Anonymous – An internal innovation and quality unit in a middle-sized municipality

The unit has two main focal areas; quality assurance and innovation; the former is seen as ensuring order and securing the quality of service offerings, whereas the latter is understood as experimental and risk-driven. The case study has taken to innovation unit as point of departure: The main activities of the innovation unit are; to mature the whole organisation in regards to an innovative mindset, to disseminate and share knowledge externally, to monitor projects as either project initiator, project lead or as sparring partners and to manage a yearly innovation fund. Both public (that is, from within the municipality itself), private and civil actors can apply for project money via the fund as long as the projects are finalised within a year.

Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

Key stakeholders are the internal functions in the municipality, private sector organisations and, despite to a lesser extent, academia. Beneficiaries are both elderly citizens and care takers.

Co-creation process

The unit is based on the logic of living labs – understood as a certain innovation methodology. From the perspective of the municipality, this living lab approach is seen as a platform where especially external actors can get an entry to collaborate with the public sector and herein access target groups, such as elderly that they could not otherwise have approached. Hence, most innovation processes are inherently co-creational since citizens, users and employees across sectors are engaged. Mostly, and across types of projects, the unit is primary lead regarding the research design, which is based on traditional user studies e.g. citizens interviews in their private homes or at care centres and public servant interviews and feedback, whereas the experimental aspects of living labs are enacted as test set-ups in homes and care centres – which seems to be part of most projects. In the projects the initial phase is considered crucial, which is why the unit emphasises how idea generation and herein reality checking need to involve various actors. This way they want to ensure that perspectives and input from the ones who are going to enact the solutions, and hence make the solutions live in the organisation, have been part of the development processes. Thus, even though the projects are inclusive processes with different stakeholders collaborating during the projects, and not necessarily with a dominant partner, the municipality is the sole decision-maker regarding the outcome of the processes.

Digital Transformation Process

There has been an outspoken focus on welfare technology, as both a means to make the citizens more self-reliant and as a way to address that there might be fewer employees in the sector prospectively (the idea is to replace all the work routines that do not imply human interaction with technological solutions). But despite the unit’s focus on technological development, it is emphasised that technology is not solely a solution in itself, but that the organisational change that might follow, be that cultural and/or procedural, is key.

Results, Outcomes & Impacts

All projects should create value by addressing the following three bottom lines: increased quality for the citizens, better work environment to employees and value creation for the organisation – as either money or resource savings or increased efficiency or quality. These are the three main success criteria written into all projects, but they do not need to be fulfilled equally or have the same weighing in all projects. Besides the three bottom lines, it is emphasised that the activities of the innovation unit, and the municipality in general, hopefully support community building by creating new jobs and making it attractive to live in the region. Also, the overall societal challenge of more elderly and a reduced work force is understood as a concern and a responsibility that reaches beyond the single projects.

Challenges & Bottlenecks

Barriers to conducting co-creation processes for innovation are both internal and external. Internally, the on-going focus on resources makes it important to the unit to be able to argue for spending time and money on the specific projects carried out. Externally, the collaboration between a huge public sector organisation with 6000 employees based on political leadership and e.g. a small one to two persons company is sometimes challenging – basically due to profoundly different work processes.

Transferability & Replicability

An important dimension regarding the value of a project is the ability to spread and disseminate the outcome, be that technology implementation or work processes. On the one hand, the innovation unit has been able to create a demand within the organisation and in the entire administration, which was not there from the beginning. But on the other hand, it is also recognised that change does not happen by itself and that both knowledge sharing and implementation can be a huge challenge, even though it is within the same organisation. Moreover, there is a focus on spreading in a wider sense not bound to the local context of the municipality; to other municipalities in Denmark and internationally. The reasoning behind is that if the unit is able to share best practices, hopefully they will also receive ideas and inspiration from the outside – and as such upscale both the solutions and the approach to innovation.

Success Factors

Increased quality of life for elderly citizen.

