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Author: Eleonora Merlicco

The Italian Public Administration: Ideas for Innovation

2008

The ongoing rapid process of modernization makes people largely more aware of the social and civic dynamics in which they are involved so that they demand increasing satisfaction of their higher expectations. But, Public Administrations of many countries in the world currently suffer from dysfunctions and inefficiencies, due to their inner bureaucratic inertia, which in turn causes distrust among citizens and slowdown in social and economic development.
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We are persuaded that any Public Administration should become the leading force of its own country, generating concrete public value from which people and enterprises may benefit. In order to that, the public sector is called to big changes and structural re-conceptualization which it may pursue with the help of a number of performance and change management practices, already effectively experienced by the private sector. This thesis takes into consideration a selected group of methodologies (the Six Sigma Initiative, the Toyota Production System, the Balanced Scorecard and the European Awareness Scenario Workshop), examines information and communication technologies until and beyond the frontiers of their actual application in the public sector and studies the new open innovation paradigm based on social networking. We provide hypotheses of their implementation about the Italian Public Administration and endorse argumentations in favour of their effectiveness in the public sector by the presentation of how other European and non-European Public Administrations have been innovating their structures and functions by the help of these same methodologies,
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