The Service Industries Journal, 2013

Vol. 33, Nos. 78, 671 682, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02642069.2013.740468

Co-creation and innovation in public services

Helena Alves

Department of Business and Economics and NECE, University of Beira Interior, Covilha
6200-209, Portugal
(Received 14 May 2012; final version received 8 September 2012)

Public-sector services feature some very specific characteristics that frequently prove
to be obstacles to innovation. This article therefore discusses how co-creation,
within a Service-Dominant (S-D) logic, may contribute to innovation in these
organisations and overcome the challenges posed by scarce resources and a
multiplicity of clients and objectives and maintain citizen consensus around these
activities. This discussion is backed up by examples drawn from the United Nations
awards made annually for the best public-sector practices and innovations.

Keywords: public services; innovation; value co-creation; S-D logic

Introduction
The bulk of research on innovation has focused on the private sector and especially on the
industrial sector (Bessant, 2005; Michel, Brown, & Gallan, 2008; Oke, 2007). However,
the Marketing Science Institute (2008, 2010) has recently deemed service-based inno-
vation a research priority. In terms of public services, however, the study remains at an
initial phase and still very much in its infancy (LSE Public Policy Group, 2008;
Mulgan & Albury, 2003; Vigoda-Gadot, Shoham, Schwabsky, & Ruvio, 2008).
Pressures on budgets and rising citizen expectations as to more accessible and
flexible services in addition to all the economic, social and environmental challenges
that are prevailing have together driven innovation in the public sector (Bloch,
Jrgensen, Norn, & Vad, 2009; Commonwealth of Australia, 2009, 2010; Kaul,
1997; Mulgan & Albury, 2003; Scott-Kemmis, 2009). Worldwide, governments are
under pressure to bring about the reform of their administrative structures and
restructure their processes to change both the ways and the scope of their operations
through various types of innovations (Improvement and Developmental Agency
[IDeA], 2005; Pinto, 1998), that is, to adapt the business model to the external
environment (Cavalcante, Kesting, & Ulhoi, 2011).
Innovation in the public sector is fundamental to improving economic performance,
social welfare and environmental sustainability and may also boost organisational effi-
ciency and drive better-quality levels, services better tailored to citizens, reductions in
business transaction costs and new operational methods (Commonwealth of Australia,
2009). The empirical studies demonstrate that innovations generate cost savings of
between 20% and 60%, boost citizen satisfaction, generate better outcomes (Bason,
2010), improve the image of the state sector in the perspective of citizens (Bloch et al.,
2009; Vigoda-Gadot et al., 2008) and boost innovation in the for-profit sector (Bloch

Email: halves@ubi.pt

# 2013 Taylor & Francis

672 H. Alves

et al., 2009; Lee, Lim, & Pathak, 2011; Yang & Li, 2011). Hence, studying innovation in
the public sector proves to be of corresponding fundamental importance.
However, the public sector does display peculiarities potentially susceptible to con-
ditioning the structure and shape of innovations taking place within its scope (Lamb,
1987; LSE Public Policy Group, 2008; Scott-Kemmis, 2009). As regards innovation,
the public sector is broadly characterised by high aversion levels to the change involved;
tight restrictions on the resources available; the lack of management guidance and
measurement; conflicts over policy directions; resistance to change and legislative limit-
ations (Commonwealth of Australia, 2010). However, other characteristic features also
include potential incompatibilities between private and public values, questions of cultural
receptiveness to innovation and also issues related to equity, access and justice (IDeA,
2005). According to Pinto (1998), there is a risk posed by adopting market-based inno-
vations as it may compromise the states social responsibilities. On the contrary, Bason
(2010) stresses that where innovations are for citizens, then they should be designed
and implemented in conjunction with them and not for them and hence the market necess-
arily plays a very important role in the development of public-sector innovation. Citizens
and companies are sources of extremely important and relevant ideas because, on the one
hand, they exist beyond the scope of the public sector and, on the other hand, they experi-
ence the direct effects of new policies and services (Commonwealth of Australia, 2010;
Lee, Hwang, & Choi, 2012). By getting far more involved, citizens and other key stake-
holders (Mainardes, Alves, & Raposo, 2011) can enhance the public-sector innovation
capacities (Bason, 2010).
Thus, the objective of this study is to discuss just how co-creation may help overcome
some of the obstacles to public-sector-based innovation, putting forward examples duly
recognised by the best-practice awards the United Nations gives annually to countries
located across all five continents.