Lessons learned

To the innovation unit, the term and the initiatives that living labs comprise legitimise the municipality as a matchmaker between and translator of public and private sector logics. Moreover, it is revealed that living lab both refers to and enables a certain discourse and a sort of organising – making the perceived strength of the living lab concept – that it is a signifier – open towards a variety of interpretations without influencing the shared experience among the actors involved; that the collaboration is highly meaningful.

Bybi – Citybee

Bybi is a social enterprise and association that enables co-production of honey by renting beehives to public, private, and social organisations in the city of Copenhagen. Bybi is in charge of processing and selling the honey produced by these rented beehives, and moreover Bybi conducts beekeeping and honey production courses in both the collaborating and other organisations, such as schools and non-profit housing organisations. The association is founded on an urge to find a model of production that contributes to a richer environment and inclusive communities.

Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

Key stakeholders are the companies and organisations that rent beehives and the municipality of Copenhagen. Beneficiaries can be understood as both the employees of Bybi, but also the customers of the honey products.

Co-creation process

The production of honey is inherently based on a co-creation process; Bybi-employees work closely together with the employees from the different organisations, and when customers buy Bybi products they also receive seeds to plant – to ensure biodiversity for bees.

Digital Transformation Process

No digital transformation process is going on.

Results, Outcomes & Impacts

Some of the people who work at Bybi are at the edge of the labour market. However, they are not treated as people that need to be re-integrated into the labour market, since the outset is that all people contribute to society. Hence Bybi aims to build an inclusive community of people with a shared vision of bees and honey production.

Challenges & Bottlenecks

There are some challenges related to communication, that is, to communicate what the company is all about and that it takes time to communicate identity. Another type of challenge is related to the ambitions of turning a factory on its head making space for consumers to act as co-producers – but it can also be understood as a driver, since it triggers an urge to find new ways and solutions.

Transferability & Replicability

Still, Bybi only exists in Copenhagen, but the idea and form of organisation are not limited to this context.

Success Factors

The objective of Bybi is to change humans from passive consumers into active co-producers of a richer natural environment and a more inclusive society. More concretely, Bybi’s influence can be described with regard to areas where Bybi has potential contributions: Creating opportunities for people to contribute to society, improving the experience of the environment, helping organisations to carry out CSR strategies and turning the factory on its head.

Lessons learned

Bybi grows out of social economy, but is confronting a wider societal and public problem of transforming the labour market and enriching the environment. It argues that this goes far beyond the Danish system of social enterprises. Hence Bybi is more an institutional entrepreneur than a social entrepreneur aiming to reconfigure relationships between labour and pleasure, production and co-production, humans and non-humans and consumption and production.

Mind Your Own Business (MYOB)

The organisation Mind Your Own Business (MYOB) is organising and facilitating development projects for young boys, between the age of 13 and 19, from marginalised housing areas. The program is centred around entrepreneurship and, in cooperation with voluntary venture pilots from civil society and business partners, the young boys are given the opportunity to start their own micro-enterprise. The philosophy behind MYOB is that the program further develops the professional and social competencies of the young boys and thereby enables a stronger association to the educational system and the job market.

Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

To be able to operate, Mind Your Own Business relies on a well-developed network of volunteers, mentor companies, non-profit housing associations, and public sector collaborators. The program is based on external funding. The main beneficiaries are the youngsters who participate in the program.

Co-creation process

Internally the program relies on a form of organising where there is no specific owner of the process and hence decision-making is made jointly among the actors involved – MYOB employees are solely acting as facilitators. A such, the program is itself based on a logic of co-creation.

Digital Transformation Process

No digital transformation process is going on.

Results, Outcomes & Impacts

To MYOB, the overall aim of the program is personal development of the boys, based on the understanding that the competences they gain from participating can be transferred to other contexts and hence increase their social and professional abilities, also prospectively.

