Agile local governments: Experimentation before implementation

This paper discusses how local governments can team up for joint service provision, be more adaptive towards new technological and organisational changes and introduce novel services following main industry trends (e.g. predictive analytics, autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence). The conceptual approach is to use Public Value (PV) as the framework for the organisation and management of government performance, one of the most important successor ‘paradigmettes’ of the New Public Management (NPM). Based on the PV concept, the ‘adaptive model’ for local governments is introduced according to which each procured ICT solution is preceded by agile, open, bottom-up and experimental trial. This model is corroborated via recent empirical evidence from the case of Helsinki and Tallinn which was obtained by observing how city governments collaborate on joint innovation-lab-type structures and conduct agile trials in the field of smart mobility before traditional procurement.