Aelita Skaržauskienė, Steponas Jonušauskas and Monika Skaržauskaitė
better e‐public services which have to be more protected and democratic and business representatives require less bureaucracy and more efficiency”( Strategy on the public admnistering development up to 2010, 2004).“ Benefits are related to improvement in the area of the public service provision operational efficiency, increase in citizen`s loyalty and decrease in functions of the state institutions‘ personnel and public services provided can be described as high‐quality, quickly‐used and publicly accessible”( Jastiuginas et al, 2012).
However, when implementing e‐Government, it shall be extremely important to honour various innovative methods and solutions, avoiding obstacles for innovative activities. The next chapter is exploring the way managers in Lithuanian public administration organisations perceive innovation and how they report on hinders or facilitators of their innovative activities.
5. Research process / methodology
The paper follows a quantitative research approach. The total sample consists of 155 respondents. The sample was at random selected in Lithuanian Public sector organizations such as Ministries and Departments. Firstly, sample size of 100 was determined using sample size table and having in mind that the population size is over 10000 and data is continuous. Secondly, having collected 100 responses, the worst variances were identified in every subsample. Finally, the size of every subsample was calculated using formula recommended by Bartlett, Kotrlik and Higgins( 2001). In this survey mainly public heads of departments and managers were surveyed using web‐based questionnaire, developed by Fafaliou( 2012) for the research project“ Relationship between small and medium sized enterprises and innovation activities“. The limitation of this research paper is that only national results were presented, the cross cultural results will be analyzed and desribed in future research papers. Data was analyzed using statistical software package SPSS. The questionnaire ends with demographic questions. The return rate of this survey was 55 % and can be treated as a good one.
It`s interesting to note that 95 % of participants perceived innovation as a new process / procedure, 92 % as a new product or service, and only 21 % of respondents understand innovation as a new technological method or as a new idea( 35 %).
Table 1: The perception of innovation meaning
77 % of respondents believe their organisation is innovative, 23 % answered this question negative. The reasons for being innovative are improving / expanding services, organisational matters and creativity processes, which were described as the new techniques in solving problems, production of new ideas, brainstorming etc. Only 23 % of respondents mentioned managerial reasons and human resource practices( 16 %) as influencing innovativeness of the organization. Surprisingly, working environment changes and practices were identified only from 8 % respondents as determinants for innovative organization( see Table 2).
Important to note that all the participants answered positively( yes or no option) the question“ Do you believe that innovations are important to all types of organizations, regardless of the field they operate?” It could be concluded that respondents deeply understand the value of innovation for every organization.
More than half respondents( 66 %) believe that innovation could be measured. The measerement of innovation in public administration organisations differs from the measurement in business organisation, because the innovation in public administration couldn`t be measured in market share increase, profitability or production increase. However, the innovation in public administration could be measured in increase in customer satisfaction and service – volume and cost reduction according the answers of this survey respondents.
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