Innovation in the public sector

Public-sector innovation derives from the need of governments to boost and enhance the
responsiveness of services provided to meet individual and local needs through services
tailored to meet individual citizen and local needs. This involves improving and persona-
lising services, reaching out and meeting public expectations, containing costs and
improving efficiency levels, and leveraging the potential of information and communi-
cation technologies while also dealing with global competition given how public-sector
innovation directly impacts on the competitiveness of companies (Bason, 2010; Common-
wealth of Australia, 2010; IDeA, 2005; Kaul, 1997; Mulgan & Albury, 2003; Pinto, 1998).
According to Bason (2010), the only way to meet and face these challenges is through the
co-creation of new solutions with citizens. Establishing partnerships with the private
sector, non-profit and community-based organisations may not only foster innovation
but also generate innovative solutions (Commonwealth of Australia, 2009).
Traditionally, service innovation gets classified as innovation either to the service
product or to the processes producing it (Junarsin, 2009). Based upon the extent of the
change involved, innovation is approached as either incremental/sustainable or discontinu-
ous (Christensen & Lrgreid, 2001; Tidd, Bessant, & Pavitt, 2005). However, these classi-
fications prove to be very closely associated with product-based classifications. Hence,
Hertog (2000) classifies service innovations into innovations in the service concept
(a new service for a specific market); innovations in the client interface (changes in the
way clients are involved in service design, production and consumption); innovations in
 The Service Industries Journal 673

service delivery systems (changes in the way employees perform their service provision
work) and innovation in technology (utilised to innovate service processes and provision).
When dealing specifically with the public sector, both the definitions and the classi-
fications of innovation may differ given the very specific characteristics attributable to
the public sector. The public sector differs from the private sector as regards the respect-
ive surrounding environment (less autonomy, less flexibility as well as the presence of
political influences) and its organisational structures (continuous interaction with citi-
zens with the latter group forced into a system of service reception that operates irrespec-
tive of their respective wishes and interests) (Lamb, 1987) and their respective
objectives (with multiple objectives, both non-financial and qualitative) (Lamb, 1987;
LSE Public Policy Group, 2008; Scott-Kemmis, 2009) in the evaluation of performance
(according to efficiency, effectiveness and equity) as well as regarding the different
client types (apathetic, disinterested and strongly oppositional markets) (Lamb, 1987).
Such factors come in addition to how an indirect pricing system prevails in the public
sector (Butler & Collins, 1995; Laing, 2003; Wensley, 1990) that constitutes an
exchange among, beyond the government itself, two different entities, the citizens
paying for services through their taxes and the clients in receipt of these services
(Alford, 2002).
Taking into consideration the aforementioned particularities, public-sector innovation
is correspondingly defined simply by Mulgan and Albury (2003) as the design and
implementation of new processes, products, services and methods of provision resulting
in significant improvements whether in terms of efficiency, effectiveness or quality.
According to Mulgan (2007) and Bason (2010), public-sector innovation integrates new
ideas and transforms them into social value. In accordance with these definitions,
Mulgan and Albury (2003) classified public-sector innovations as either incremental,
reflecting small alterations to already existing services and processes, or radical, when
involving new services or new ways of going about production-related processes or trans-
formative/systemic innovations, requiring entirely new human resource structures, new
types of organisations or new inter-relational structure types. Windrum (2008), very
similar to the approach taken by IDeA (2005), classifies public-sector service innovations
into service provision, administrative or organisational innovations, conceptual inno-
vations (new perspectives on problems), political innovations (changes in the way of con-
ceiving policies and behavioural intentions) and systemic innovations (new or improved
ways for the various structures making up the public sector to operate and interact with
stakeholders).
The empirical evidence describes how service companies tend to focus more on incre-
mental change than on radical innovation (Chan, Go, & Pine, 1998; Oke, 2007) and also
that current failure rates in service innovation are high (van Riel, Semeijn, Hammedi, &
Henseler, 2011). As regards the public sector specifically, however, such evidence
remains non-existent or highly scarce. Nevertheless, given the seriousness of the problems
that society faces, and ranging from the demographic changes very often boosting the cost
of service provision (e.g. healthcare costs) to climate change as well as environmental and
social problems, governments absolutely need to come up with innovative solutions
necessary to overcome the scale of such challenges (Bason, 2010; Commonwealth of Aus-
tralia, 2010; Cottam & Leadbeater, 2004). Thus, such innovation needs to be radical or
discontinuous in scope. Effective responses are needed both to encourage new forms of
social behaviours and to develop approaches incorporating service users into their
design and provision. This involves the interaction, participation and joint resolution of
problems by users, workers and managers (Caceres, Guzman, & Rekowski, 2011;
674 H. Alves

