Samenvatting

The digital revolution enables civil servants to create innovation with others, across organizational boundaries and with larger groups. Traditional bureaucracies are challenged to put additional conditions and incentives in place to make this possible. The program ‘civil servant 2.0’, aimed at enabling and awareness raising among civil servants, itself also makes use of modern possibilities. One example is Pleio, a digital meeting place for civil servants and other officials and persons who want to share knowledge in a thematic, transboundary way. A dilemma civil servants face is that the hierarchy and the political leadership have to be open to opportunities and input generated from outside. The level of hierarchical support can be discovered when the opportunity emerges. This takes entrepreneurial civil servants: taking initiative with the aim of discovering emerging opportunities in the outside world before it is known how these will be evaluated by the hierarchy. Other enabling conditions are that this activity needs to be possible without taking-up too much of their time, a culture of transparency, the possibility to link with the world through modern ICT (despite possible risks), a safe hierarchical environment, and novel ways of accounting for their output.