How service users envision their engagement in processes of collaborative innovation: A Q-methodological study on user involvement in eHealth collaborations

Involving users in innovating public services is an increasingly common, but challenging practice, as users often have different viewpoints on their own role in the process. Particularly in complex innovation arrangements such as public-private collaborations, governments and service innovators need to be aware of users’ perceptions of their involvement to maximally exploit the advantages of including them. This article theorizes and tests four different roles of user-provider interaction on co-innovation processes: users as (1) legitimators, (2) customers, (3) partners, and (4) self-organizers. These theoretical roles are tested through Q-methodology on service users in 19 public-private eHealth collaborations from five European countries. Our findings suggest the existence of three hybrid empirical profiles of user involvement: (1) users as ‘service consultants’, (2) users as ‘co-designers’, and (3) users as ‘hands-off supporters’. The discovery of these profiles suggests the existence of different viewpoints on user involvement, which can influence the expectations and behavior of the users in innovation processes.