Enhancing Innovation Capacity in Local Governments: How can Innovation Labs Make a Contribution?

Abstract

Facing the increasing demand for innovation to solve public and social problems, many government organizations recently set up innovation labs to strengthen their capacity to introduce new and innovative solutions. Yet, our knowledge about the actual contribution of those innovation labs to increasing innovation capacity is still limited. To address this research gap, this paper proposes a comparative case study to further illustrate how those innovation labs make contributions to enhance innovation capacity in the local governments. An analytical framework of innovation capacity is proposed to guide the study and the next steps are outlined for empirical analysis.