The Increasing Role of Digital Technologies in Co-production
Veiko Lember · RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · 2017
There is a new wave of digital processes, applications and “mashups” of services emerging, driven by a growing digitization of society, everincreasing computational power, social networking and related institutional innovations. Digital technology can empower individuals and substantially increase opportunities for collective co-production as well as enable more personalized and demand-driven public services. However, the conflicting interests and diverging values among stakeholders, the inability of algorithms to mirror the complexity of societies, unevenly spread technological capabilities and other factors make digital co-production a fundamentally ambiguous, open-ended and contested process. The chapter discusses how the major trends in digital technologies affect co-production and recent evidence on the topic, as well as the major risks and open issues associated with new technologies in co-production.