Chang, Hughes, & Hotho, 2011; Cottam & Leadbeater, 2004; Hotho & Champion, 2011;
Cegarra-Navarro, Sanchez-Vidal, & Cegarra-Leiva, 2011).
In this sense, it would appear that only within a logic of value co-creation does it prove
possible for organisations to innovate discontinuously or radically (Cottam & Leadbeater,
2004; Michel et al., 2008; Vargo, Maglio, & Akaka, 2008). According to these researchers,
discontinuous innovations always take place whenever there is change in the means of
creating value. These co-created services are new and not some mere combination of
those existing already (Cottam & Leadbeater, 2004).

The potential of co-creating value to public-sector innovation

The co-creation of value is a new approach to value, meaning the joint creation of value
by the company and the customer (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004a, p. 8), and differs
from traditional conceptions perceiving the construction of value by companies, within
their corporate structure and for the consumer (Vargo & Lusch, 2004; Vargo &
Morgan, 2005). Instead, from this new perspective, both clients and suppliers create
value (co-create): suppliers apply their knowledge and skills in the production and brand-
ing of the product and the clients apply their knowledge and capacities in their daily util-
isation (Vargo et al., 2008). A product or service thereby incorporates value through its
actual usage (value-in-use) rather than through its sale price (value-in-exchange) (Vargo
& Lusch, 2006), and hence such value is determined only by the end-beneficiary
(Lindic & Marques da Silva, 2011; Siegel & Renko, 2012; Vargo & Lusch, 2008a).
Within this new logic, denominated by Vargo and Lusch (2004) as the Service-Domi-
nant (hereafter, S-D) logic, all entities exchange services for services, and to such organ-
isations, money, products and networks are mere intermediaries in these service processes
(Vargo & Lusch, 2006, 2008b). This greater involvement of clients in value creation pro-
cesses drives the integration of their capacities and knowledge to result in new and impor-
tant capacities (Battistella, Biotto, & De Toni, 2012; Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004b) and
competitive advantages (Chaston & Scott, 2012; Lee, Olson, & Trimi, 2012; Zhang &
Chen, 2008), contrary to what is proposed by Zortea-Johnston, Darroch, and Matear
(2012). Thus, we may conclude that this perspective focuses primarily on the operant
resources (those that act upon other resources) rather than on the operand resources
(those upon which acts or operations are performed) (Vargo & Lusch, 2004), in keeping
with their fundamental role to generating competitive advantage (Prahalad & Ramas-
wamy, 2004a; Vargo & Lusch, 2008a). From the perspective of Vargo et al. (2008) and
Eggers, Hansen, and Davis (2012), the very process of co-creating value is responsible
for innovation and marketplace developments.
Michel et al. (2008) propose that the co-creation of value enables discontinuous or
radical innovations to be generated as such processes inherently involve changes to the
prevailing resource integrators. As stated by the aforementioned authors, Because the cus-
tomer is always a co-producer . . . customer value co-creation activities integrate operant
resources and operand resources (Michel et al., 2008, p. 62). This new approach perceives
the creation of value not as units of organisational output (value-in-exchange), but rather
as value-in-use (Vargo et al., 2008) or value-in-context, given that all economic actors may
serve as resource integrators (Vargo & Lusch, 2008a).
The application of the S-D logic and the co-creation of value may present the public
sector with a diverse range of innovation-related opportunities. Citizens may prove to be
excellent sources of innovation, inspiring ideas in their position as the actual users of ser-
vices (Bason, 2010; Bessant, 2005; Commonwealth of Australia, 2010). Co-creation not
 The Service Industries Journal 675

