The Collaborative State Collection
This collection will outline the lessons to be learned from inter-organisational collaboration in practice, through case studies looking at successful collaboration in action, and conceptual and systems analysis.
The tools of communication created by digital technologies mean that new, more ambitious and complex patterns of collaboration and coordination between many different points of contact have a growing role in shaping our organisations and the demands placed on them.
For the state, this is important for two main reasons:
First, meeting people’s needs is a more demanding task, requiring more sophisticated patterns of collaboration, because people’s needs can be more highly differentiated, and because more people expect a higher level of interaction and authenticity from their dealings with public services and institutions.
Second, the role of the state, local and national, continues to move towards influencing sets of organisations, and the interactions between them, rather than seeking directly to control whole sections of the economy through vertical control and management.
One widespread response to these pressures is to seek personalisation of public services; greater differentiation in the experiences, support and resources made available to each person, service standards and infrastructures that provide more rapid and responsive service, supported by ICTs, and greater involvement of the user in shaping, or even ‘co-creating’ the outcome, such as a job successfully sought, a qualification achieved, a medical condition successfully managed, and so on.
Around the world, policy makers and managers are therefore seeking successful collaborative models, trying to understand how collaboration is involved in the shared production of different goods, and developing the tools and skills needed to sustain collaboration successfully in different settings.
This project seeks to deepen that understanding, by learning lessons from inter-organisational collaboration in practice, and by surrounding those stories and lessons with insights drawn from research and theory about how collaboration can best work in different circumstances.
The project will gather knowledge and make it available in a way that will encourage sharing and further collaboration, by combining the design and execution of the project with the development of a user group that can access and influence the material online, using tools housed by the Demos website.