Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing in the Public Sector in Portugal: The Participatory Budget

Introduction

Innovation is seen as the predisposition of individuals to experiment, be engaged in creative processes and explore new ideas (Moss et al., 2011). Overall, innovation can be seen a process that aims, both technological and tasks development improvement. These improvements can occur in all fields of organizations, such as products, processes, markets or structure (Pinheiro, 2009). In recent years, due to the strong changes experienced in the market, there have been significant changes in the importance attached to the field of innovation and, specifically, within the scope of the organizations management. In this context, new paradigms have emerged in the innovation field, being increasingly common the use of open innovation techniques (Chesbrough, 2003; Pinheiro, 2009).

Open innovation is understood as the use of networks of people with some kind of skills that are available to collaborate with various entities in order to obtain new ideas to innovate. Through open innovation, companies can have access to the know-how embedded in their network, which allows them to innovate and therefore differentiate themselves from other companies on the market. In addition, the interaction and collaboration with the other elements involved in the network allows the ideas to stand out in the markets (Pinheiro, 2009). The network may be composed of elements that are internal or external to the organisation.

Crowdsourcing is also a new concept, increasingly used by organisations, in which different stakeholders get involved in mobilising different types of resources, including informational ones and the generation of ideas for problem solving and strategy definition (Barbosa, 2015).

Participatory budgeting, in turn, is a concept embodied in a process in which the population has a voice in society and in the decisions that are taken with public resources in a given location. The participatory budget has been increasingly used by the public sector all over the world and also in Portugal, which is one of the most preeminent countries in the use of participatory budgets (Sampaio, 2016).

This chapter aims to study the extent to which Portuguese municipalities use participatory budget and, in those cases, how participatory budgeting processes are being implemented. The chapter also seeks to understand the main benefits and difficulties experienced by Portuguese municipalities in using participatory budgets.

The choice of this topic arose primarily due to its importance in the public sector. This is a sector that has several various problems to address and for which participatory budgeting, as an instrument for applying open innovation and crowdsourcing, can have a great impact.

To achieve the proposed research objectives, the chapter is structured in four sections. The first section of the chapter explores the literature review on open innovation, crowdsourcing and participatory budgeting. The second section is describes the methodology chosen for the research. Subsequently, section three presents the results obtained through the quantitative study carried out. Finally, the conclusions, contributions of the study and clues for future research are presented.