional con...

As technology and automation are increasingly introduced to the public sector, the design of technology starts to influence how and with whom the public organizations collaborate. Machine-to-machine and human-to-machine interactions progressively delineate the space for innovation: who is involved, how they interact with each other, how the interac...

Despite growing interest in the potential of digital technologies to enhance co-production and co-creation in public services, there is a lack of hard evidence on their actual impact. Conceptual fuzziness and tech-optimism stand in the way of collecting such evidence. The article suggests an analytical framework that distinguishes between the impac...

While the contemporary academic discourse regards innovation as an inherent feature of infrastructure public‒private partnerships (PPPs), the conceptual link between infrastructure PPPs and innovation is narrowly understood. While most existing studies conceptualize the innovation processes and effects within the context of PPP projects, we argue t...

The paper maps and analyzes all existing practical exercises aiming to develop indicators for public sector innovations. To our knowledge this is the first attempt to comprehensively gather information about various international efforts. We only considered such exercises where actual indicators were developed and used at least once. We map five su...

The paper maps and analyzes all existing practical exercises aiming to develop indicators for public sector innovations. To our knowledge this is the first attempt to comprehensively gather information about various international efforts. We only considered such exercises where actual indicators were developed and used at least once. We map five su...

La technologie est un facteur essentiel dans la vie des organisations. Rares sont pourtant les études qui s’intéressent à la technologie et aux organisations publiques. Dans le présent article, nous proposons de comprendre l’évolution technologique dans le secteur public, en particulier la manière dont la technologie influence la capacité administr...

Digital transformation has emerged as a term that describes the departure from digitization efforts to a full stack revision of the policies, processes and services in order to create simpler user experiences for citizens and frontline workers. While previous waves of digitization focused on the transition from analog to (parallel) digital services...

There is a new wave of digital processes, applications and “mashups” of services emerging, driven by a growing digitization of society, ever-increasing computational power, social networking and related institutional innovations. Digital technology can empower individuals and substantially increase opportunities for collective co-production as well...

Technology is clearly a critical factor in the lives of organizations, yet there are only a few studies that deal with technology and public organizations. In this article, we propose to understand technological change in the public sector, in particular, how technology influences administrative capacity, through a new concept of technological capa...

This article is a first comprehensive attempt to globally map and analyse innovation labs (i-labs) in the public sector. The article analyzes theoretical reasons why i-labs are created in the public sector and tests these assumptions in practice. During the empirical study, thirty-five such organizations all over the world were identified. The 10 r...

This article examines the policy implementation phase of co-production, focussing on micro-level dynamics (individual relationships, motivation, and trust), which are largely out of the direct control of the government. A case of an alternative probation service in Estonia is presented, where experimentation and the inclusion of motivated citizens...

This chapter examines how governments can enhance public sector innovation by utilizing new as well as old forms of public-private interaction that mobilizes the knowledge, competencies and resources of the private sector. We focus on three major yet distinct forms of public and private interplay: contracting out, public procurement and public-priv...

Most countries that have adopted the public–private partnership (PPP) model as a means of implementing infrastructure projects have launched dedicated supporting units to guide policy development and stimulate project implementation. This paper draws on the theoretical notion of PPP-enabling fields to carry out a comparative analysis of the roles a...

The societal challenges-based approach to science, technology and innovation (STI) policy is currently one of the key ways by which the EU seeks to break away from the linear and science-push driven policy thinking. This seems to raise complex challenges of policy legitimisation, rationalisation and institutionalisation especially in the countries...

New forms of urban regeneration have been based on strong citizen involvement and support. Based on the new realist theory of social class, we argue that these processes have the face of the new leisure class – urban professionals, designers, intellectuals, etc. – who create the agenda for citizen-led regeneration activities. This leads to conspicu...

Governments are actively looking for ways to use public procurement so that it would become more effective in facilitating innovation across public and private sectors. However, a shift towards public procurement of innovation (PPI) has proven to be difficult. Whereas the contemporary debate has mostly focused on how to reduce the barriers of PPI t...

The article examines the effects of market-type contracting on the capacity of the government to integrate public service stakeholders and to assure coherence in service provision. The study focuses on the case of the Estonian out-of-hospital emergency medical care and analyses it through an analytical framework, concentrating on basic coordination...

Social innovation is a recurring theme in public administration, in order to face contemporary socalled ‘wicked’ challenges like an ageing population and youth unemployment. Social innovation can be considered as a process of co-creation, since it seeks the collaboration of multiple stakeholders. These stakeholders bring in their own specific resou...

