What factors drive open innovation in China's public sector? A case study of official document exchange via microblogging (ODEM) in Haining

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Abstract

Government transparency and information disclosure have received increasing attention from both academics and practitioners with the development of information technologies (ITs) and the Internet. Moreover, the popularity of social media applications has provided governments, especially governments in China and other developing countries, with new opportunities and challenges associated with the administrative shift toward open innovation. The official document exchange via microblogging (ODEM) of the Haining Bureau of Justice is a practical case of government open innovation in the social media context. Based on the ODEM case, this study uses the technology-organization-environment (TOE) framework to explore the factors that drive open innovation in China. We find that the support of top managers, the access and competence of IT personnel, and the regional economic and social environments are key determinants of the emergence of open innovation in the public sector.

Introduction

The popularity of social media applications is changing people's lives by expanding the mobility and timeliness of communications within the digital domain. In the last five years, with the development of mobile communication technologies, microblogging services have become some of the most popular social media applications. For example, Twitter has gained 500 million registered users worldwide. Meanwhile, based on different language environments, many developing countries have created their own microblogging service websites. In China, Sina Weibo, a hybrid of Twitter and Facebook, acquired approximately 135 million registered users between March 2010 and March 2011, thus becoming the leading microblogging platform in China (Kenneth, 2011).

Although microblogging service websites were originally perceived as entertainment platforms, their influence with respect to promoting public participation cannot be ignored. Wattal, Schuff, Mandviwalla, and Williams (2010) contended that Web 2.0 technologies offer opportunities for active participation with and the integration of various forms of media. In his 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, Barack Obama reached out to millions of people via electronic means, such as blogs and video sharing, providing voters with both the ability to receive information and the opportunity to interact and become directly involved with the campaign and each other. Recent events in Egypt and other Arab countries have demonstrated that social media and public access to the Internet serve as platforms that support the creation of social coalitions and encourage civic engagement (Qureshi, 2013).

Although open innovation initiatives originated in the private sector, a growing number of public sector organizations are also undertaking open innovation projects. For example, the U.S. government has made important commitments to the Open Government Initiative, which enables the public to access government data and to contribute ideas and expertise related to government policymaking and service innovation. In China, government agencies and officials are increasingly establishing their own microblogs. According to the 2014 Report on Government Microblogs, which was edited by the People's Daily Public Opinion Monitoring Office (PDPOMO), there were 130,103 Chinese government microblogs on Sina Weibo in December 2014, of which 94,164 were government agency accounts and 35,939 were government official accounts (PDPOMO, 2015).

What factors drive open innovation initiatives in China's public sector? This study focuses on an open innovation project called official document exchange via microblogging (ODEM), which was implemented by the Bureau of Justice in Haining, a city in southeastern China. Under the ODEM system, all non-confidential official document exchanges are conducted on Sina Weibo. Both government employees and citizens can read official documents and post comments. On April 2, 2011, the Bureau released the first document on its official microblog and was thus among the first agencies in the nation to publish notices and regulations via a microblog (Fu, 2011). On the one hand, ODEM helps the public understand how the government functions and how policies are made. On the other hand, ODEM helps the government reengineer its internal processes and formulate better policies based on online public responses.

To promote this type of open innovation project, based on the case of the ODEM project, this study uses the technology-organization-environment (TOE) framework to explore the determinants that led to the adoption of this open innovation initiative in Haining. The results show that three key determinants—the support of top management, the access and competence of IT personnel, and the regional economic and social environments—play important roles in the emergence of ODEM and that they could have effects on similar open innovation practices in China's public sector.

Section snippets

Open government: from websites to social media

Open government information has always been an important issue. Considered a basic characteristic of good government by many nations (Hardy & Williams, 2011), transparency became an important issue during post-World War I negotiations (Bertot, Jaegar & Grimes, 2010). Government information disclosure aims to provide access to information to those who are relevant to or affected by specific government decisions (Kim, Halligan, Cho, Oh, & Eikenberry, 2005). Advancing the right to access

Case background

On April 2, 2011, the official website of the Haining government published a notice concerning the use of ODEM. The aim was to implement ODEM inside the city's judicial system. Immediately, the official microblog of the Haining Bureau of Justice released the first ODEM, which announced the duty schedule for the Tomb Sweeping Day. The ODEM concept was proposed by Zhongyi Jin, the director of the Haining Bureau of Justice in Zhejiang province. ODEM publishes government documents in the form of

Methodology

This case study aims to collect real data and to theoretically explore the determinants of the ODEM. As this study is regarded as a positive explanatory case study, we followed the steps outlined in a widely accepted set of guidelines (Yin, 2003) to ensure the rigor of our research. To fully understand the factors that influence the adoption of ODEM in the Haining Bureau of Justice, we collected data from two sources: documents and interviews. The documents include policies and important

Case description

Before discussing the determinants from technological, organizational, and environmental perspectives, we first present the case process (see Table 2). We summarized the information that is not directly related to the TOE framework in the interview records, which we have presented in Table 2 to facilitate an understanding of the background and the overall case process.

In the first step of the release process, two core criteria are used to select potential ODEM. The first criterion stipulates

Concluding remarks

The findings in this study lead to the following conclusions. First, from a technological perspective, the competence of IT personnel, particularly their familiarity with social media applications such as microblogs, is one of the most important factors. To some extent, Director Jin's personal IT competence and enthusiasm are unique to this case. Although the average age of government officials in China is gradually decreasing, many government officials have a limited understanding of the

Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71473143, 91646103), the National Social Science Foundation of China (15ZDA039, 16BGL155), the Beijing Social Science Foundation (15JGA008), and the Tsinghua University Initiative Scientific Research Program (20131089260).

Nan Zhang is an associate professor at the School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University, China, and currently a visiting scholar at Evans School of Public Policy and Governance, University of Washington, U.S. His research interests focus on Electronic Government & Online Governance, Public Big Data & Policy Informatics, Innovation 2.0 & Smarter City Development, etc. Dr. Zhang's articles have appeared in several important international journals, including Computer in Human

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    Nan Zhang is an associate professor at the School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University, China, and currently a visiting scholar at Evans School of Public Policy and Governance, University of Washington, U.S. His research interests focus on Electronic Government & Online Governance, Public Big Data & Policy Informatics, Innovation 2.0 & Smarter City Development, etc. Dr. Zhang's articles have appeared in several important international journals, including Computer in Human Behavior, Electronic Commerce Research, Electronic Markets, Information & Management, Information Processing & Management, Information Systems Frontiers, International Journal of Mobile Communications, Journal of Global Information Management, Online Information Review, etc., and several important conferences like HICSS (E-Government Track), ASPA, ICIS and PACIS. Corresponding Author, [email protected]

    Xuejiao Zhao is a post-doctor research fellow at the School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University, China. She earned her Ph.D. degree on Public Administration at Auburn University, U.S.

    Zhongwen Zhang is a Ph.D candidate at the School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University, China.

    Qingguo Meng is a full professor at the School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University, China.

    Haibo Tan is a post-doctor research fellow at the School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University, China. He earned her Ph.D. degree on Public Administration at Sun Yat-sen University, China.

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