Formal Innovation Structures and Innovativeness of Social Service Organizations in Times of the Pandemic

Due to a surge in demand, the emergence of new needs among beneficiary groups and essential health safety measures, SSOs needed to substantially broaden their activities or find new ways of providing services to their clients during the COVID-19 pandemic. Formal Innovation Management Structures (FIMS) aim at regulating criteria and methods for resource allocation and aligning the process of generating and implementing novel ideas with the overall organizational strategy. While they offer legitimacy, shared language, and standardized procedures of resource allocation for innovation, they may also create slow, bureaucratic decision making structures which stand in contrast to the need to fast reactions during a crises.
Against this background, we investigate the role of FIMS regarding innovativeness of Social Service Organizations (SSOs) in times of crisis. We draw on 16 interviews from a sample of 8 SSOs in Vienna, Austria. Moreover, an analysis of organizational documents provides further insights into innovation practices in these organizations.
Our results show that the pandemic widely influenced innovation in SSOs, including new challenges and a boost for digitization. The role of FIMS has been ambivalent during this time, with our results hinting towards an influence on internal perceptions regarding the relevance of innovation, organizational decision-making and legitimization of innovation in times of crisis.