Summary

Organisations need to innovate their management to keep up with the competition; innovating products and technologies do not supply the advantages as they did a decade ago. The focus has mainly been on technological innovation, which shifted to different forms of innovation the last 25 years; like process innovation, service innovation and Strategic Innovation and eventually to Management Innovation in order to understand how organizations innovate to further their goals. Scholars have shown that management is very suitable for innovation, but Management Innovation is not very tangible and therefore more complicated to prove and to show its (future) benefits. Management Innovation typically emerges without a dedicated infrastructure, adding to the abstractness and intangibility, which makes them potentially complex and ambiguous. 

Scholars already stated that even though various bodies of literature are very useful for this topic of research, there is almost no knowledge available on the generative mechanisms of new management ideas, how these are put into practice or how Management Innovation comes about, nor do we understand the process of Management Innovation as these are based on a few well-known examples. Adding to the issue, it is also largely unknown what the role of change agents is in how this is put to practice. This research aims to contribute to the theory and managerial implications that can be put into practice regarding Management Innovation in the (semi-)public sector, with a focus on the external change agent. The questions that arise from the first conceptual paper, will be empirically researched in two case studies within the (semi-)public sector.