Challenges & Bottlenecks

Historically, the main barriers are related both to the internal and the external environment of the program. Internally the boys are struggling with both low support and understanding from their families and with the acceptability from the other boys in their neighbourhood. Externally the adult lack of confidence in the competences and abilities of the boys is leading to mistrust. Hence, a barrier is to change the ‘outside’ story of the boys. Nevertheless, these barriers seem to decrease both during the course of a program and since the success stories of the program are now spreading.

Transferability & Replicability

At the moment the program is starting out in Greenland, and despite the need to develop and tailor the process to a new context the main idea does not seem difficult to transfer.

Success Factors

The process and the learning of the boys in the program are the main success criteria, but also there is an awareness that, from the perspective of the boys, an important success criterion is related to the micro-enterprises – the aspect of entrepreneurship is crucial for the boys to become engaged.

Lessons learned

MYOB is based on a planned network to function. As such the relationship building, and hence trust among actors, has been key in developing a functional network that over time can be seen as innovative cross-sectorial collaboration. The innovation network is bottom-up, since it is founded on an entrepreneurial initiative and still relies heavily on releasing local resources. Nevertheless, the network was from the outset conditioned by having an existing and recognised platform to develop from and still it is dependent on MYOB as ‘system integrator’ in realisation of the MYOB programme.

Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

The foundation mainly relies on income as a subcontractor to the public sector, offering education within the ‘special planned youth education programme’, thus a key stakeholder is the municipalities using the program. Other stakeholders are the customers of the social enterprises and other organisations that are part of Grennesminde’s network. The key beneficiaries are the young people, but to some extent also the municipality, since Grennesminde as subcontractor offers a public service.

Co-creation process

The way Grennesminde functions today is based on a development process initiated by a change in legislation that the organization needed to respond to. Hence co-creation of the public service has developed over time, both due to systemic changes and due to a hiring process focusing on recruiting candidates with a business mindset.

Digital Transformation Process

No digital transformation process is going on.

Results, Outcomes & Impacts

Despite being evaluated upon the measurement and quality criteria in the formalised inspections, the managers of Grennessminde furthermore distinguish between impact at a micro or macro level. At a micro level, the managers stress all the little success experiences during the everyday life at Grennessminde. At a macro level, the success is also understood as two-fold. On the one hand it is to support or trigger a cultural change in the municipalities where the employees (as representatives of the system) meet the youngster with respect and in this manner open up the doors of the system. On the other hand, it is believed a success criterion to push and actively engage in the debate on social economy in Denmark.

Challenges & Bottlenecks

A main driver that eases collaboration is clear expectations from the municipalities, transparency in the referral and assessment process, and trust from stakeholders and partners. In opposition, a key challenge has to do with navigating in diverse realities with different quality parameters; the public sector and the third sector. Also, the aspect of clashing logics is also mirrored in structural settings, where it becomes hard to operate and change practices due to municipal silos and silo thinking. This can e.g. be between different administrative bodies or between different groups of professionals.

Transferability & Replicability

The case in itself is not easy transferable, but the idea of establishing work integrated social enterprises is not new, and as such the case can be an illustrative example.

Success Factors

The overall aim of Grennessminde is to create a meaningful life for young people with special needs. To be part of the job market is perceived key in this regard, which is why Grennessminde supports the development of their social and collegial skills. Hence the value lies in the experience of the youngsters as being important relative to colleagues and their job function. Thus, the success is not measured in people getting a job, but rather in empowering the young people.

Lessons learned

An overall challenge regarding the understanding of success criteria and measurements is that, in Grennessminde’s view, most municipalities focus on the degree of youngsters that have entered the job market – despite not being able to undertake ordinary jobs. A circumstance, which is especially in a long-term perspective hard to identify, since it is illegal to keep civil registration numbers and hence Grennessminde cannot know, or show, how the young people are doing after e.g. a two years period. Therefore, Grennessminde urges the municipalities to make as specific measurement parameters as possible, while the youngsters are at Grennessminde, e.g. to be able to do a bus ride alone and hence support that the youngsters become ready for the job market – whether as an employee at Grennessminde or at another work place.