only ensures that the real challenges in the lives of public-service end-users are taken into
consideration but also actually ensures that they serve to guide and structure the involve-
ment of all the internal and external stakeholders critical to implementation and thereby
ensures behavioural change and real social impact (Bason, 2010).
According to Prahalad (2004), through involving clients, companies are able to co-
create value. To this end, the company may begin simply by persuading the client to
get involved with the company through its communication strategy (customer engage-
ment); in the second phase, the company might encourage the client to co-produce
based on the respective activity and thereby hands part of the task to the client (self-
service activities). In the third phase, the phase of experience creation, the company con-
structs the context of a determined experience and the client participates in it (customer
experience), while the fourth phase involves the company enabling the client to navigate
through the company system to try and resolve its problems (problem-solving), and the
final involvement phase is that where the client is already designing and co-producing
the service or product and where the client actually takes on part of the work, service
and risk (co-design).
We now move on to look at just how the co-creation of value logic enables some of the
restrictions on public-sector innovation to be overcome, especially limitations on the
resources available for innovation and the difficulties in both gaining the consent of citi-
zens and dealing with multiple clients. This theoretical deduction is supported by content
analysis of the United Nations Public Service Awards1 for the 2003 2011 period given
that they acknowledge and reward best practices and innovation in public sectors
worldwide.

Resource limitations
One of the trends verified across public sectors is the sharp decrease in budgetary allo-
cations (Scott-Kemmis, 2009), which has, in turn, produced major pressure to reduce
costs and maximise efficiency (Bason, 2010; IDeA, 2005; Mulgan & Albury, 2003;
Pinto, 1998; Scott-Kemmis, 2009). The co-creation of value logic may enable public-
sector entities to boost their own resources through integrating the operant resources
held by clients, given that all social and economic actors act as integrators of resources
(Vargo & Lusch, 2008a). Through their daily experiences, capacities and knowledge,
public-sector clients may co-create value with public organisations to enable the latter
to overcome budgetary restrictions and to achieve a shared goal. Vargo et al. (2008)
propose exchanging the operant resources in one system with those in other systems as
one means of acquiring the resources necessary. Through the ongoing relationships exist-
ing among the diverse systems, it becomes possible to establish the win win resource
combinations able to bring about improvements across the different systems. Furthermore,
whether at the individual, group, organisation, company or government level, there are
service systems susceptible for leveraging mutually beneficial resource interchanges
(Vargo et al., 2008). The potential of integrating client-held resources is still further
boosted by how the latter operates within a social system (Edvardsson, Tronvoll, &
Gruber, 2011) that may still further leverage such resources through an operant resource
network (Michel et al., 2008). Service systems involve exchanges with other service
systems designed to bring about improvements to levels of adaptability and survivability,
thus co-creating value for oneself and for others (Huarng & Yu, 2011; Vargo et al., 2008).
According to Bason (2010), co-creation necessarily plays a role in the public-sector
innovation ecosystem. This perspective also broadens the scope of innovation beyond
676 H. Alves

that bound up with laboratory-based research and development activities and may foster
discontinuous innovation (Michel et al., 2008). Organisations mobilising the intelligence,
investment and imagination of their users will reap great gains in costs, productivity, flexi-
bility and innovation (Cottam & Leadbeater, 2004). Gebauer, Johnson, and Enquist (2010)
effectively demonstrate how co-creation activities improve the performance of public
organisations. Hence, the role of a service provider is to understand how the process of
value creation is perceived by clients, fostering the value creation opportunities and mana-
ging the ways and means favourable to the co-creation of value (Payne, Storbacka, &
Frow, 2008; Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004a).
A good example of citizen utilisation of resources as a means of offsetting govern-
ment limitations is observed in the project entitled Programme of communitisation of
public institutions and services implemented by the government of India, in Nagaland,
in 2008, and winner of the third category of the United Nations Public Service Awards.
Prior to implementing this public utility and social service programme, resources for
healthcare, education and electricity were scarce and badly managed. Following pro-
gramme implementation, the government introduced a new service concept within
which citizens themselves became responsible for public-service provision and directly
involved in the collection of taxes and payments necessary to operationally running
these services. Under the auspices of this programme, citizens began cooking in
shifts for the communitys poor, growing vegetables for them and giving classes to
deprived children, among other activities. Through this initiative, the government
increased and enhanced the social capital of communities and boosted not only the
quality of service provision but also its efficiency in terms of reducing the costs
involved.
This example demonstrates how the co-creation of value effectively leverages the
resources of public organisations through integrating the operant resources of citizens
and expanding this input through social networks, as proposed by Vargo and Lusch
(2008a) and Edvardsson et al. (2011). This example displays how engagement with citi-
zens through customer experience and problem-solving activities, and correspondingly
facilitating the activities of the respective public-sector institutions, serves to boost their
capacities to deliver services of value to the community.

