On the Bumpy Road Towards Open Government: The Not-Invented-Here Syndrome as a Major Pothole

Abstract

This paper investigates the role of public employees in absorbing external knowledge. Triggered by open government initiatives and open calls for participation, external actors are invited to integrate ideas, solutions, or experience into public organizations. Such exploitation of valuable external knowledge across organizational interfaces might, however, be hindered by negative attitudes of public employees towards external input. The rejection of outside knowledge by internal actors is known as the Not-Invented-Here syndrome. This paper sheds light on NIH attitudes in public organizations. After reviewing the state of the art of research on NIH, it emphasizes rethinking NIH in the public sector. The in-depth discussion of previous work thus serves to derive an extensive agenda for future research.

Keywords: Public Innovation, Knowledge Transfer, Not-Invented-Here Syndrome, Open Government, Open Innovation