“Cycling Without Age” (CWA)

Cycling Without Age is a foundation that was established in Denmark 2015, but is now represented in 47 countries.

The main idea is that elderly people living in care centres or elderly people offered home care are given the opportunity to get a bike ride in a trishaw. The trip involves what is referred to as the three P’s: pilots, passengers and personnel. The pilot (driver) is either a volunteer or an employee from the care centre or home care, the passenger is the elderly person and personnel refer to the employees and/or administration at the care centre/home care. The main objective of Cycling Without Age is presented as giving the elderly the right to wind in the hair by ensuring mobility and active partaking in society.

Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

A key stakeholder in a Danish context is the municipality, and more specifically the managers and employees at care centres and home care. The service of the bike ride cannot be outlived without these. Another key stakeholder is thus the politicians, who have been part of pushing the idea forward. Besides the public sector stakeholders, a key actor is the volunteers and the beneficiaries are the elderly.

Co-creation process

The idea and the service of getting a bike ride is not the outcome of co-creation, understood as deliberative innovation processes. Anyhow the idea has been developed and tailored to countries outside Denmark, where the public sector is not the main provider of elderly care.

Digital Transformation Process

CWA offers a digital booking platform, but the interviews revealed that for some care centres it was easier to use a manual calendar. And in the cases using the platform, it is not transforming practices and procedures.

Results, Outcomes & Impacts

It is difficult to highlight specific results and outcomes of the bike ride in itself (see success criteria), but the success of CWA as a foundation and the many countries that now also offer bike rides for elderly can be seen as evidence for impact regarding the service/idea.

Challenges & Bottlenecks

The public managers stress that fiery souls are key when it comes to implementing the initiative – either positioned in the administration or within elderly care, and these need managerial back-up. Another barrier relates to the operation of CWA. The public managers tell how they are left alone with the initiative after the implementation phase. This experience is both related to the awareness from the municipality and from the CWA secretariat. To exemplify, it is the responsibility of the care centre/home care to maintain the trishaws and they are not granted any funding for repairing or buying new bicycles if they are damaged.

Transferability & Replicability

The initiative has been easily transferred to municipalities in Denmark and to other settings internationally.

Success Factors

The impact of the initiative is not perceived by CWA and public managers in traditional quantitative metrics but rather in qualitative aspects, such as the general enhancement of the joy of life among the elderly. Another positive aspect of the visibility of the elderly in the local community is an increased awareness of elderly, dementia etc. among citizens in general. Still, CWA is working on more concrete evaluation criteria to professionalise and legitimise the bike ride as a method and an approach to increased life quality among the elderly.

Lessons learned

The case of CWA is interesting due to the high degree of positivity that surrounds the movement. The initiative and the foundation do not seem to meet a lot of resistance concerning the cause per se; to ensure that elderly stay mobile and part of society. Thus, it seems that if the cause is perceived highly legitimate the room for manoeuvre increases. Externally, since it becomes easier to engage in strategic collaborations and to recruit volunteers, and internally because the organization, based on trust in their own raison d’être and main objective, becomes flexible in regards to development and organizing, as long as the main objective stays the same. Another key aspect is how the innovation is positioned in the eco-system of public elderly care services. CWA is mainly an add-on to formal elderly care, since the foundation does not overtake tasks or roles of the public sector. In this manner they are not subject to competition regarding resources and legitimacy, making it less problematic for the municipalities to engage in collaboration.

