IMPACT: Innovation has become a buzzword of the contemporary public sector, yet the practical uses of innovation are diverse and sometimes conflicting. This article highlights four different innovation approaches and describes their use with examples from the municipal organization in Stockholm. These innovation approaches have different end goals, perspectives and logics that drive them. With a better understanding of the broad concept of innovation that is relevant within a city organization, municipal officials can make conscious decisions about their innovation practices. ABSTRACT Innovation is an increasingly influential agenda for municipalities to apply to multiple activities and objectives. This article presents an institutional logics framework to clarify the ways that municipalities use innovation to achieve their long-term ambitions. The framework consists of four approaches that co-exist within a single municipality: the business-enabling approach supports local economic growth, the organizational change approach focuses on improving internal processes and services, the attractiveness approach promotes the territory for investment, and the transformative approach engages with broader societal challenges. The framework clarifies how innovation is interpreted and practised by municipalities and reveals opportunities to enhance these activities.

Urban experiments, living labs and testbeds have emerged as influential approaches to governing cities around the world. Experimental governance allows stakeholders to trial possible futures and to embrace creativity and innovation in the pursuit of sustainability goals. Experiments are often conducted through triple helix partnerships that favour informal and distributed actions. This is a significant departure from traditional urban development processes that are informed by well-defined processes executed by public authorities to ensure the public good and are legitimated by citizens. In this paper, we investigate this tension between experimental governance and public sector legitimacy by focusing on experimental practices in two Swedish municipalities, Stockholm and Gothenburg. We gathered data through a desk-based study, participant observations and semi-structured interviews with municipal actors to investigate the input, throughput and output legitimacy of municipalities in experimental governance. The findings indicate that municipalities emphasise actions and results from experiments, while de-emphasising reflection and attention to democratic procedures and protection of the public good. The focus on legitimacy reveals the fragmented and instrumental practices of experimental governance and a deficit in organizational capacity with potential detrimental impacts on legitimacy.

Experimental governance is increasingly being implemented in cities around the world through laboratories, testbeds, platforms, and innovation districts to address a wide range of complex sustainability challenges. Experiments often involve public-private partnerships and triple helix collaborations with the municipality as a key stakeholder. This stretches the responsibilities of local authorities beyond conventional practices of policymaking and regulation to engage in more applied, collaborative, and recursive forms of planning. In this article, we examine how local authorities are involved in experimental governance and how this is influencing their approach to urban development. We are specifically interested in the multiple strategic functions that municipalities play in experimental governance and the broader implications to existing urban planning practices and norms. We begin the article by developing an analytic framework of the most common strategic functions of municipalities in experimental governance and then apply this framework to Stockholm, a city that has embraced experimental governance as a means to realise its sustainability ambitions. Our findings reveal how the strategic functions of visioning, facilitating, supporting, amplifying, and guarding are producing new opportunities and challenges to urban planning practices in twenty-first century cities.

Urban experiments are increasingly popular for municipalities to demonstrate possible futures and sustainable transformations. High profile urban development projects typically include multiple experiments that produce learnings to be embedded broadly across the municipality. However, these embedding processes are hindered by a lack of planning and organisational structures, obdurate institutional norms and standards, and assumptions that positive experimental results will automatically be implemented. This paper uses an institutional capacity framework to analyse the embedding of experimental learnings from the Royal Seaport project to the City of Stockholm. The study focuses on knowledge resources, relational resources, and mobilisation capacity as elements of institutional capacity that are needed to translate the extraordinary activities and insights of individual experiments into long-term ordinary governance processes of municipalities. The results highlight the challenges of translating experimental findings into broader institutional changes and the need for capacity building that involves organisations of learning to facilitate these processes. 

Innovation is an increasingly influential agenda for municipalities to apply to multiple activities and objectives. This paper presents an institutional logics framework to clarify the ways that municipalities use innovation to achieve their long-term ambitions. The framework consists of four approaches that co-exist within a single municipality: the Business-Enabling approach supports local economic growth, the Organizational Change approach focuses on improving internal processes and services, the Attractiveness approach promotes the territory for investment, and the Transformative approach engages with broader societal challenges. The framework clarifies how innovation is interpreted and practiced by municipalities and reveals opportunities to enhance these activities.