Digital-Enabled Public Service Innovation in China's eHealth Sector: An Institutional Logics Perspective

Public service innovation is relatively poorly understood, in which innovators need to navigate between the changes of technologies and organizations. By drawing on the perspective of institutional logics as a potential approach to explain the changes of the institutions, in this article we contribute to the understanding of how innovation may emerge among different norms and practices in the public service field. Case study evidence from a longitudinal analysis of China 's electronic healthcare evolution is applied to examine the interaction of institutional, technological, and partnerships ' changes in the public service innovation. The result suggests that the successful implementation of public service innovation requires to utilize the existing institutions and elaborately design and deploy the institutional changes to trigger the technological and partnerships ' changes in public service innovation. The institutional adjustment-leveled institutional changes lead to the partnerships ' quantitative increase and the technology diffusion, which is usually implemented at the beginning of each developing stage. The strategic transformation-leveled institutional changes trigger the structural changes of the partnerships and the alignment of the technological capabilities. Thus, implications for institutional design for public service innovation are then provided.