Trajectories of how collaborative innovation processes generate public value: insights from an open digital living lab

This article advances understanding of how collaborative innovation processes generate public value in contexts marked by uncertainty, open-endedness, and ambiguity. Drawing on a comparative qualitative study of nine initiatives in an open digital living lab, we adopt a dynamic perspective to trace how shared contextual pressures, institutional backgrounds, and actors’ capacities interact in generating public value over time. We process-theorize and visualize three trajectories that reveal how public sector managers build, or fail to build, navigational capacity to turn shared contextual pressures into opportunities for different forms of public value creation.