Citizen consent
Another particularity of the public sector relates to the fact that many of the services sup-
plied encounter public resistance to a greater or lesser extent (e.g. payment of taxation).
According to Lamb (1987), citizens cannot refuse to finance government activities irre-
spective of whether or not they consume the services. However, markets are frequently
highly apathetic and disinterested (e.g. citizenship behaviours and participation in resol-
ving environmental and social problems) and hence the public-sector image needs
enhancement and improvement (Butler & Collins, 1995). According to Bason (2010),
changes in the tasks and the orchestration of co-creation processes in favour of new sol-
utions, with the people and not for the people, may lead to a higher level of citizen con-
sensus vis-a-vis public-sector activities. Only through the co-creation of value is it possible
to align and extract value from public-sector innovations, which are very often driven only
by legal imposition or political changes and end up dissipated through churn (LSE Public
Policy Group, 2008).
The 879 programme of the Government of Poland won the 2011 first prize in the
Improving the Delivery of Public Service category and shows how citizen involvement
 The Service Industries Journal 677

really can boost the consent of citizens to government activities. This programme strove to
combat tax evasion and help citizens gain a better understanding of taxation and tax col-
lection processes. To this end, the government developed a programme based on
cooperation and openness reaching out to different groups of taxpayers for ideas on
how to optimise the collection of taxes. The government thus not only boosted consent
levels around the payment of taxes but also boosted its image among citizens.
The co-creation of value observed here extends from simple citizen participation
through to the co-design of solutions. Both such forms of involvement were identified
by Prahalad (2004) as activities susceptible to leveraging the co-creation of value and,
in this specific case, enabling the public sector to strengthen and deepen its service pro-
vision capacities.

Clients and multiple objectives

Dealing with multiple clients is another challenge posed to the public sector but suscep-
tible to reconciliation through the co-creation of value. According to the LSE Public
Policy Group (2008), the maximisation of public value may result in the absence of a
clear and defined common denominator able to guide public-sector innovations. Contrary
to the private sector where client value is private value, the public sector has to deal with
two types of values: the individual and the social (Laing, 2003). Governments have two
beneficiary types, citizens and clients. The former receive the public value and determine
what should be done through the electoral process, while the latter gain private value and
whether paying clients or simply as beneficiaries or endowed recipients (Alford, 2002).
This division of actors leads to an indirect pricing system within the framework of
which the service payer does not always correspond to the service recipient (Butler &
Collins, 1995; Laing, 2003; Wensley, 1990).
From this perspective, citizens would favour value-in-exchange as they pay for ser-
vices through their taxation, while clients opt for value-in-use, as they draw on the
utility gained through service usage as identified by Vargo and Lusch (2004) and Vargo
and Morgan (2005). Co-creating value clearly enables the reconciliation of these
diverse actors and their respective perceptions of value attributed to value-in-exchange
as they are intrinsic to the creation of value-in-use (Vargo et al., 2008). In supplying
value to the client beneficiary, government organisations are providing public value to
the citizen (Alford, 2002). Thus, while, on the one hand, value is only determinable by
the user (Vargo & Lusch, 2008a) and who should be involved in the value creation
process, on the other hand, the citizen also needs to be involved in the creation process
as only thus can the right to participate in the design and provision of community services
be gained given this pays for the public services rendered. In this way, the co-creation of
value process is motivated by value-in-use but mediated and monitored by value-in-
exchange (Vargo et al., 2008).
The Arts and Craft School Project of Sanatana do Parnaba project, which won the
first prize in the 2008 United Nations awards category 1, exemplifies how these two
types of values are reconcilable. This project sought to bring about the restoration and revi-
talisation of both the historical centre of Santana de Parnaba and its suburbs. Therefore,
young persons were trained in restoration. The involvement of these persons, in turn, gen-
erated employment and better labour qualifications (individual value) while simul-
taneously changing the behaviour of the young persons who henceforth stopped
vandalising the historical centre and thereby produced social value (value-in-exchange)
for the entire community.
678 H. Alves

Once again, it proves possible to grasp how the involvement of citizens may enable
public organisations to overcome some of the obstacles to innovation while simul-
taneously ensuring that they are far better positioned to respond to problems than they
otherwise would be.