While innovation labs (i-labs) are increasingly popular in the public sector, there is almost no systematic academic overview of these organizations. This article is a first comprehensive attempt to map and analyze such labs globally. We have identified 35 such organizations all over the world. The research is based on a two-step approach: first, a...

The aim of this article is to give an overview of scholarly state-of-the-art in terms of both conceptualizing and measuring public sector innovations. In order to do so, the article consists of following sections: first, we give a brief overview of prevailing attempts to conceptualize (define) public sector innovation and contrast it with older lit...

Estonian innovation policy has been developing rapidly since the mid-2000s, but supply-side measures dominate, and systemic public procurement of innovation exists only in some unimplemented policy documents—a situation dominated by noninterventionist neo-liberal values and inertia in the politico-administrative systems, described as a “no policy”...

The recent decade has witnessed a growing interest in using public procurement to spur innovation and development. The current theory is, with some notable exceptions, constrained and often guided by the historical successes of (mostly) military procurement. The two research questions presented are (1) what policies are countries currently pursuing...

This final chapter summarizes the main findings from the 11 country chapters presented in the book. We categorize the current public procurement of innovation (PPI) policy practices and explore the factors behind policy developments. Although countries have followed rather different paths in PPI policy-making, we detect a certain general PPI trajec...

This book maps the latest developments in public procurement of innovation policy in various contexts and analyzes the evolution and development of the various policy solutions in broader institutional contexts. In doing so, it addresses significant theoretical and practical gaps: On the one hand, there is an emerging interest in public procurement...

Pre-hospital emergency medical service (EMS) is a mobile public service that is provided to persons in need of instant medical aid. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Estonia inherited a highly fragmented EMS that was administered independently by 15 counties. In the late 1990s, first steps were taken to join up the different parts of...

This chapter provides a preliminary framework for understanding innovation-oriented public-procurement policy. The first part will give a short overview of how innovation-oriented public procurement is defined in the literature and summarizes today’s main theoretical debates. In the second part, by distilling from international policy practices, pa...

The purpose of this policy brief is twofold. First, it provides an overview of the currently existing range of demand-side policy tools. Second, it makes a case for further consideration for inclusion of demand-side innovation measures in the Estonian policy toolbox.

In this Discussion Paper Series, we discuss some of the alleged crucial elements of the national context for PPP development, being the extent to which PPP-related policies, political commitment, regulations and supporting institutions are present in specific countries. A descriptive overview of contextual factors in 17 European countries is provid...

Public procurement for innovation represents one of the least studied demand-side innovation policy tools that can be used to increase urban competitiveness. Evidence suggests that local and regional governments are becoming more involved in procuring innovative solutions, but overall knowledge remains limited regarding how they get involved and wh...

Arguably, the sub-central governments have a share that is two to three times larger in total public procurement than national governments in the EU (Nyiri et al., 2007). At this time, however, there is no coherent evidence available to indicate the extent to which public procurement for innovation potential is realized at local and regional levels...

Public procurement for innovation has been an important national innovation policy tool since World War II (European Commission Working Group, 2006 [hereafter ECWG]).

State support for innovation in enterprises has been long-standing. One of the specific support measures is public procurement for innovation, which has only recently re-emerged in academic discussion as well as in the European policy discourse. While the spillovers from this type of innovation policy measure may be substantial, the complex process...

So far, only 40 countries have joined WTO�s Government Procurement Agreement (GPA), from the developing world only some East Asian (Hong Kong [China], South Korea, Singapore) economies and ten Eastern European countries are parties to the agreement. This article sets out to answer two interrelated questions: is it advisable for developing countries...

We examine the use of purchase-of-service contracting in transition countries, focusing on a case study of Estonian social services contracting at the local level. Given the nature of transition economies, we expect to find the use of relational contracting to offset problems of thin markets. We find this is the case; however we also find that the...

After providing an overview of the main regulative principles of the Estonian public procurement system by presenting the new Public Procurement Act that was adopted in 2007, this chapter identifies the main aspects and features of the Estonian public procurement model covering areas of procurement budget and methods, transparency in procurement, p...

In spite of the fact that more public services are contracted out every year in Central and Eastern European and other transitional countries, empirical evidence demonstrates ongoing problems in implementing the process. The chapter suggests that instead of learning only through market testing, governments should concentrate more on ex ante analysi...

Estonia, being one of the most diligent students of the neo-liberal economic paradigm among the Central and Eastern European transitional countries, has declared that private organisations should be given the chance to operate public prisons. This article argues that in spite of the promising perspective of this idea, the transitional context mixed...