E-BRO-Let’s Go to work

“E-BRO APS” is a small company that has developed “JobIntra”, an IT solution that has been first applied by Jobcenter Brøndby in Denmark in the context of the flexi-job scheme, which is an initiative within the Danish unemployment scheme. Flexi-jobs imply that a company employs a disabled citizen for 10-12 hours a week in a permanent form of employment. The company pays the salary for the 10-12 hours per week, while the state pays the rest. JobIntra’s aim is first to increase the number of available flexi- jobs and then to substantially reduce the time it takes to find a permanent flexi-job to potential candidates. The case represents a special form of social innovation, a “reverse” process of finding flexi-jobs to disabled citizens.

Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

The main stakeholders and beneficiaries are Brøndby Jobcenter, the disabled citizens, Brøndby Municipality, the recruitment companies as well as the society at large.

Co-creation process

The co-creation process can be divided into two phases. In the first phase, Jacob, an employee in charge of the flexi job scheme at Jobcenter Brøndby, and his manager recognize that the flexi-job process and network is operating in an inefficient way. As a result, it takes too long time to get a flexi- job candidate into work. For example, in the first 13 weeks after a citizen came to Jobcenter Brøndby, nothing happened and in some cases, nothing happened maybe for another 13 weeks. After the waiting period, a disabled citizen was allocated to a recruitment company at a time, so there was no competition between the different recruitment companies to get a citizen into work. Therefore, Jacob and his manager had made some strategic considerations about simultaneously allocating several recruitment agencies to find a flexi-job to a citizen. The process involved a lot of discussions, reflections and co-creation. The result of this process was that Jacob discussed this issue with one of his friends who is an IT expert and together they started conceptualizing and co-creating an IT solution that could solve this problem. This represents the second co-creation phase. The idea for establishing a company started therefore in 2012 and in 2013 the IT solution, “JobIntra”, was developed and E-BRO APS was founded with Jacob and his partner as co-founders.

Digital Transformation Process

JobIntra has induced a digital transformation of the process of finding a job to a flexi-job candidate. This digital process innovation can described as a “reverse process” of finding a job. In fact, prior to JobIntra the Jobcenter Brøndby allocated a candidate to one and only one recruitment company at a time, who then tried to find a job to the candidate. With JobIntra, Jobcenter Brøndby inputs a candidate information into the IT system. This information can be accessed by all recruitment companies that simultaneously try to find flexi-jobs to the candidate, thus competing on a candidate. Furthermore, the recruitment companies can directly get in contact with the citizens, if necessary, thus improving substantially the communication among the different actors involved in finding a job. This speeds up the process.

Results, Outcomes & Impacts

The adoption of JobIntra at Jobcenter Brøndby has generated several positive results. Firstly, JobIntra has contributed to decrease unemployment among the flexi-jobs in Brøndby Municipality, which as a result has been ranked as one of the Danish municipalities with lowest flexi-jobs unemployment rates. Second, due to its functionality, JobIntra has substantially reduced the amount of time that the Jobcenter Brøndby’s employees use on each specific flexi-job. This in turn has generated resources that can be used on the most complicated cases or on other types of activities within the job center. Thirdly, by reducing the amount of time it takes to place an unemployed disabled on the job market, it has increased the satisfaction of these citizens. In the long term, JobIntra may benefit Brøndby Municipality and the Danish society, because by speeding up the process of finding jobs and by decreasing the number of unemployed disabled citizens, JobIntra decreases the amount of public subsidy paid to the unemployed by saving public unemployment expenditures.

Challenges & Bottlenecks

The main challenge concerns JobIntra’s wider adoption and use in other Danish municipalities, thus restricting the potential benefits that it could bring to society. It takes a lot of effort for E-BRO APS to get through the public eco-system, mainly due to the distance between the operational level and the policy level.

Transferability & Replicability

The IT solution “JobIntra” can be used and adopted by other job centers within the Danish context. This is what E-BRO APS does now: tries to sell the application to other Danish municipalities. Whether JobIntra could be applied and used in other national contexts depends on the way unemployment agencies are organized in such contexts.