Discussion and implications

The literature discussion and the examples presented together show how the co-creation of
value may effectively foster and enhance public-sector innovation and drive discontinuous
or radical innovation. Effectively, through integrating citizen capacities and knowledge,
governments can restructure and relaunch public services, designing and implementing
new processes, products and methods of service provision that result in gains in efficiency,
effectiveness and quality. The co-creation of value may therefore result in new ways of
perceiving and resolving problems, in conjunction with new forms of interacting with
the diverse stakeholders present (Mainardes et al., 2011) and correspondingly considered
forms of innovation (IDeA, 2005). Through the co-creation of value, public organisations
may thus respond to the serious problems that societies face, ranging from the environment
and crime through to public health issues, as this approach enables the generation of truly
innovative solutions able to respond and to deal with such social issues (Bason, 2010;
Cottam & Leadbeater, 2004).
The examples demonstrate, as advocated by Vargo and Lusch (2008a) and Edvardsson
et al. (2011), how through this integration of citizen operant resources and multiplier
effects throughout the respective prevailing social context, public organisations may
counter the shortfall of resources increasingly experienced in recent times. Furthermore,
the difficulty in defining clear objectives for public-sector innovations, designed to gener-
ate individual value and social value, may also be offset through innovative ways of
public-service provision in conjunction with new approaches to problems within the fra-
mework of which citizens, individually and collectively, are called upon to contribute and
engage. With the co-creation of value, many of the problems faced by government organ-
isations (social and environmental problems, for example) transform into parts of the sol-
ution to the problem. Similarly, raising citizen consent levels and improving the image of
the state sector may be attained through the involvement of citizens in resolving problems
and developing innovations. When involved, citizens feel that the innovations are created
with them and not for them, and when there is a lack of acceptance among citizens for such
services, it becomes easier to ensure that they gain broad consensus, as advocated by
Bason (2010). The examples effectively demonstrate how customer engagement activities,
ranging from their simplest forms through to the most elaborate co-design activities, rep-
resent the co-creation of value activities (Prahalad, 2004) susceptible to fostering inno-
vation (Borins, 2001).
Despite Chan et al. (1998) and Oke (2007) maintaining that service-based innovations
are above all incremental in nature, we may infer that innovations resulting from the co-
creation of value in the public sector may be considered discontinuous innovations in
accordance with Michel et al. (2008), who found that innovations are always discontinu-
ous whenever triggering significant change in the way clients create value (value-in-use)
and whenever impacting on the way the company creates value (value-in-exchange).
To this end, we need to consider that value creation processes belong not only to the
organisation but also to the client (Payne et al., 2008). Public organisations need to build
on and improve their processes for fostering citizen value creation and endowing the citi-
zens with information, knowledge and the capacity to access and utilise such services.
 The Service Industries Journal 679

Furthermore, public organisations should establish opportunities for such co-creation

through, for example, deploying new technologies as well as planning an outside in per-
spective able to enhance these service value co-creation processes. Co-creation opportu-
nities should similarly be factored into the design of service provision processes.
Indeed, the key to sustained competitive advantage lies in this ability to design a complete
value creation system and render it functional (Normann & Ramirez, 1993).
To this end, organisations have to enter into dialogue with their clients, facilitating access to
information and resources while evaluating the risks posed by supplying truly clear and trans-
parent information (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004b; Reed, Storrud-Barnes, & Jessup, 2012).

Conclusions
The co-creation of value, within an S-D logic, is a recent perspective still requiring further
deepening and development. In the public sector, the study and discussion of this logic
remain at a fairly incipient stage and limited in scope. However, this would seem to be
an approach that does potentially enable public services to radically innovate and draw
on the skills and capacities of all participants in public-service provision processes. To
leverage the greatest synergies from this approach, the public sector clearly needs to
develop a better understanding of this logic as well as its role as a core actor in establishing
and nurturing the conditions necessary to the co-creation of value.
The discussion presented here in no way exhausts the scope and the potential of co-
creating value in the public sector as our discussion focused only on three limitations:
resources, objectives and citizen consent. Given that the discussion presented is entirely
theoretical in extent, a range of empirical studies would prove to be of benefit to
public-sector organisations.

Acknowledgement
This research was supported by NECE R&D Centre funded by the Multiannual Funding
Programme of R&D Centres of FCT (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technol-
ogy), Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education.

Note
1. http://www.unpan.org/unpsa

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