User Innovation Inside Government: Towards a Critically Performative Foundation for Inquiry

The thesis sets out to study regulatory innovation inside government from the perspective of user innovation and to do so in a way that is critically performative. The empirical subject matter is ‘laboratories’ (Da. Styringslaboratorier): a form of innovation process focused on developing ‘regulatory innovations’ (i.e. administrative innovations used for purposes of regulating public sector organizations) in collaboration between regulators and users. This particular form of innovation process has been the subject of considerable debate in Denmark and been suggested as a way forward in public sector modernization after New Public Management. It is, however, also an underspecified phenomenon: while it is attributed some potential, it is unclear what this potential is and what it is about laboratories that make this potential plausible. We have only vague ideas about what gets done when people do laboratories.