Success Factors

An important success factor is the use and adoption of JobIntra in other municipalities as this may contribute to decrease the number of unemployed flexi jobbers at national level with several societal benefits such as increased happiness and satisfaction of the unemployed disabled citizens and saving in public unemployment expenditures. This is also the very main challenge that E-BRO APS is facing on a day to day basis.

Lessons learned

JobIntra is an innovation that may bring strategic changes at job centers in Denmark within the flexi job scheme. However, as most innovations, it is difficult for E-BRO APS to have it adopted and used in other municipalities. The main reasons being the distance between the operational and policy level in Danish municipalities.

The Danish Business Authority (DBA)

The Danish Business Authority (DBA), a state administrative unit, is an authority under the Ministry of Business. Founded originally in 1964, the Danish Business Authority (DBA) in its present structure was founded on January 1, 2012 by a merger of the Danish Commerce and Companies Agency with parts of both the Danish Commerce and Construction Agency and IT and Telecom Agency. DBA is financed through the Finance Act. Currently it employs about 650 employees distributed in three different locations in Denmark. The Danish Business Authority’s overall vision is to provide “the best framework for businesses” with the clear mission of making “it simple and attractive to conduct business throughout Denmark” in partnership with others.

Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

The main stakeholders and beneficiaries include the ministries, the other circa 40 Danish Authorities including for example the tax and the working environment authorities, Danish and international businesses, the Confederation of Danish Industry.

Co-creation process

DBA has close cooperation with all its stakeholders including businesses and business organization. DBA has involved them, and still involves them directly or indirectly in all the phases of the digital transformation. Such co-creation activities take multiple forms including co-initiation, co-design, co-implementation, co-delivery, and co-assessment.

Digital Transformation Process

DBA’s digital transformation goes ten year back in time and started in 2009 due to old legacy IT systems that created several problems such as difficulties to implement IT changes to comply with the law changes, problems to meet customer demands concerning digitalisation and inefficient operations. The digital transformation has taken the starting point in both DBA’s customer needs and employees’ knowledge. In 5-6 years, DBA has transformed 14 different registration systems into one IT system. This has several advantages for DBA including digitalisation of data that can be used to improve service provision as well as a decreased amount of resources needed to perform the same tasks.

Results, Outcomes & Impacts

The results of DBA digital transformation is creation of public value in several forms: economic value, administrative value, democratic value, and citizen value. The democratic value include making life easier for businesses, making the customers happier, stronger companies’ control and potential increased societal wealth. The value for the business includes minimisation of the administrative burden, one stop shop, better services due to quality standards, personalised overview as well as transparency. The administrative value include business self-sufficiency and data sharing. The long-term impact of DBA’s digital transformation includes savings of citizen taxes on public administration tasks and decreased company fraud through increased control.

Challenges & Bottlenecks

In the implementation of the digital transformation, DBA has encountered a number of challenges including financial problems, organisational resistance, collaboration among different authorities, IT systems implementation priority, attitude change.

Transferability & Replicability

DBA’s digital transformation is a best practice example of efficient and effective digital transformation. For a period, DBA has organised in–house meetings during which people from all over Europe came to hear about their digitalisation journey. It is expected that such digital transformation could be replicated in other parts of the Danish public administration if the need and the will is there, since it is the same socio technical conditions that apply. Whether such digital transformation can be replicated in public organisations located in other national contexts depends on the way public administration is organised in such contexts as well as the level of digitalisation of both businesses and society.

Success Factors

An important success factor is that the digital transformation supports The Danish Business Authority to reach its goals “to create predictable and responsible business conditions, in order to make it as easy as possible to run a business in Denmark”.

Lessons learned

Embarking and implementing digital transformations is not an easy task that implies many challenges. It requires strong and committed leadership to make them successful.

Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

Municipality and hospital

Co-creation process

The idea is to develop and implement healthcare innovations through a living lab approach in which an external consultancy leads the co-creation process which is the living lab. The living lab is anchored in and owned by a stakeholder organization. The main stakeholders are asked to define a problem and develop hypothesis concerning the cause of the problem. They also generate ideas as to its solution. In one case, citizens from a municipality have involved in setting priorities for health care through a street lab approach. Though the living lab approach, ideas are generated and developed into innovations within problem-framework defined the main stakeholders. Trusted users test the ideas and ideas are experimentally implemented in a real-life context.

Digital Transformation Process

Innovations may involve digital technology such as mobile technology.

Results, Outcomes & Impacts

Results are specific innovations in health care. Further, the living lab approach is changing the mindset of the healthcare organisations towards thinking healthcare in a new way and becoming more outward oriented taking users situation more into consideration. The overall idea is, however, to create public value by changing the healthcare system towards a more patient-oriented approach.

Challenges & Bottlenecks

A main challenge is that it takes time and efforts to change healthcare. Some user-oriented innovations may be easy to implement; however, some can take several years because they involve scientific projects. Scientific evidence for the effectiveness of the proposed solutions must be provided.

Transferability & Replicability

An innovation method has been developed that draws on other methods and the scientific literature about innovation and change management, and for which there is some scientific evidence. This method may work in other contexts as well.

Success Factors

Providing new solutions in healthcare that change the healthcare system towards involving users more in taking care of own health. This must lead to fewer hospital admissions and higher perceived quality of healthcare.

Lessons learned

Living labs can be a method of collaborative innovation that involves strategic changes of the healthcare system towards a more outward oriented approach.

Bispebjerg-Nørrebro (BIN) Project

The research setting of the case study is the elderly care sector in the municipality of Copenhagen, Denmark. The municipality has been undergoing a paradigm shift towards an increased focus on what a good life contains to elderly citizens (Københavns Kommune 2015b). This is discursively constructed in the elderly care policy as a move from “passive to active” implying an increased focus on self-determination and participation of citizens (Københavns Kommune 2015a). An experiment with improving elderly care services were organized by the municipality over a three-year period in 2015-2017. The project was called “Quality of life for elderly people in non-profit housing areas” targeting loneliness amongst elderly people living in their own homes. The point of departure was three residential areas for elderly, but the focus in this case study is on one specific area, the sub-project Bispebjerg-Nørrebro (BIN). The project is an illustration of the interplay between “prolonged” activities (taken place in the residential area) and activities maintained by the same employees in the local Activity Centre (Activity Centre Bispebjerg). The main aim of the project is: to enhance life quality and lessen loneliness among residents by creation of residence-near activities, which promote the creation of network and friendships, that the residents themselves want to engage in and manage after project completion (Project description, 2015). The project activities ended in the beginning of 2018, but the findings of the project continues as spin offs at different levels in the municipality e.g. as a loneliness foundation and a new initiative at the Activity Centre focusing on how the elderly to a larger degree can use the city of Copenhagen.

Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

Policymakers define the strategy. Front-line employees implement the physical training and relationship building courses (in their own words, they “make an offer” to the benefiairies – the seniors) and senior participate in the activities. Sometimes, external actors are involved too, as with the Cycling Without Age, a voluntary programme initiated by one citizen (to take elderly citizens on bicycle trips in the city), where the municipality responded positively, by purchasing some bikes to scale up the initiative. Finally, private funds and private firms play a role in research projects in the municipality (via living labs activities), as well as in the development of welfare technology.

Co-creation process

Policymakers define the strategy for healthcare policy for the elderly. Based on this framework, the front-line employees of the Activity Centre design training sessions with the elderly who take part. After a long period of time, the elderly can take charge and interact with each other on their own.

Digital Transformation Process

The municipality further participates in several living lab activities, where welfare technology developed by private firms are tested by citizens.

