Sustaining crisis-driven collaborative public sector innovations: the role of public value measurement

Despite a widespread belief that collaborative public sector innovations better address urgent wicked issues, managing multi-actor networks may lead to ‘interaction-specific’ challenges, undermining the innovation process. This study analyses the case of the Italian response to the Ukrainian refugee crisis (July 2022 – March 2023). By doing so, it highlights three enabling factors of public sector innovation maintenance over time and in a progressively more institutionalized context thanks to the use of public value measurement, namely: multi-dimensionality, consistency, and insulation. These findings shed light on the understudied interactions between crisis-driven collaborative public sector innovations, their governance and public value measurement.