Service Innovation within New Public Governance Theories E-Platforms as Smart Service Systems for Public Utilities

The growth of global services has led to increased interaction at any levels. Service interactions today have increasingly a networked character and affect every sector such as trade, finance, health, education, entertainment, transport, goods production. The modern development of the service concept has supported the emergence of service systems (economic, managerial, organizational, technological). The emerging Science of Service, firstly proposed by the Almaden Research Centre of IBM, focuses on new concepts of service and of modern service systems interpretation, both for private or public governance. This new frontier of Service Research origins from multidisciplinary routes and it can now reinterpret the concepts of co-creation, value networks, innovation and ICT applications. Public boarders in offering services nowadays have to face both an increased level of service complexity and a growing number of specialized service and actors; for this reason public governance practices may benefit of service science suggestions when dealing with great numbers of users, information sharing, statistical process control and real time decision made upon complex systems. The paper purpose is to highlight the relevance of new considerations about service in the public administration, coming from the multidisciplinary Service Research; to do this a case study was deepened, referring on useful evidences about public financials management for R&D innovative Projects. With this work, the features, the principles and the results of e-platform for new kind of public governance were showed, highlighting the possible contributes of Service Science to nowadays service systems structure, organization and management and verifying how this kind of tools/practices are effectively close to new concepts of smart solutions, as scalable, renewable, adaptive, intelligent and complex systems, considered as key elements for service exchange