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AbstractThe author provides a brief history of the role that evaluation has played in Norwegian industrial development efforts and offers a critical commentary on the current state of the art.

A challenge for all formative evaluators is how to communicate advice and 'get through' to the evaluand in order to bring about improvements. This case study of an evaluation of a Norwegian business development program analyses three different attempts at intervention by evaluators. Based on this, the article identifies four critical challenges in formative evaluation. First, stakeholders must clearly express their expectations when hiring evaluators. Second, the evaluator and the evaluand must represent different perspectives, thus together creating diversity as a basis for innovation. Third, diversity provides a challenge in terms of communication, and creates a need for a good form of communication. Fourth, we found that the best form of communication was to construct the arguments for change in terms of the functionality (does it work?) of the program. We called this functional argumentation, as opposed to normative argumentation.

In 2007, the Norwegian Parliament decided to merge the two largest health regions in the country: the South and East Health Regions became the South-East Health Region (SEHR). In its resolution, the Parliament formulated strong expectations for the merger: these included more effective hospital services in the Oslo metropolitan area, freeing personnel to work in other parts of the country, and making treatment of patients more coherent. The Parliamentary resolution provided no specific instructions regarding how this should be achieved. In order to fulfil these expectations, the new health region decided to develop a strategy as its tool for change; a change "agent". SINTEF was engaged to evaluate the process and its results. We studied the strategy design, the tools that emerged from the process, and which changes were induced by the strategy. The evaluation adopted a multimethod approach that combined interviews, document analysis and (re)analysis of existing data. The latter included economic data, performance data, and work environment data collected by the South-East Health Region itself. SINTEF found almost no effects, whether positive or negative. This article describes how the strategy was developed and discusses why it failed to meet the expectations formulated in the Parliamentary resolution. ; publishedVersion

AbstractThis article contributes to public administration research on collaborative governance in partnerships by exploring local efforts to metagovern a multi‐layered interorganizational collaboration between a city and a university. Hence, to further explore the prospect for developing city–university partnerships (CUP) into local platforms for the co‐creation of innovative public value outcomes, we ask: How can metagovernance contribute to aligning different actors and levels in a CUP aiming to enhance public value production? This question is answered based on a mixed‐method case study of cutting‐edge experiences from the City of Trondheim, Norway, where a transformative partnership was formed in 2017. The main finding is that the efforts to metagovern the CUP are deficient as they fail to prevent it from being stuck in the middle with a tactical level that is disconnected to strategic leadership and has limited operational impact. Some remedial strategies are offered, and the future of CUPs is discussed.

While there is an abundance of studies examining the collaboration between government agencies and private business, only scant attention has been directed to "town and gown" cooperation. This is a pity, since the involvement of knowledge institutions in public governance, service production, and the construction of co-creation platforms may help to ensure that new governance solutions are based on new and updated scientific knowledge and that public research is informed by societal needs and public concerns. Drawing on document studies, qualitative interviews, and participant observation, this paper aims to shed light on the drivers of as well as the barriers to the formation and operation of joint co-creation platforms, such as TRD3.0. It explores the background and key features of the new platform, the motivations of the institutional actors behind the initiative, the drivers of interorganizational integration, and the barriers to the development and consolidation of the joint platform for the co-creation of innovative solutions. It also considers the strategic, tactical, and operational depth of the joint effort of the municipality and university to integrate and collaborate. Finally, it reflects on the appropriate governance and leadership responses to emerging problems and challenges in order to identify a pathway to successful implementation.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is gradually becoming an integral part of the digital strategy of organizations. Yet, the use of AI in public organizations in still lagging significantly compared to private organizations. Prior literature looking into aspects that facilitate adoption and use of AI has concentrated on challenges concerning technical aspects of AI technologies, providing little insight regarding the organizational deployment of AI, particularly in public organizations. Building on this gap, this study seeks to examine what aspects enable public organizations to develop AI capabilities. To answer this question, we built an integrated and extended model from the Technology-Organization-Environment framework (TOE) and asked high-level technology managers from municipalities in Europe about factors that influence their development of AI capabilities. We collected data from 91 municipalities from three European countries (i.e., Germany, Norway, and Finland) and analyzed responses by means of structural equation modeling. Our findings indicate that five factors – i.e. perceived financial costs, organizational innovativeness, perceived governmental pressure, government incentives, regulatory support – have an impact on the development of AI capabilities. We also find that perceived citizen pressure and perceived value of AI solutions are not important determinants of AI capability formation. Our findings bear the potential to stimulate a more reflected adoption of AI supporting managers in public organizations to develop AI capabilities. ; publishedVersion ; Peer reviewed