Results, Outcomes & Impacts

The main success criteria of the project is that it is perceived as meaningful for the elderly and that the municipality ensures that the findings and the learning of the project are applied prospectively. The success of the Activity Centre is mainly measured by its occupancy rate and members receive a phone call on a yearly basis as part of a satisfaction survey. In both cases the Centre gets high scores, but there is a caveat: the evaluators do not visit the centre and don’t see how the activities and the daily life unfold. Also, the employees think there is a lack of focus on what they perceive to be main objective of their work; i.e. the measurement of parameters that can embrace relationship building, life quality, degree of loneliness, the excitement of the elderly in the daily activities, etc. They propose to measure the amount of readmissions among the elderly that use the centre, testing of functional ability and to use the start-up dialogue with the elderly and the subsequent evaluation dialogues (each year) to see if they have experienced a change in life perspective.

Challenges & Bottlenecks

1) There is a disconnect between the policymaking level and the operational level on value co-creation: when reacting to what the role of staff is in value creation, policymakers emphasize strongly both the need for political structures and for development work at the strategic level as a basis for public service staff in creating value, but, at the level of the projects, there is much more emphasis on the competencies, enthusiasm and the mood of the front-line staff in co-creating value in direct interaction with the elderly users. 2) Policymakers state that, at the strategic level, there is strong interest in user involvement. Yet the potential of user involvement is not realised in a systematic way in practice. There is a lot of rhetoric rather real user involvement. Whilst the municipality is making an effort to listen to the users, the impact of this approach is still weak. 3) Projects like this one are meant to become driven by the users/citizens over time. Citizens should create the value and take responsibility for it. But here, the elderly citizens do not see themselves as having a key role creating value for others. And it takes time for the front-line employees to build trust with the seniors (1.5 year, according to the log-books), so that, later on, they can slowly withdraw as main actors and let the elderly themselves be drivers – based on their new social relations.

Transferability & Replicability

The objective of the project is to foster the ability of the elderly to stay as long as possible in their own home and to be self-sufficient as long as possible thanks to a good mental and physical health – which are stimulated by physical training and relationship building. This very general objective is replicable in other municipalities.

Success Factors

1) To let the surrounding community (associations, evening schools) use the facilities of the Activity Centre, outside opening hours. 2) A condition for creating value to the elderly, is to work network-oriented in the municipality and to open up between the different institutions at an individual level. 3) Create platforms where it is possible as an individual to be something for the elderly – e.g. supported by digitalisation. 4) To counteract the practice of the public sector that classifies people and puts them into boxes (e.g. the box of an elderly that starts at 65+) more flexible housing areas for people across generations could be developed – also to support the changing family structures. 5) If there were resources to support the relationships outside of the Centre, improvements could be greater 6) Invite other Activity Centres and their events to our place or to do activities together with groups of elderly that have the same challenges/oppurtunities. 7) To increase the visibility of the Activity Centre – and to create opportunities for being or becoming e.g. a visitor. 8) To make sure the local environment is designed for the needs of the Centre’s participants (e.g. having a hairdresser, a grocery shop, a church, in the whereabouts).

Lessons learned

1) It seems as if the lingo of public services and value co-creation, as part of the policy terminology of the welfare state, is mainly mirrored at a tactical and strategic level, but less at the operational level. The danger is that policies might become detached from practice, which is why it seems pertinent to contextualize what is meant by value and to whom. Or to discuss whether the term value are analytically suitable if it becomes a straitjacket to understand the logic of public services from an employee perspective. 2) There is a change that has taken lace from a partial patronizing approach towards a more responsive approach to care. However, to provide care must still first of all correspond to professional standards, and then next be responsive to users’ expectations and experiences. It’s less advanced than in the MAIA approach, where the senior’s need are placed above the professional’s diagnostic. 3) There is a generational effect: the elderly of today come from a frugal generation. They do not expect the public sector to solve their problems and are therefore quite thankful for all initiatives they perceive to be beyond their rights as citizens e.g. medical care and hospitalisation. An offer such at the Activity Centre and being part of the BIN-project falls within these not-expected-categories.